Debunked cases — mystical places on the map
Cases that are closed. Not «unexplained so far» but closed: the author of the photograph was found, the costume turned up in a garage, the film was taken apart frame by frame, the confession was given while the hoaxer was still alive. The place stays on the map because a legend usually outlives its own debunking — and here the two stand side by side: what was told, and what it turned out to be.
100 places
The Curse of Tutankhamun
After the opening of tomb KV62 in the Valley of the Kings in 1922–23, and Lord Carnarvon's sudden death from blood poisoning following a mosquito bite, the newspapers announced the pharaoh's curse and attributed to it every death with any connection to the excavation. There is no curse inscription in the tomb. As early as 1934 the Egyptologist Herbert Winlock counted: of the twenty-six people present at the opening, six died within ten years. In 2002 Mark Nelson of Monash University published a study in the British Medical Journal of forty-four westerners who were in Egypt: the survival of those who entered the tomb and those who did not was the same. Howard Carter lived seventeen years after the dig.
The Unlucky Mummy and the Titanic
The painted coffin lid of a priestess of Amun-Ra, acquired by the British Museum in 1889 as EA22542. By the early twentieth century a story had grown around it: everyone who owned it was ruined or died, the photographer who took its picture shot himself, and in April 1912 the museum was said to have shipped it secretly to America aboard the Titanic. None of it happened. The lid is a flat board, not a mummy, and no body was ever attached to it; it has not left London except for wartime and 1990s storage, as the accession registers show. The story was got up privately by the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson and the editor W. T. Stead, who liked to tell it at dinner; Stead himself died on the Titanic.
The Shroud of Turin
A linen cloth over four metres long bearing the image of a man, kept in the cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin since 1578. Its first documentary appearance is at Lirey in France around 1355, and already then the bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, wrote to the pope that the artist who made it had confessed. In 1988 a sample was cut from the cloth and divided between three independent laboratories — Oxford, Zurich and Arizona — blind, with control fabrics. All three returned the same interval: 1260 to 1390. The result was published in Nature. The Catholic Church has never declared the shroud a genuine relic and describes it as an icon for veneration.
The Piri Reis Map and the Antarctic Coast
In 1929 a surviving fragment of a map drawn by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis in 1513 was found in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. Charles Hapgood, and Erich von Däniken after him, announced that the southern part of the map showed the coast of Antarctica beneath its ice, surveyed from the air by an unknown civilisation. Piri Reis wrote his sources on the margin himself: some twenty portolans, Arab charts and a map of Columbus. The southern line on his sheet is the east coast of South America, bent eastward because the parchment ran out — a device found on other portolans of the period. It bears no resemblance to the true sub-glacial topography of Antarctica established by seismic survey.
The London Hammer
In 1936 Mr and Mrs Hahn, walking by a waterfall on Red Creek near the town of London in Texas, picked up a lump of rock with a piece of wood sticking out of it. The stone was later split and an iron hammer with a wooden handle was inside. The creationist Carl Baugh bought it and opened a museum, announcing it as the tool of an antediluvian man hundreds of millions of years old. The surrounding rock is not Ordovician sandstone but a calcium carbonate concretion, which forms around iron in a matter of years and is common in that creek. The hammer itself matches a pattern of miner's tool mass-produced in Texas in the nineteenth century.
The Coso Artifact
On 13 February 1961 three rock dealers from Olancha, collecting geodes in the Coso Mountains, cut open a concretion and found a ceramic cylinder inside with a metal shaft down the middle and a copper sheath. Geologists they consulted put the rock at half a million years, and the find entered the literature as an extraterrestrial spark plug. In 1999 Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich showed X-rays of it to the Spark Plug Collectors of America: the members identified a Champion plug of the 1920s, with its characteristic thread and ceramic insulator. Concretions of clay and rust grow around iron in decades, not epochs.
The Calaveras Skull
In February 1866 miners at Angels Camp in Calaveras County brought up a human skull from forty metres down, beneath a bed of lava. Josiah Whitney, State Geologist of California and a Harvard professor, announced it as proof that people had lived in North America in the Pliocene. Locals were telling reporters almost at once that the skull had been taken from an Indian burial in a nearby cave and put down the shaft as a joke on the professor; Bret Harte wrote a poem about it. Radiocarbon dating in 1992 gave an age of about a thousand years — an ordinary late Native burial, with no relation at all to the lava above it.
The British Museum Crystal Skull
A life-size rock crystal skull, bought by the British Museum from Tiffany & Co. in 1897 and displayed for half a century as Aztec work. In the nineties the museum's researchers traced it to the Paris dealer Eugène Boban, who sold Mexican antiquities in the second half of the nineteenth century and had connections to the German lapidary workshops of Idar-Oberstein. In 2005 a joint study by the British Museum and the Smithsonian found the regular marks of a rotary wheel under the microscope, and the inclusions showed the quartz to be Brazilian — unavailable to pre-Columbian Mexico. The label in the gallery was rewritten.
The Mitchell-Hedges Skull
The most famous of the crystal skulls: by the family's account Anna Mitchell-Hedges found it in 1924 in the ruins of the Maya city of Lubaantun in British Honduras, on her seventeenth birthday. It was called an instrument of ancient priests and an object that stops the heart. The documents say otherwise: Anna's adoptive father Frederick Mitchell-Hedges bought it at Sotheby's in London in 1943 from the collector Sydney Burney, and it appears in Burney's correspondence before that. In 2008 Jane Walsh and the Smithsonian's laboratory examined it under an electron microscope: the surface was worked with a rotary abrasive tool, which pre-Columbian America did not have.
The Davenport Tablets
In 1877 the Reverend Jacob Gass excavated a mound near Davenport, Iowa, and brought out slate tablets inscribed in several ancient alphabets at once, with a cremation scene. The Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences held them to be proof of contact between the Old World and the New. A century later the archaeologist Marshall McKusick went through the Academy's own archives: the slate matches roofing tiles from a demolished local brothel, and the alphabets on the tablet are copied, errors included, from a plate in the 1872 edition of Webster's dictionary. The correspondence suggests they were planted by members of the Academy itself, who resented the newcomer Gass.
The Dare Stones
In 1937 a stranger brought a quartz boulder to Emory University in Atlanta with an inscription signed by Eleanor Dare — mother of Virginia Dare of the lost colony of Roanoke. The stone explained what had become of the colonists. Over four years another forty-odd turned up, scattered across Georgia and the Carolinas, and together they traced a coherent route. In 1941 the reporter Boyden Sparkes followed the chain for the Saturday Evening Post and arrived at a stonecutter, Bill Eberhardt, who was selling the finds and eventually admitted carving them. The first stone, the Atlanta one, is still argued over; the other forty are closed.
The Newark Holy Stones
In 1860 the surveyor David Wyrick, digging in the ancient earthworks near Newark, Ohio, brought up a stone wedge with a Hebrew inscription, and a few months later a black stone case carrying a figure of Moses and the full text of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. For those who held that the mounds were built by the lost tribes of Israel this was decisive. Hebraists pointed at once to the difficulty: the letters are not palaeo-Hebrew but the square script, which came into use a thousand years after the mounds, and they follow the shapes of a common Hebrew Bible then being printed in Ohio. A stone bowl found with them was later identified as a modern whetstone.
The Michigan Relics
From 1890 copper tablets, clay bowls and slate slabs bearing cuneiform, Egyptian signs and biblical scenes were taken out of mounds all over Michigan — proof that the continent had been settled from the Holy Land. Some three thousand objects accumulated, and nearly every one was found by, or with the help of, the same man: a travelling sign-writer named James Scotford. Professor Francis Kelsey of the University of Michigan showed that the ancient inscriptions were a mixture of alphabets copied from a schoolbook, and that the copper had been cut with modern tools. In 1911 Scotford's stepdaughter's husband swore an affidavit describing how he made the objects and buried them the night before a dig.
The Acámbaro Figures
In 1945 the German dealer Waldemar Julsrud began buying clay figures at Acámbaro in Mexico, dug up on the Bujares hill by a local farmer, Odilón Tinajero. Some thirty-three thousand accumulated over the years, dinosaurs among them, standing beside people. The archaeologist Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation excavated the site and found the figures lying in disturbed ground with no patina of age and fresh unoxidised breaks, some still carrying file marks. In 1969 thermoluminescence testing at the Pennsylvania museum returned modern dates, and the laboratory formally withdrew its earlier results, which had been taken without allowing for the firing.
The Ica Stones
From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.
The Kensington Runestone
In 1898 the Swedish farmer Olof Öhman was clearing an aspen on his land near Kensington, Minnesota, and found a slab in the roots with a runic inscription: a party of eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey west from Vinland, ten men killed, the year 1362. The stone became the proof of a Norse presence deep inside the continent. Runologists have pointed to the same thing from the beginning: the language is not medieval Swedish but a nineteenth-century Swedish dialect written in runes, with forms and loanwords that did not exist in 1362 and characters known only from the schoolbooks of the day. No specialist in runes has ever accepted it.
The Vinland Map
A parchment that surfaced with a European dealer in 1957 and was bought for Yale: a fifteenth-century world map with an island of Vinland drawn west of Greenland — America, decades before Columbus. Yale announced it in 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, and the argument ran for half a century. In 1974 Walter McCrone found anatase in the ink, a form of titanium dioxide first manufactured in the 1920s. Yale gave the final answer in September 2021: X-ray fluorescence mapping showed titanium ink along every line of the map, and beneath it an erased medieval inscription. The parchment is genuine; the map on it is not.
The Persian Princess of Karachi
In October 2000 Pakistani police seized from dealers in Karachi a mummy in a carved wooden coffin, with a gold mask and a breastplate whose inscription named her a daughter of King Xerxes. Eleven million dollars was being asked for her, and Iran and Pakistan began to argue over ownership. The National Museum ran a CT scan and radiocarbon dating: the mat beneath the body was woven around 1996, the woman was about twenty-one, she had died in 1996 of a broken neck, and the body was mummified afterwards. The cuneiform on the breastplate contained grammatical errors. A case about selling an antiquity became a murder inquiry, and was never solved.
Bob Lazar and the S-4 Facility
In November 1989 Bob Lazar told KLAS in Las Vegas that he had worked as an engineer at a facility called S-4 by Papoose Lake, south of Area 51, where nine alien craft stood in hangars running on element 115. He described himself as a graduate of MIT and Caltech. The registrars of both institutions reported that no such graduate exists, and he appears in no class list or student publication of those years. His one confirmed employment is a short contractor's stint at Los Alamos. Element 115 was synthesised at Dubna in 2003: moscovium, which lives for fractions of a second and is not a fuel.
The Philadelphia Experiment
The story runs that on 28 October 1943, at the navy yard in Philadelphia, the destroyer escort Eldridge became invisible, jumped instantly to Norfolk and came back with sailors fused into the bulkheads. All of it goes back to one man: Carl Allen, writing as Carlos Allende, who in 1955–56 covered a copy of the astronomer Morris Jessup's book in marginal notes and sent it to the Navy. The Eldridge's deck log puts the ship off New York and in the Bahamas on those dates; she was never in Philadelphia. In 1969 Allen told investigators that he had invented the annotations. The Office of Naval Research has answered enquiries with a standard fact sheet ever since.
The Letters from Ummo
From 1966 Spanish ufologists received typewritten letters from the inhabitants of the planet Ummo, in the system of the star Iumma: hundreds of pages on physics, society and language, each marked with an emblem of three strokes. The correspondence ran for twenty years, produced a literature of its own and several religious groups, and was cited as the most detailed extraterrestrial message on record. In 1993 the Madrid psychologist José Luis Jordán Peña publicly stated that he had written them himself, as a social experiment in what educated people are prepared to believe. The typewriter, the Spanish syntax and the scientific errors of the sixties all matched his authorship.
The Majestic 12 Documents
In December 1984 an undeveloped roll of film arrived in the post for the television producer Jaime Shandera, with no return address. On it was a briefing for President-elect Eisenhower dated 18 November 1952: a secret committee of twelve set up by Truman to handle crashed craft and bodies. The FBI examined the papers at the Air Force's request and concluded in 1988 that they were entirely bogus. Truman's signature proved to be a photocopy of one on a genuine 1947 letter, matching line for line; the dates were written in a format Eisenhower never used; and the Pica typeface belonged to a machine that went on sale later.
William Roy Sells His Method to a Newspaper
William Roy, in fact William George Holloway, was the highest-earning British medium of the forties and fifties: he named sitters' dead relatives with an accuracy that was taken as unanswerable. In 1958 he sold the Sunday Pictorial a series describing his whole business for £30,000. A microphone was hidden in the cloakroom where the sitters left their coats; an assistant listened to their conversation and fed it to Roy's earpiece down a wire run through the leg of his chair. Beyond that, Roy kept years of card files built from newspaper obituaries and parish records. He wrote that he regretted nothing except being caught, and a few years later went back into practice under another name.
Kathleen Goligher and the Belfast Circle
From 1914 the Belfast engineer William Jackson Crawford studied the Goligher family circle and wrote three books about the psychic rods with which sixteen-year-old Kathleen raised the table; he weighed her, photographed her by red light and worked out an entire mechanics. After Crawford's death in 1920 the physicist Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe took over the circle. He sat twenty times and published his report: the ectoplasm in the photographs was ordinary white cloth hanging from under her skirt, and Kathleen lifted the table with her foot, which he once saw plainly. She was not seen in public again.