Stories and mysteries from the modern era.
Modern
A diver off Japan's westernmost island found stone terraces 25 metres down in 1986. Most geologists think the sea and natural fractures made them, and no one has proved otherwise.
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Modern
The Vasa was the most heavily armed warship in the Baltic, and a light gust sank her 1,300 metres from the quay in 1628. Raised in 1961, she now has to be saved from chemicals in her own timbers.
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Modern
In 1854 Inuit witnesses told John Rae how Franklin's men had died, including cannibalism. Britain called them liars. Their accounts later led searchers to both ships.
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Modern
In 1897 a British force burned Benin City, took its brass and ivory art, and auctioned much of it to help pay for the raid. Over a century later, some is being returned to Nigeria.
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Modern
Around 1,100 artists, sound engineers and radio men used inflatable tanks, recorded noise and fake radio traffic to impersonate whole divisions in 1944 and 1945, then kept quiet for fifty years.
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Modern
The Mary Celeste was found sailing herself with her cargo intact, six months of food aboard and all ten people gone. The warm breakfast and steaming tea were Arthur Conan Doyle's inventions.
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Modern
In 1908 something exploded over Siberia with the force of a thousand Hiroshimas and flattened eighty million trees, yet left no crater. The evidence points to an airburst from space.
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Modern
In 2013 the world reported that Timbuktu's manuscripts had burned. Most had already been smuggled out in metal trunks, by car, donkey cart and canoe, to Bamako.
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Modern
Nobody has read rongorongo, the script carved on Easter Island boards. One tablet's wood dates to about 1450 to 1500, before any European is known to have reached the island.
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Modern
A widowed queen, an adopted son the British refused to recognise, and an escape from a besieged fort in 1858. What the record supports about the Rani of Jhansi, and what it does not.
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Modern
In 1802 a brig sank off Kythera with seventeen crates of Parthenon sculpture. Sponge divers spent two years bringing them up, and in 2026 the wreck gave up one more fragment.
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Modern
After 1945 the US quietly brought some 1,600 German scientists across the Atlantic, some of them Nazis whose files were edited. Their rockets later carried Americans to the Moon.
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