Official

Old maps · lost machines · strange signals

Strange claims.
Real records.

Extraordinary claims, traced to the documents, artifacts and accounts behind them.
Where the story began. What the evidence shows. What remains unknown.

Choose your first story Explore the subjects
Featured investigation · Ancient Astronauts and the Anunnaki Does a pillar carved eleven thousand years ago record a comet strike? Gobekli Tepe's Pillar 43 and the Comet in the Stone Examine the evidence

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Choose what makes you curious.

  1. The Shape of the World

    Is the coast along the bottom of the 1513 Piri Reis map Antarctica?

    Trace the coastline and the competing readings.

    Explore the map11 min read

  2. Lost Technologies

    What does the carving in the Dendera crypt show?

    Compare the carving with the inscriptions beside it.

    Examine the relief14 min read

  3. Signals

    Why has the Wow! signal of 1977 never been caught again?

    Searched for ever since. It has never come back.

    Follow the signal12 min read

Seven subjects. Many ways in.

About these pictures
  • Planet X and Nibiru: a wall relief from the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, 865 to 850 BC, British Museum. It shows a figure in a winged disc, identified as the god Ashur; Zecharia Sitchin read the winged disc as the symbol of the planet Nibiru. Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped and resized; this copy is shared under the same licence.
  • Ancient Astronauts and the Anunnaki: A winged, eagle-headed figure from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, about 883 to 859 BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5.
  • The Shape of the World: Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, Antwerp, 1570. Along the bottom runs Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, the southern land not yet known.
  • Lost Technologies: Hero of Alexandria's aeolipile, a sphere spun by steam, described in the first century AD. An 1870s engraving from Popular Science Monthly.
  • Signals: The largest antenna of NASA's Deep Space Network, at Goldstone in the Mojave Desert, California. Photo: NASA/JPL.
  • Disclosure: Project Blue Book status report no. 8, 31 December 1952, US Air Force. Stamped Confidential, later declassified.
  • The Watchlist: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachon, Chile, under the Milky Way. Its ten-year sky survey is expected to find more visitors from other stars. Photo: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/H. Stockebrand, CC BY 4.0.