Place a small gold pendant on a table, flat side down. It measures only a few centimeters, with a triangular body, two swept-back wings and a single upright fin at the tail. To many eyes, it looks like a toy jet fighter. In the second half of the twentieth century, this resemblance gave rise to one of the best-known puzzles of popular archaeology: the so-called "golden jets" of Colombia. The pieces are real and beautiful, and they were made by skilled hands. The question is what those hands were making. What the Pieces Are The little gold objects come from Colombia and are often credited to the Quimbaya culture, which flourished in the middle valley of the Cauca River roughly in the first millennium of our era. Similar winged pieces are also credited to neighboring peoples, such as the Tolima and the Zenu, and some resemble works from Costa Rica and Panama. Many of them are kept in the Gold Museum, the Museo del Oro, in Bogota. They are small, usually no more than a few...

In 1972, the Italian weekly magazine La Domenica del Corriere published a startling story. A Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti claimed that he and a team of scientists had built a machine able to see and hear the past. They called it the Chronovisor. The idea of a hidden device capable of opening a window onto history has fascinated readers ever since. Ernetti was a real person, a priest, musician and scholar of ancient music who lived in Venice. His story, however, has never been confirmed, and most researchers consider it a fabrication or a misunderstanding. Even so, the legend of the Chronovisor remains one of the most curious modern myths about time. The Monk Behind the Story Pellegrino Ernetti was born in 1925 and died in 1994. He was known as an expert in archaic music and Gregorian chant, and he taught in Venice. According to his claims, his interest in the past was also scientific: he believed that sounds and images from long ago never fully disappear. He s...

On the evening of the twenty-first of October, 1978, a twenty-year-old Australian pilot named Frederick Valentich took off in a small single-engine aircraft to fly across a stretch of open water called Bass Strait, the wild sea that separates the Australian mainland from the island of Tasmania. It was a routine flight, one he had made before, and the weather that clear evening was good. He never arrived. Somewhere over the dark water, Valentich reported to air traffic control that a strange craft was hovering above his plane — an object he could not identify, that was not, he insisted, an ordinary aircraft. And then, in the middle of describing it, his transmission dissolved into a strange metallic sound and cut off. Neither the young pilot nor his airplane was ever found. No confirmed wreckage, no body, no explanation. What happened to Frederick Valentich in the sky over Bass Strait remains an unsolved mystery, and one of the strangest and most unsettling disappearances in the hist...

On the second of July, 1937, the most famous woman flier in the world lifted off from a jungle airstrip in New Guinea and pointed her silver aircraft out over the emptiest expanse of ocean on earth. Amelia Earhart was attempting to circle the globe along its equator, the longest and most daring route ever flown, and only this final great stretch of the Pacific stood between her and triumph. Ahead of her, more than two thousand miles away across open water, lay a speck of coral called Howland Island, a landing strip barely visible on any map, where a ship waited to guide her in. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, flew toward it through the night and into the morning. They never arrived. Somewhere over that vast blue nothing, Amelia Earhart and her aircraft simply ceased to be, and nearly ninety years of searching has never brought back a single certain trace of her.

The Solar Fire: A rhapsody of plasma and light, the physical shadow of the Solar Logos.

The planet Mercury photographed by the MESSENGER spacecraft — the closest planet to the Sun, it completes its orbit in just 88 days and appears to reverse course three or four times a year from Earth's perspective, giving rise to one of astrology's most discussed cycles