Workers were fixing a water leak at the Massachusetts State House in 2014 when they landed on a box buried there. Rather than jackhammering through it, they called in trained reinforcements, who extricated it with care over the course of seven hours. The box was a time capsule, buried by Sam Adams and Paul Revere in 1795. It contained coins and documents from that time, as well as stuff that was old even back in those days, dating all the way to 1652.
This wasn’t the first fresh air the capsule had breathed since the 18th century. When the same building saw repairs in 1855, people discovered the box, opened it, inserted additional coins from their own time and reburied it. In 2014, Boston put the contents of the box on display, and then, in 2015, they placed some 2015 coins in there and buried it once more.
Here’s the really spooky part, however: During that recent resealing ceremony, officials looked up the men who created the capsule at the end of the 18th century. It turned out that both of them had died.
An American Flag Under an Australian Geoglyph
Sometime in June 1998, someone carved the following figure in South Australia. We know they must have carved it at that time because we have satellite photos from before then showing no sign of it. But we still don’t know who did it.
We also don’t know how they did it. People have doodled geoglyphs for thousands of years (consider Peru’s Nazca Lines), but those were drawn using broad strokes. This glyph, known as the Maree Man, after the town of Maree, uses precise angles, the kind that made investigators suspect the creator used GPS. This was in 1998, when generally only professionals had GPS access.
The one assumption we could all make about the Maree Man was that an Australian drew it. This was Australia, it looks like an Aboriginal man and that thing the guy’s holding looks like an Australian throwing stick — a woomera, not a boomerang; Australia has several different kinds of throwing sticks. Then an anonymous tipster told officials that something was buried 15 feet south of the Maree Man’s nose. It turned out to be a plaque. A plaque with a quote from an Australian, an engraving of the Olympic rings… and an American flag.
Why the flag? Was an American behind all this (rather than, as the most reasonable theory otherwise said, some Australian artist)? Would Australia and America now have to meet in battle, as had long been prophesied? It’s too late to ask those questions now. In time, the carving eroded away.
All things on the surface do that. To last longer, you have to go deeper.
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