Original subtitles

[compelling music]

Imagine finding a tiny skeleton so strange,

it may be from another world.

- It's got this sort of conical, bulbous head,

these oversized eyes, and the skin seems sort of scaly.

- It literally looks like nothing of this Earth.

- Or a beachcombing adventure

that uncovers a horrific surprise.

- She looks inside the sneaker,

and finds a foot.

- So this is a second person, a second victim.

- You now have a pattern.

- What about finding the strange sound

that almost caused a war?

- They see bubbles coming up.

There is something down there

that could ignite World War III.

[bomb exploding]

- These are the discoveries

so weird they are truly unbelievable.

[dramatic music]

Of all the amazing discoveries man has found

beneath the Earth's surface,

from the tombs of the Pharaohs in Egypt,

to the first T. rex in Montana,

none are quite as baffling as one pocket-size mystery

found buried in a Chilean desert 20 years ago.

[tense music]

- It's 2003.

In the ghost town of La Noria in the Chilean desert,

local collector Oscar Muñoz

is digging up artifacts from the local landscape.

Coins and bottles,

things that don't really have a lot of value.

- Oscar spots an object

that is wrapped in a white cloth.

Opening it, Oscar finds something unthinkable.

- It is a little skeleton.

It's about six inches long.

It's got this sort of conical, bulbous head,

these oversized eyes, and the skin,

the whole covering on the body seems sort of hard

and almost even scaly.

- It literally looks like nothing of this Earth.

- [Dan] Muñoz wonders, who or what could this be?

- The next thing you know,

there's a national magazine claiming that Mr. Muñoz

has discovered a dwarf extraterrestrial.

- It fits the image in the popular mind

of a being from another planet,

what is sometimes called a gray.

- It looks like what we might be seeing is alien life,

an actual example, right?

Not hidden away in Area 51 or something like that.

On the other hand, scientists suggest,

look, this might be a kind of human with some mutations,

or genetic abnormalities,

or some changes that we just haven't seen before.

- In media coverage,

the tiny skeleton is nicknamed Ata,

for the Atacama Desert where the body was found.

- [Dan] Hoping to cash in on the "E.T." hype,

Muñoz sells his incredible find to a local businessman

for 30,000 pesos,

which nets out to a whopping 64 bucks.

Then, the skeleton disappears for a while.

- In 2013,

immunologist and genetics expert from Stanford University,

Dr. Garry Nolan, gets his hands on the skeleton,

and this is when the firestorm really begins.

- So Dr. Nolan does a visual basic survey,

and a few things jump out.

First, most humans have 12 sets of ribs.

Ata only has 10.

And second is that the hand bones in Ata

reflect about a five or six-year-old,

but Ata's size, it's about six inches.

That's the size of sort of a late-term fetus.

One of the specialists, a pediatric radiologist,

said he'd never seen anything that looked like this.

- [Dan] Is this proof these peculiar bones

could belong to some type of otherworldly being?

- Dr. Nolan realizes the only way

to really get these answers

is to get a DNA sample and examine the entire genome.

- When the DNA is compared, right,

to a bunch of different kinds of human samples,

what we see is that there's a 90% identical match.

- [Dan] But what about the other 10%?

- Scientists usually think

probably related to the degraded specimen sample,

and that probably accounts for the difference.

But the diehard UFO enthusiasts think something else.

- First, could be that aliens came down

and actually mated with humans,

and so it's 10% alien DNA.

Or it could be that maybe aliens came here before

and they have 90% human DNA,

and that 10% is the alien part of them that still remains.

In the end, the Ata case is really interesting

because you get something

that happens in science all the time,

you get a less-than-perfect answer.

- It's not just the desert that hides buried mysteries.

The dank wetlands of Denmark

also hold disturbing secrets from the past.

[tense music]

- It's 1951, around Silkeborg, Denmark,

and two brothers, Viggo and Emil Hojgaard,

and Viggo's wife, Grethe Hojgaard,

are traipsing through a cold, wet bog,

harvesting peat for fuel to heat the home.

- As the Hojgaards reach into the cold muck

to harvest their peat,

something stops them dead in their tracks.

- This head bobs to the surface, a human head.

They see there's an entire body there.

- Most of the body is naked.

The head is covered in some kind of cap.

The most eerie thing of all

is this expression on this corpse.

It's this calm, almost serene, expression.

[pensive music]

- There had been recent news stories

of a boy in Copenhagen who'd gone missing,

so perhaps they stumbled upon his body, they thought.

They immediately called the police.

- [Dan] The first thing cops must do

when they find a dead body

is to establish the time of death.

But in this case, that proves tricky.

- The forensics examiners realize,

this can't be the kid from Copenhagen

because the corpse is too old.

By about 2,000 years.

- [Dan] That means this man lived

some 500 years before Christ.

- The body is impeccably preserved,

down to facial wrinkles and whiskers on his chin.

They're even able to establish his age at the time of death

to be about 30 to 40 years old.

- [Dan] He becomes known as the Tollund Man.

Perfectly preserved by the bog's unusual chemistry.

- Bog water, it turns out,

is pretty acidic and it's very low in oxygen.

And furthermore, it contains tannins,

which are exactly what we use to preserve leather.

Its environment perfectly preserved the skin of this guy

over 2,000 years.

- We even know what he ate

because his last meal was still in his gut,

and it consisted of a porridge, of barley,

and about 40 different seeds, and some fish.

- [Dan] But there's much more to uncover

about this mystery man.

- He has a rope around his neck,

suggesting that he was hanged.

He also has a broken nose

and the bones of his face look like they've been crushed.

His body and his torso

are covered in stab wounds and knife wounds

as if he was cut up pretty violently.

He's some sort of murder victim.

- The Tollund Bog Man is not the only body

that's been recovered from a bog.

Thousands of them have actually been discovered

since the 1700s,

and they all seem to have met a violent end.

This seems like more than a coincidence.

- [Dan] Researchers don't think

these were just ordinary murders,

but something more unbelievable.

- There are many archeologists who think

that these bogs are actually a place

of some sort of ritualistic or spiritual importance,

because a lot of Europe during the Iron Age and Bronze Age

was very heavily forested,

and the bogs are one place

where you can actually see the heavens.

- Having a full glimpse of the sky with all the stars,

it would be as if you were able

to communicate with the gods.

- Decaying plants also give off swamp gas,

which can result in a eerie, otherworldly glow,

which might've been seen as spirits or fairies

to these Iron Age people.

- [Dan] Making bogs the perfect place

to get your god's attention,

through human sacrifice.

- The best theory of the Tollund Man's death

is that he was sacrificed as an offering for fertility

or a better crop harvest.

But if not for the fact

that these people were sacrificed in bogs,

science wouldn't have this glimpse into Iron Age life.

- After years of dissection across many labs,

parts of this incredible find

have unfortunately gone missing.

The museum where the Bog Man is displayed has a request.

If you happen to have the jar containing his intestine,

please, send it back.

- New York, the city that never sleeps,

is a well-known hive of nonstop activity.

Less well-known are its strange, hidden treasures,

like one discovered

in New York City's Financial District in 2010.

[tense music]

- After the tragedy of 9/11,

it takes years to clear out all of that debris

from Lower Manhattan.

- We're talking about a million and a half tons of concrete

and crumpled steel that has to be removed,

so they excavate all the way down

to the foundation of the buildings.

- And whenever there's a construction operation

of this magnitude, especially in such a historic site,

there are always archeologists to make sure

that if anything is discovered of historic value,

they can recover it.

- [Dan] One of the archeologists is Molly McDonald.

As demolition continues, something catches her eye.

- She notices a piece of wood sticking out

amidst the steel and concrete, and other debris.

- She goes down and grabs a team.

Starts to dig by hand, basically,

and what she finds is one rib, two ribs,

three ribs that are expertly spaced apart,

and they look just like the ribs of a ship.

And it's really old.

- Dendrochronologists are able to estimate

the age of the wood to 1773,

which means that this is a ship

dating to before the American Revolution.

- Now, what's really amazing about finding a ship like this

is that every piece of timber tells a story.

This particular lumber is riddled with wormholes

from a species that only exists in the Caribbean.

- This provides some very compelling proof

that this old Hudson River 30-footer

sails the entire eastern seaboard of the United States

all the way down to the Caribbean.

- [Dan] But how did it make its way from the sea

to the foundation of the Twin Towers?

- So in 1773,

what would become Lower Manhattan

was actually likely underwater.

- All of the soil excavated for construction

is moved down to Lower Manhattan

to expand the overall profile of the city.

- But dirt settles, they need things to stabilize it.

So carriages, frames from houses,

scrap wood would be placed in there to stabilize the dirt.

- You even have wooden boats that are moved down

and used to shore up areas

that were, at one time, underwater.

And it provides us a fascinating insight into what the era

of the pre-colonial United States of America looked like.

- It takes a sharp eye to spot a treasure among the trash,

but what about a sharp ear?

Meet the heroic marine biologist

who helped pull the West and Russia from the brink of war

by making a very strange discovery.

[tense music]

- It's 1981, at the height of the Cold War.

It's difficult to communicate the intensity

of tensions between the West and the Soviet Union.

[missile whooshing]

- [Dan] The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan,

and new US President Ronald Reagan

has vowed to stamp out any communist threat worldwide.

[plane roaring]

- Earlier that year,

a Soviet nuclear submarine runs aground

in Swedish territorial waters.

Tensions get even worse than when the Swedes

confirm the presence of nuclear weapons onboard it.

- This is a powder keg.

One spark could ignite World War III.

[bomb exploding]

So of course, the Swedish Navy are on high alert,

trying to detect any evidence

that Soviet submarines might be intruding into their waters.

- A Swedish naval officer is listening to underwater sounds,

but what he's hearing doesn't sound like what he expected,

and it's a little troubling.

- But also, the sailors on deck

see bubbles coming up.

It reinforces the theory that there is something down there

and it's probably another nuclear submarine.

This is bad news.

- So the panic is,

have the Soviets developed some new propulsion system

that defies our ability to detect it?

In one example, the Swedes chase one of these bogies

around the North Atlantic for months

without ever having visual contact with it.

[water bubbling]

- This cat-and-mouse game

between this strange sound and the Swedes

goes on for over a decade.

[tense music]

- Finally, the Swedish Prime Minister has had it.

He sends a letter to Boris Yeltsin,

demanding to know what the source of this phenomenon is.

- And the reply comes back from Boris Yeltsin.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

- [Dan] Desperate, the Swedes hire

Danish marine biologist, Magnus Wahlberg,

to help interpret the mysterious acoustic signals.

- Magnus expects to hear what sounds like propellers,

or mechanics, or a sonar ping.

But instead, he hears what sounds like frying bacon.

- Magnus is perplexed by this,

but they're looking at it

not through the lens of military concerns.

They're looking at this matter

through the lens of marine biologists.

- [Dan] So what was thought to be rumblings of war

are actually something else.

- What Magnus finds is that when herring are being hunted,

they form something called a bait ball

as a deterrent to predators.

- In order to maintain the coordination of their bait ball,

they actually communicate with each other.

They expel air from their swim bladders out their anus.

[water bubbling]

- It's fish flatulence.

- Now, if you have thousands of herrings

doing this all at once,

it makes a lot of noise.

- For the Swedish officer

who has to deliver the report on what happened,

it's not such good news.

But at least he can console himself with the fact

that they didn't start World War III.

- This is most likely the first and last time

fish flatulence nearly started a war.

- Kids are natural explorers,

and what better place to explore than a beach?

Digging up clams, collecting seashells and driftwood,

all wonderful childhood fun,

except for one very strange find in Canada

that could turn a kid off beachcombing forever.

[tense music]

- It's 2007.

A little girl is out on the beach of Jedediah Island

in British Columbia,

and she sees this large, size 12 men's sneaker

washed up on the beach.

- So she runs over, she sort of looks inside the sneaker.

[suspenseful music]

And finds a foot.

[child screaming]

Was this a murder victim?

Did someone fall off their boat

and get chopped up by the propeller?

Who knows? But it's pretty disconcerting.

- [Dan] The only comfort locals take

is that this horrific discovery

seems to be an isolated incident.

That is, until it's not.

- Less than a week later, on nearby Gabriola Island,

another sneaker washes up with another foot inside.

At first, you might think,

okay, well, feet do come in pairs.

It would be expected that if you find one,

you'd eventually find another.

- But, the sneakers don't match,

and both feet are right feet.

So this is a second person, a second victim.

- You now have a pattern.

- 2008, a size 11 Nike washes up on Valdes Island,

also with a severed foot.

- In November 2008,

a woman's New Balance shoe washes up on Kirkland Island,

also with a severed foot inside.

- November 2011, men's size 11 hiking boot, foot inside.

- 2016, New Balance shoe, foot inside.

- [Dan] Over the next 14 years, more than 20 severed feet,

complete with late model athletic footwear,

wash up on nearby beaches.

- This is causing terror along the coast,

and to make matters worse,

now pranksters are putting chicken bones inside sneakers

and sending them afloat.

[tense music]

- [Dan] Investigators are flummoxed.

Could all of these victims be connected?

- One thing that links all of these severed feet

is that none of them show any evidence

of having been hacked off, or sawed off,

or chopped off through human action.

All of them are severed through the ankle joint

by decomposition.

- [Dan] Eager to calm the public,

forensic investigators start performing experiments

in deep water decomposition with an unusual test dummy.

- Investigators take some pig cadavers

and sink them to the bottom of the Salish Sea,

the area where all these feet are washing up,

and what they note during these experiments

is that the scavengers, crabs, lobsters,

things that are down there

immediately start to disarticulate the body.

- [Dan] Disarticulating is a fancy way

of saying, pulling the body apart at the joints.

You know, just like humans do to crabs and lobsters

when we eat them.

Apparently, the feet are often the first to go.

- All good athletic footwear today

has air pockets inside of it,

so as soon as those feet

sort of disarticulated from the body,

they floated to the surface,

and that's how the feet kept showing up on beaches.

- [Dan] But why are they only showing up

in this one particular area?

- Turns out the Salish Sea

has these sort of rotational currents.

As they're circling around,

western and eastern winds blow them back and forth,

and so rather than stuff out to sea,

it sort of circles in a particular region

to push them up onto these beaches.

- The cause of all these severed feet is actually natural,

and it's not the signature move of some crazed serial killer.

[pensive music]

- Authorities in British Columbia

are so happy with this explanation

that they actually tell the public not to worry

if more dismembered feet wash up,

because, and I quote, "This is no cause for alarm."

Maybe we'll reach the day

where severed limbs don't freak us out,

but we certainly weren't there in 1935,

when family crowds at an Australian aquarium

witness a feeding time they'll never forget.

[tense music]

- It's 1935

and this Australian businessman named Bert Hobson

owns the Coogee Aquarium in Sydney, Australia.

This summer, business has been slow,

so he's looking for something to increase his profits.

- [Dan] Lucky for Bert, he's got a new star attraction.

- Bert has a 14-foot tiger shark, which amazingly,

he and his son managed to catch

and wrangle into their tank in this aquarium.

- Bert is cashing in on a current shark panic.

That summer, there had been several bad shark attacks,

so bad that local authorities

have actually deputized local fishermen

to find, hunt, and kill the sharks.

- [Dan] At first, Bert's tiger shark is a big hit.

Crowds flock in to see it up close.

But soon, there's a problem.

- The shark becomes lethargic,

it just hangs out, it doesn't eat anymore,

and that is not what people are coming to see.

They want their shark alive and dangerous,

not sick at the bottom of the tank.

- Then, this lethargic shark suddenly gives onlookers a show

beyond what they could have anticipated.

It throws up a rat, and then it throws up a bird,

and then it throws up a severed human arm.

The smell is horrific.

- Hobson calls the police, they come,

they take the decomposing arm out of the water,

and take it back to their lab for examination.

- One of the things they notice is that it has a tattoo

of two boxers sparring.

- [Dan] But it's the way the arm is dismembered

that really piques their interest.

- The arm clearly was severed cleanly

with a blade structure,

which is impossible for shark's teeth to do so cleanly,

so it appears that actually,

the arm was eaten by this shark postmortem.

- [Dan] Police now assume the victim

was murdered and dismembered,

and his body was dumped into the ocean

where the tiger shark snagged it.

But who did this arm once belong to?

- They put out an ad in the local newspaper, Sydney's Truth,

and they describe the tattoo in that ad.

- A man contacts them,

indicating that his brother, James Smith,

who went missing a few weeks prior, was an amateur boxer,

and he definitely had a tattoo that matches their description.

They pull fingerprints off of the hand from the severed arm,

and lo and behold, it's positive for James Smith.

- Investigation reveals that James Smith

is wrapped up in the Sydney underworld.

He's running cocaine, he's involved in insurance fraud,

and most importantly, a confidential informant.

- So it's not terribly surprising

that somebody might want him dead.

- This case has never been solved,

no one's ever come forward with new information,

and so it remains a cold case until today.

[tense music]

- Like Smith, the shark has an unhappy ending.

It's killed and autopsied in a hunt for more body parts.

As it turns out, there are none.

- We've seen weird discoveries that are dug up, washed up,

and even thrown up,

but what we haven't seen yet is one that is dreamed up

in a psychic vision.

- It's 1938 in Virginia Beach,

and there is this renowned psychic named Edgar Cayce.

He's predicted all sorts of things.

It's alleged that he predicted the 1929 stock market crash,

World War II, [artillery firing]

and even the deaths of JFK and Roosevelt.

- [Dan] In 1938, from a trance in his Virginia Beach home,

Cayce predicts the discovery of underwater ruins

from the legendary lost city of Atlantis.

- He says a portion of the temples may yet be discovered

under the slime of ages and seawater near Bimini.

He even gives it a timeline,

expected in '68 or '69, not so far away.

- [Dan] Flash forward to 1968.

Dr. Joseph Valentine, an amateur archeologist,

flies over Bimini when he spots a strange collection

of large stones underwater.

- The stones extend for about a half mile

in what looks like a large cobblestone path.

- It's 1968, just like Cayce predicted,

and these stones are near Bimini,

and they're also under the slime of ages and seawater.

Just like Cayce predicted.

- [Dan] They call the structure the Bimini Road,

and Cayce devotees immediately insist

it's a highway to Atlantis itself,

though skeptics are quick to pump the brakes.

- Legend has it that Atlantis

existed about 10 to 12,000 years ago.

- When scientists use Carbon-14 dating to test these rocks,

there is a bit of a discrepancy.

They're only about 2,000 years old.

- Another huge question is,

why would Atlantis, if it's there, be near Bimini?

Plato said that Atlantis was off the coast of Gibraltar.

Bimini is 4,000 miles from Gibraltar.

It's off the coast of Florida, for crying out loud.

- Even though Atlantis hasn't been found,

the discovery of the so-called Bimini Road

is still pretty amazing,

especially when you take into account

that Cayce darn near exactly predicted it decades earlier.

[water splashing]

- Many of his followers still believe

and they still do fund dives off the coast of Bimini

to find this lost city of Atlantis.

- Not all deep sea mysteries remain hidden forever,

but finding an ancient treasure

and unlocking the secrets behind it

are two very different things.

In the summer of 1900,

a team of Greek divers is busy harvesting sea sponges

off the island of Antikythera.

As the men on deck dutifully pump air

to the divers working below,

suddenly, one of the lifelines begins to frantically jerk.

- What this means is the diver

is signaling to the men on board that he has an emergency.

So they pull him up from about 150 feet down.

- They get him up, take off the helmet,

and he's talking, almost hysterically, about dead bodies.

- The ship's captain, Dimitrios Kontos,

wants to see for himself.

So he suits up and he goes down to the sea floor.

- What he's found is not dead bodies.

These are statues,

ancient Greek statues.

[dramatic music]

Priceless relics.

It sparks one of the biggest archeological digs ever.

I mean, this is a treasure trove of antiquities.

- They also find coins that help them date the shipwreck,

and they figured it had to have been around 60 or 70 BCE,

over 2,000 years old.

- [Dan] But the most astounding discovery

of this ancient shipwreck

is something that is almost completely overlooked.

- Along with all these amazing statues,

they find this weird, like, decaying lump of stuff.

But the green makes them think

maybe there's some bronze there and it's a bronze artifact,

and so they bring it to the surface.

- When they get the lump of metal

back into the lab in Athens,

they begin to peel away the crud,

and what they find is astonishing.

There's a set of bronze gears,

and they fit together precisely like a fine Swiss watch.

- This is incredible,

because this technology seems way ahead of its time.

This is more like something you'd see

in the 15th or 16th century, the times of da Vinci.

- [Dan] The mysterious device

is named the Antikythera mechanism

after the island where it's found.

- For decades, historians

and archeologists study this device

trying to figure out what it is.

- It's 1959.

There's a Princeton historian, Derek J. de Solla Price,

and he's the one who cracks the mystery.

- He figures out that there's a main gear

which you turn to set to the calendar date,

and then there are all these little gears,

which are connected to it,

which predict the positions of the planets,

the Sun, the Moon.

The thing can even predict solar eclipses.

- [Dan] Others speculate the technology

is so unbelievably advanced

that it must have come from the future, or even from aliens.

- Was it some sort of device for celestial navigation?

Were they doing astrological predictions?

The problem is that this machine is such an outlier.

It's the only one we know of.

So figuring out its true purpose

is made even more difficult.

- Scientists are now using

what they've discovered about the Antikythera mechanism

to help them reconstruct a fully-functioning duplicate,

hoping to unlock the rest of its secrets.

- Guam, January 24th, 1972.

Two friends, Jesus M. Duenas and Manuel D. Garcia,

are hunting and fishing deep in the jungle.

As they approach the Talofofo River,

they spot an unusual, unkempt figure

checking a bamboo fish trap.

[tense music]

- They're miles from anywhere, deep in the jungle.

They see this bizarre shadow figure.

He's wearing this strange outfit that's stitched together.

I mean, he looks like some kind of hermit.

- To their surprise, the old man lunges toward them.

He tries to take their gun from them,

but he's so weak that he can't carry out the threat.

The man collapses on the riverbank,

and as he lays there,

he pleads with the two of them to kill him,

rather than take him prisoner.

But his pleas are in the Japanese language.

- They don't kill him.

Instead, they take him to the local authorities.

That's when they find out this man's name is Shoichi Yokoi.

- It turns out, Shoichi came to Guam as a Japanese soldier

in the middle of World War II in 1943,

and he's been there ever since the US took the island

in '44.

He's been hiding in the jungle for 28 years.

- His struggle is over,

but Shoichi Yokoi is overcome with guilt,

ashamed of the fact that he has finally surrendered,

even after almost three decades.

- [Dan] To understand how we got here,

it's important to know

what was really expected of Shoichi Yokoi

as a young soldier in the Imperial Army.

[tense music]

- Guam has been a US territory since the Spanish-American War.

In 1941, the Japanese invaded

because of its strategic importance

as a resupply point for their war ships.

- [Roosevelt] With the unbounding determination

of our people...

- The Japanese put 20,000 infantry troops there

to defend it.

- We will gain triumph,

so help us God.

- When the US Marines invade to retake the island

in the summer of 1944,

it is an absolute bloodbath.

- [Reporter] No longer were the Japanese undisputed masters

of the sea and air.

- To surrender is to dishonor your family and the emperor.

So those who are not killed in combat

flee into the jungle in the southern part of the island

and go into hiding.

- Shoichi and the number of comrades

are thinking, "Maybe we can regroup."

For them, the war is still on.

- They're living in caves

and underground tunnels and shelters.

They eat rats to survive.

Some die of disease,

but the holdouts stay hidden for years.

- [Dan] Deep in the jungle, news of the world escapes them,

especially major events like the atomic bombs

or Japan's surrender to the US in 1945.

- So sometime in the mid-'60s,

the rest of his comrades die in a flood.

He's living off the land,

and he manages to do this for another eight years or so.

- The main objective driving him to survive

is to avoid capture at all costs.

- [Dan] But that struggle is over now

as he sits in custody before a magistrate in Guam.

[mellow music]

- And they decide,

"What the heck are we gonna do with this guy?"

Well, there's only one answer.

"We'll repatriate him to Japan."

- Although he is ashamed of the fact

that he has finally surrendered,

he is nevertheless greeted by an adoring crowd of 5,000

upon his arrival.

[Shoichi speaking in Japanese]

Shoichi says, "I returned with the rifle

that the emperor gave me.

[Shoichi speaking in Japanese]

And I'm sorry that I did not serve him to my satisfaction."

- Shoichi lives to 82 years old

before dying of a heart attack in 1997,

25 years after being discovered checking his eel traps

on Guam.

- Most big-time discoveries

are made by professional explorers,

after long, expensive years

of dedicated research and digging.

Archeologist Howard Carter spent five years and a fortune

to find King Tut's tomb.

But sometimes, the most valuable discoveries

are stumbled upon by accident,

and in a weird and unexpected place.

[pensive music]

- Wesley "Uncle Sam" Basham

is a hardworking laborer in Arkansas in 1924.

He uses a high-powered hose

to remove mud from some rocks where he works,

the Arkansas Diamond Company.

- Diamonds were found in Arkansas in 1906,

and that creates a huge rush of people

who are trying to get rich quick.

But unfortunately,

most of the diamond claims pinch out very quickly,

and a lot of these claims don't really produce enough money

to even cover the cost of the equipment.

- So Wesley's firm is in trouble.

They're hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,

and Wesley is all but out of a job.

- [Dan] Suddenly, as Wesley sprays down the rock pile,

a flash of light grabs his attention.

- He's been around diamonds enough

to know a raw diamond when he sees one.

He's getting excited, he starts to holler,

"Oh, boy, this could be the big one!"

But he has no idea

how big this discovery is actually gonna be.

- [Dan] Wesley "Uncle Sam" Basham

has just discovered the largest diamond in America,

over 40 carats.

- [Kavitha] This is obviously a gigantic find.

- Historically, we hear a lot of stories

about these huge diamonds being cursed,

but this diamond turns out to be a lifesaver.

It saves the firm, it saves Wesley's job.

He is basically a hero for finding this diamond.

- [Dan] True heroes get cool stuff named after them,

and Wesley's 40-carat beast is dubbed the Uncle Sam Diamond.

And it's a beauty.

- They take this massive, raw, 40-carat diamond

and craft it into a perfect emerald-cut diamond.

It's still enormous at over 12 carats.

- The Uncle Sam Diamond is bounced around for decades.

It's eventually sold for 1.75 million,

and it is now in the Smithsonian Gem Collection.

It is still one of the largest diamonds in the world

and the largest diamond ever discovered in America.

- It's not often you get to save your whole town from bankruptcy

with a hose, but rarer still,

is tripping over treasure in your own backyard.

- It's 2013,

and you've got this Northern California couple

that are just chasing their dog around the yard,

having a good time playing around, what you will,

when they start to notice that their dog

comes across one specific spot

and starts just furiously digging.

- And that's when they see a rusty old canister

protruding from the dirt.

They're intrigued,

and they start to dig around the can with a stick,

but when they try to lift it, it's really, really heavy.

- They pop it open, and lo and behold,

there are golden coins inside this canister.

[dramatic music]

It is truly buried treasure.

- [Dan] What could be better

than finding one dirty canister of gold coins

on the outskirts of your herb garden?

How about eight?

- 1,500 gold coins in all, all minted around the mid-1800s.

So you're talking prime California gold rush time.

- Who leaves behind eight canisters with 1,500 gold coins?

That's not something you forget about.

- [Dan] Even more surprising

is these coins seem to be uncirculated,

and in mint condition.

- So the fact that these coins haven't been circulated

kind of screams lifted, stolen.

- Uncirculated coins were issued by a bank

for deposit into another bank.

So the fact that these were found buried in a backyard

means that, at some point,

they were intercepted, probably from a stagecoach on transit.

Around the time that these coins are minted,

there are some very famous stagecoach robbers,

and one is a guy named Black Bart.

From 1875 to 1883,

Black Bart robs 28 stagecoaches in Northern California.

- [Dan] Charles Boles, AKA Black Bart,

was called the Gentleman Bandit.

He never cursed,

and sometimes left poems behind after his robberies.

The other prime suspect

has a reputation that's slightly saltier.

- Jesse James is a notorious robber,

one of the most famous in the country.

And in fact in 1864, Jesse James is in the area,

just 10 miles away from where these gold coins are found.

He hits a stagecoach.

So, it's very plausible

that he is the man behind these coins.

- [Dan] Since Black Bart and Jesse James

are both long dead,

this loot is pretty much finder's keepers.

- So this couple who decide to keep their names anonymous

and just go by John and Mary,

they take their coins to an expert

who tells them that these coins collectively,

all 1,500 of them, add up to about $10 million.

Not bad for just hanging out with your dog

in your backyard one day.

- Not every weird discovery

is a $10 million solid gold payday.

Sometimes, it's a sneaker with a severed foot inside,

or a 2,000-year-old mummified Bog Man.

But whatever strange surprises we stumble on,

it's important to stop

and celebrate the ones that are truly unbelievable.