The Coral Castle
Coral Castle was built in the early 20th century by an eccentric Latvian recluse named Edward Leedskalnin who allegedly left Latvia when he was rejected by his 16 year old fiance. He would never marry and would spend 30 years of his life building a Coral Castle and its surrounding buildings, for his alleged 'Sweet Sixteen'. Leaving for America, he came down with terminal tuberculosis. He allegedly spontaneously healed, stating that magnets had some effect on his healing.
Leedskalnin was a 100 pound 5-foot tall man who wound up in Homestead, Florida on a ten-acre tract of land just south of Miami, Florida. Somehow he allegedly managed to single-handedly lift and maneuver blocks of megalithic stones, mostly coral, weighing up to 30 tons each, to create not only a castle but other things.
How Leedskalnin worked has never been discovered, though he labored for 30 years. The veracity of his doing this alone is impossible to prove because he worked at night, hidden from the eyes of observers. He seemed to know when he was being watched. On those occasions he wouldn't lifted the stones and stopped working.
Some suggest that he used a form of antigravity device to build the castle. Numerous designs have been suggested for this device, some using "harmonic sound waves", some using magnetism, and numerous other proposals.
Leedskalnin himself claimed that he knew the "secret" of the ancient Egyptian pyramids, and some allege he used those secrets to assemble the structure. He was quoted as saying, "I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids, and have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons."
Many of the features of the castle are notable, including a table with a flower planted in the middle. He stated that he wanted the table to have flowers on it every day of the year.
There are also machines to tell time, home-made air conditioners and other electrical devices, as well as a nine-ton revolving door that is so well-balanced that a child could open it with the push of a single finger.
Leedskalnin was a 100 pound 5-foot tall man who wound up in Homestead, Florida on a ten-acre tract of land just south of Miami, Florida. Somehow he allegedly managed to single-handedly lift and maneuver blocks of megalithic stones, mostly coral, weighing up to 30 tons each, to create not only a castle but other things.
How Leedskalnin worked has never been discovered, though he labored for 30 years. The veracity of his doing this alone is impossible to prove because he worked at night, hidden from the eyes of observers. He seemed to know when he was being watched. On those occasions he wouldn't lifted the stones and stopped working.
Some suggest that he used a form of antigravity device to build the castle. Numerous designs have been suggested for this device, some using "harmonic sound waves", some using magnetism, and numerous other proposals.
Leedskalnin himself claimed that he knew the "secret" of the ancient Egyptian pyramids, and some allege he used those secrets to assemble the structure. He was quoted as saying, "I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids, and have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons."
Many of the features of the castle are notable, including a table with a flower planted in the middle. He stated that he wanted the table to have flowers on it every day of the year.
There are also machines to tell time, home-made air conditioners and other electrical devices, as well as a nine-ton revolving door that is so well-balanced that a child could open it with the push of a single finger.
One of the world's most famous yet least visited archaeological sites, Easter Island is a small, hilly, now treeless island of volcanic origin. Located in the Pacific Ocean at 27 degrees south of the equator and some 2200 miles (3600 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, it is considered to be the world's most remote inhabited island. Sixty-three square miles in size and with three extinct volcanoes (the tallest rising to 1674 feet), the island is, technically speaking, a single massive volcano rising over ten thousand feet from the Pacific Ocean floor. The oldest known traditional name of the island is Te Pito o Te Henua, meaning ‘The Center (or Navel) of the World.’ In the 1860’s Tahitian sailors gave the island the name Rapa Nui, meaning ‘Great Rapa,’ due to its resemblance to another island in Polynesia called Rapa Iti, meaning ‘Little Rapa’. The island received its most well known current name from the Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen, who, on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722, became the first European to visit.
In the early 1950s, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl (famous for his Kon-Tiki and Ra raft voyages across the oceans) popularized the idea that the island had been originally settled by advanced societies of Indians from the coast of South America. Extensive archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic research has conclusively shown this hypothesis to be inaccurate. It is now recognized that the original inhabitants of Easter Island are of Polynesian stock (DNA extracts from skeletons have recently confirmed this), that they most probably came from the Marquesas or Society islands, and that they had arrived as early as 318 AD (carbon dating of reeds from a grave confirms this). At the time of their arrival, the island was entirely covered with thick forests, was teeming with land birds, and was the richest breeding site for seabirds in the Polynesia region. Within a matter of centuries this profusion of wildlife was destroyed by the islanders' way of life. The reasons are today eminently clear.
It is estimated that the original colonists, who may have been lost at sea, arrived in only a few canoes and numbered fewer than 100. Because of the plentiful bird, fish and plant food sources, the population grew rapidly and gave rise to a rich religious and artistic culture. However, the resource needs of the growing population inevitably outpaced the island's capacity to renew itself ecologically and the ensuing environmental degradation triggered a social and cultural collapse. Pollen records show that the destruction of the forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the start of the first settlement. These forest trees were extremely important to the islanders, being used for fuel, for the construction of houses and ocean-fishing canoes, and as rollers for transporting the great stone statues. By the 1400s the forests had been entirely cut, the rich ground cover had eroded away, the springs had dried up, and the vast flocks of birds coming to roost on the island had long since disappeared. With no logs to build canoes for offshore fishing, with depleted bird and wildlife food sources, and with declining crop yields because of the erosion of good soil, the nutritional intake of the people plummeted. First famine, then cannibalism, set in. Because the island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats and priests who kept the complex society running, chaos resulted, and by 1700 the population dropped to between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. During the mid 1700s rival clans began to topple each other's stone statues. By 1864 the last of the statues was thrown down and desecrated.
In the early 1950s, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl (famous for his Kon-Tiki and Ra raft voyages across the oceans) popularized the idea that the island had been originally settled by advanced societies of Indians from the coast of South America. Extensive archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic research has conclusively shown this hypothesis to be inaccurate. It is now recognized that the original inhabitants of Easter Island are of Polynesian stock (DNA extracts from skeletons have recently confirmed this), that they most probably came from the Marquesas or Society islands, and that they had arrived as early as 318 AD (carbon dating of reeds from a grave confirms this). At the time of their arrival, the island was entirely covered with thick forests, was teeming with land birds, and was the richest breeding site for seabirds in the Polynesia region. Within a matter of centuries this profusion of wildlife was destroyed by the islanders' way of life. The reasons are today eminently clear.
It is estimated that the original colonists, who may have been lost at sea, arrived in only a few canoes and numbered fewer than 100. Because of the plentiful bird, fish and plant food sources, the population grew rapidly and gave rise to a rich religious and artistic culture. However, the resource needs of the growing population inevitably outpaced the island's capacity to renew itself ecologically and the ensuing environmental degradation triggered a social and cultural collapse. Pollen records show that the destruction of the forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the start of the first settlement. These forest trees were extremely important to the islanders, being used for fuel, for the construction of houses and ocean-fishing canoes, and as rollers for transporting the great stone statues. By the 1400s the forests had been entirely cut, the rich ground cover had eroded away, the springs had dried up, and the vast flocks of birds coming to roost on the island had long since disappeared. With no logs to build canoes for offshore fishing, with depleted bird and wildlife food sources, and with declining crop yields because of the erosion of good soil, the nutritional intake of the people plummeted. First famine, then cannibalism, set in. Because the island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats and priests who kept the complex society running, chaos resulted, and by 1700 the population dropped to between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. During the mid 1700s rival clans began to topple each other's stone statues. By 1864 the last of the statues was thrown down and desecrated.
The Devil's Tower Mystery
Near the northeast corner of Wyoming is a striking mountain of igneous rock that looks like a gigantic tree-stump. A tree stump over a thousand feet high. Columns run vertically up the top part of the rock like giant scratches. The name given to the mountain by the white man was "Devils Tower." The Indians had many names for it. One of them was "Bear Lodge."
Because it is so unusual in its appearance the tower has figured into many Native American legends and in 1977 it was used as the location for the finale of Steven Speilberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Perhaps the most widely-known legend the Native Americans had about the tower was told by the Kiowa: There were seven girls playing near their village when they were chased by some bears. The girls jumped on a low rock and called to it "Rock, take pity on us, rock save us!" The rock heard them and grew up towards the sky. The bears jumped at the rock scratching it, but they could not climb it. The rock took the girls so high that they became stars. A constellation we now call the Plediades.
There is one story, though, that does not deal with the creation of the rock but what is below it. Years ago a resident of that part northeast Wyoming visited Yankton, South Dakota. While there, he showed a picture of Devils Tower to some elderly Sioux Indians he met. One of them got very excited when he saw the picture.
"Has a passageway been found at the base of the tower?" he asked.
When the resident replied no, the man seemed disappointed. With a little urging, the resident was able to get the Indian to pass on to him the legend about the tower that he had been told. It went something like this:
Many years before three braves had been hunting near the tower. While exploring the rocks at the base of the mountain, they discovered a passageway underneath it. They made torches out of pitch pine knots for light and started exploring the tunnel. They found the passage strewn with bones. Perhaps human bones. At the end, the tunnel opened up into a cave with an underground lake some 25 yards long and more than 15 yards wide. Around the lake were large quantities of gold.
The braves were not prepared to take the gold with them, so they left the tunnel and hid the entrance so that others would not find it. They intended to return to get the gold at a later time, but never did. One of the braves, on his deathbed, told the story to other members of his tribe and the tale had been handed down for several generations before reaching the old Indian.
So is there a cave with gold under Devil's tower? Nobody has ever found one. Also the geology of the mountain, an igneous intrusion, does not seem to make it a promising location to find caves directly under the mountain. The tale sounds very much like other "lost mine" stories of the Old West, like the story of the "lost Dutchman" mine andBeale's mine, which seem to have little factual basis.
On the other hand, the Black Hills area in which the tower is located, has some of the largest caves in the world underneath it, including Wind Cave and Jewel Cave. The Black Hills area is also known for gold mining that inspired a major gold rush in the 1880's. So maybe, like many legends, there is some truth to the Devil's Tower story. Perhaps the lost cavern is not underneath the tower, but nearby, waiting for someone to find it.
Because it is so unusual in its appearance the tower has figured into many Native American legends and in 1977 it was used as the location for the finale of Steven Speilberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Perhaps the most widely-known legend the Native Americans had about the tower was told by the Kiowa: There were seven girls playing near their village when they were chased by some bears. The girls jumped on a low rock and called to it "Rock, take pity on us, rock save us!" The rock heard them and grew up towards the sky. The bears jumped at the rock scratching it, but they could not climb it. The rock took the girls so high that they became stars. A constellation we now call the Plediades.
There is one story, though, that does not deal with the creation of the rock but what is below it. Years ago a resident of that part northeast Wyoming visited Yankton, South Dakota. While there, he showed a picture of Devils Tower to some elderly Sioux Indians he met. One of them got very excited when he saw the picture.
"Has a passageway been found at the base of the tower?" he asked.
When the resident replied no, the man seemed disappointed. With a little urging, the resident was able to get the Indian to pass on to him the legend about the tower that he had been told. It went something like this:
Many years before three braves had been hunting near the tower. While exploring the rocks at the base of the mountain, they discovered a passageway underneath it. They made torches out of pitch pine knots for light and started exploring the tunnel. They found the passage strewn with bones. Perhaps human bones. At the end, the tunnel opened up into a cave with an underground lake some 25 yards long and more than 15 yards wide. Around the lake were large quantities of gold.
The braves were not prepared to take the gold with them, so they left the tunnel and hid the entrance so that others would not find it. They intended to return to get the gold at a later time, but never did. One of the braves, on his deathbed, told the story to other members of his tribe and the tale had been handed down for several generations before reaching the old Indian.
So is there a cave with gold under Devil's tower? Nobody has ever found one. Also the geology of the mountain, an igneous intrusion, does not seem to make it a promising location to find caves directly under the mountain. The tale sounds very much like other "lost mine" stories of the Old West, like the story of the "lost Dutchman" mine andBeale's mine, which seem to have little factual basis.
On the other hand, the Black Hills area in which the tower is located, has some of the largest caves in the world underneath it, including Wind Cave and Jewel Cave. The Black Hills area is also known for gold mining that inspired a major gold rush in the 1880's. So maybe, like many legends, there is some truth to the Devil's Tower story. Perhaps the lost cavern is not underneath the tower, but nearby, waiting for someone to find it.