With the addition of a few numbers and Greek letters, the name “Zzyzx” (pronounced zeye-zix) might be a complicated equation to orbit rockets around Mars, but the site has a colorful history that stretches back almost two centuries. A rare and bountiful desert spring situated at the base of chocolate-colored mountains attracted the first Spanish…
Folktales from the Indonesian island of Flores tell of a mysterious race of little people called the “Ebu Gogo,” who abducted children and spoke in murmurs. Scientists began to take the myths more seriously when in 2003, the remains of a new humanoid species called Homo floresiensis was discovered in caves on the island. Fossil dating suggests…
Also known as the Tasmanian tiger or wolf, the thylacine was a large meat-eating marsupial that lived in Australia. It had a long, stiff tail, dark stripes on its back and rump, and a pouch similar to other marsupials like the koala and kangaroo. It was driven to extinction by human activity and the introduction…
The largest burial mound in the United States holds the remains of prehistoric West Virginians. WHAT APPEARS TO BE A simple grass hill in the appropriately named town of Moundsville, West Virginia is actually a prehistoric burial pile known as the Grave Creek Mound. Slowly built over 100 years from around 250 to 150 BCE, the…
ince the 18th century, hundreds of incredibly well-preserved human cadavers have been discovered in the peat bogs of Northern Europe. These bodies have been forensically dated to as far back as 8,000 BCE. The famous “Tollund Man,” discovered in 1950 by two Danish farmers in a small town in Denmark, lived in the Pre-Roman Iron Age of the 3rd century…
Since the 1940s, archeologists have been unearthing mysterious stone spheres in the Diquis Delta of Costa Rica. Initially discovered during agricultural forays undertaken by the United Fruit Company, these objects range in size from a few centimeters to over two meters in diameter with some weighing as much as 16 tons. All of the spheres are man-made objects…
At some point between 70 and 60 BCE, a Greek ship heading from Asia Minor to Rome sank in the Mediterranean. When a group of sponge divers discovered the wreck in 1900, they salvaged three pieces of bronze comprising a device that became known as the Antikythera mechanism. The artifact, which is roughly the size of…
EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon). This is the recording of ghostly voices on audio tape and other audio recording devices. EVP recordings are heard under the white noise, that static, fuzzy noise you get when you are between radio stations or when playing back a blank tape. These voices can be fuzzy and hard to hear,…
While it’s fairly common to label the Egyptian pyramids the stuff of “ancient mysteries,” it’s something entirely new to discover similar structures all around the world. Such is the case with the Pyramids of Argolis, Greece, and their most famous structure, the Hellenikon Pyramid. The true purpose of the Hellenikon remains unknown, although experts have theorized that a battle once took place at the site,…
Western Bolivia’s Sajama lines are a series of massive drawings etched into the earth, numbering into the thousands. First discovered in 1932 by Aimé Felix Tschiffely, the lines, between 3 to 10 feet wide individually, connect about 8,700 square miles via an intricate web-like design. Because of this, they are not only the largest archeological site in the Andes,…
