The Glozel Tablets: A French Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Are the Glozel Tablets? The Glozel tablets are a body of inscribed clay objects, part of a larger assemblage of roughly three thousand artifacts, recovered between 1924 and 1930 from a single field outside the hamlet of Glozel, in the Auvergne […]
The Vanishing of the USS Cyclops
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 On 4 March 1918 the collier USS Cyclops cleared the harbor at Bridgetown, Barbados, bound north for the Norfolk Navy Yard with a hold of 10,800 tons of Brazilian manganese ore and 306 souls aboard. She never arrived. No SOS, no debris […]
The Kingoodie Artifact: A Nail in Ancient Rock
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 In 1844, a Scottish quarryman split a block of Old Red Sandstone at Kingoodie Quarry near Inchture, and a corroded iron nail came out with the rock. Sir David Brewster reported the find to the British Association for the Advancement of Science […]
The Treasure of the San José Galleon
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The 1708 Wreck Off Cartagena and What Lies on the Caribbean Floor The Spanish sixty-four-gun galleon San José sailed from Portobelo on the Panamanian isthmus on May 28, 1708, riding low under the year’s accumulated New World tribute, and was sunk on […]
The Vinča Culture: Europe’s First Civilization?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. Was the Vinča Culture Europe’s First Civilization? The Vinča culture flourished in the central Balkans between roughly 5700 and 4500 BCE and produced large planned settlements, the world’s earliest copper smelting, elaborate figurines, and a corpus of […]
The Donner Party Tragedy
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Was the Donner Party Tragedy? The Donner Party was a wagon company of roughly eighty-seven Illinois and Missouri emigrants who left Springfield, Illinois in the spring of 1846 for California, took a poorly tested shortcut promoted by the lawyer Lansford W. […]
Automatons in Ancient Times
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Were Ancient Automatons? Ancient automatons were self-moving mechanical figures built from gears, levers, hydraulics, pneumatics, and programmable cams that imitated human and animal motion without electricity. From Hero of Alexandria‘s first-century temple-door opener to Al-Jazari’s elephant […]
The Sitovo Inscription: A Bulgarian Enigma
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Is the Sitovo Inscription? The Sitovo Inscription is a sequence of roughly thirty-eight characters cut into a limestone wall inside a rock shelter near the village of Sitovo, in the Rhodope foothills south of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. It was identified in 1928 […]
The Dispilio Tablet: Neolithic Writing in Greece
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Is the Dispilio Tablet? The Dispilio Tablet is a small wooden plaque inscribed with engraved symbols, recovered in 1993 from a waterlogged Neolithic pile-dwelling site on the southern shore of Lake Kastoria in northwestern Greece. Radiocarbon […]
The Disappearance of D. B. Cooper
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Happened on Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971? A man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 24, 1971, handed a flight attendant a note announcing a […]