Yeah, as a kid I also ate up that ‘Chariots of the Gods’ stuff too, then I got older and grew a healthy sense of skepticism.
I still thought until recently there was some small germ of truth to the Oak Island story though, at least in the sense that the pit had some sort of purpose-built, man-made origins. But yeah, it seems like an awful lot of trouble and expense to have gone to, and to what end?
(Sigh)… I said “some tantalizing small pieces of treasure”. A bit of gold chain brought up by an augur bit in the 1800s, a few coins hundreds of years old. A piece of jewelry, I think.
Not much at all, but like a slot machine that coughs up a few tokens every several dozen pulls, just enough to keep several groups over the years investing lots of money, effort and lost life looking for a real payoff that yes, never came.
Another lost Shakespeare play is Cardenio. Who knows how much of it was by Shakespeare, though; supposedly a good amount is by his collaborator Fletcher. The History of Cardenio
And hopefully somewhere are some of the lost poems of Sappho? Poetry of Sappho
The gold chain was apparently like that from a watch- i.e. planted or lost by a digger. Go over any place that has been inhabited with a metal detector and you will find a few coins, jewelry, etc. Other than the watch chain, the rest was not found in the pit.
PS- the lead “Templar Cross” found in the show was so obviously planted it was disgraceful.
I get it, the Oak Island thing is a complete hoax, and I agree. You seem to keep cherry-picking little pieces of what I say out of context to make it seem like I’m arguing for there being something to the mystery, when I’m not. Yes, I did bring up Oak Island in the first place, but only in a larger context of the legends around Captain Kidd’s lost treasure, and now I’m kinda sorry I did.
A very simple question - if someone dug a pit 90 feet deep, yet big enough to work in - where’s the dirt? Of al the stupid ideas, a pit 90 feet deep to bury a few chests is only stupider than spending days spreading out a huge pile of dirt instead of just tossing it aside, because dirt thrown into a hole after is originally nowhere near as packed as what came out.
A bunch of treasure need only be 6 feet or so under to remain hidden. If they needed to retreive it in a hurry, how many men how many days to dig it up? People with more money than brains and no shortage of time have trouble digging 90 feet deep.
(I’ve never watched or read anything in depth about Oak Island, but what do you do to avoid cave-ins as you get 30 or more feet down? Especially where the water flows into the hole… Did the pirates really remove the wood walls shoring up the hole as they filled it in? This is another layer of stupidity - assuming someone would haul dirty and/or waterlogged wood logs or planks up 90 feet and then disperse them into the forest so they were not found… There should be a stack 10 feet tall just off to the side… Why hide the logs but leave the tackle block? (How much metal hardware wasted to nail up all those wood sides later removed?)
I’ve never watched the show either, but I read about the “Templar cross” online, and thought, It was only a matter of time. No conspiracy theory worth its tinfoil hat is complete without: A., the aliens who built the pyramids; B., the Illuminati; or C., the Templars. Like dust on a bottle of wine, the presence of the Templars proves that the CT has matured into full-blown batshittery.
There was one of those roving archeologist shows and every time they did a small dig a very clean artifact needing just a light brishing to romve loose sand came up. Soooo stupid. And he’s trying sooo hard to look astonished at the amazing luck of such a find.
There’s another lost play, but as @gkster mentioned, it’s a Shakespeare / Fletcher collaboration called Cardenio. We don’t have any reason to think it was ever printed, though, and surviving play manuscripts from this period are super-rare, so I figured it probably doesn’t qualify for this thread.
I just happened upon this one randomly last night…
The journalist Webb Miller, who was the inspiration for Martin Sheen’s character in the film Gandhi, had a cigarette case with him when he met Gandhi in 1930. Gandhi agreed to inscribe his name on it if Miller promised it would never again hold cigarettes, and he agreed. FDR, Mussolini, Hitler and others later did the same. It was stolen after Miller died and has never been seen again.
That would be a cool relic to turn up at a garage sale.
The Museum offers reproductions of some of its pieces for sale, including the Rembrandt. I’m not sure how they do that–maybe they photographed it before it was stolen. A couple years ago I bought a 21" x 26" copy of the Rembrandt. It cost $300, including shipping. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to owning one of the Old Masters.
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of the Big Well in Greensburg, KS. It’s 109 feet deep and it was dug by hand. It’s so wide that it has a staircase inside that you can walk down.