TOP 5 UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF 2022 | The UnXplained

on the bottom of our planet lies The Frigid land of Antarctica coldest and most inhospitable continent in the world stretching over 5 million square miles Antarctica is covered in ice sheets that breach more than a mile deep the average daily temperature is negative 49 degrees Fahrenheit and wind speeds can reach over 100 miles per hour today the only inhabitants of this Barren landscape are scientists who work in research stations scattered across the continent mainstream geologists have long believed that ancient humans never settled on Antarctica because of its hostile climate but incredibly in 2016 satellite images

revealed a curious formation emerging from the ice that some researchers believe could be a man-made pyramid recently there have been a number of reports of pyramids huge Great Pyramids in Antarctica they jut out of the ice and snow and they look perfect just like those in Egypt but they dwarf those in Egypt like the Great Pyramid one has a perfectly square base that is two kilometers Square in each Direction is it possible therefore that our ancestors did actually reach the Antarctic continent and perhaps even settle there a man-made pyramid beneath the Antarctic Ice if such

an incredible notion is true then it naturally begs some questions how was such a massive structure built on Antarctica when was it done and by whom Antarctica we have been told from the geologists has been under ice for many millions of years however there is evidence that it could have been free advice certainly in certain areas until perhaps 4000 BC there are a large number of stories from Polynesia of so-called culture Heroes who reached the Antarctic continent a French academic by the name of Argo put together all of these different stories in the book titled

out of Antarctica the Polynesian people's stories describe This Strange Land where these white rocks that come out of the water with your icebergs and other creatures such as seals and Penguins and seem to describe an area that we now know as Antarctica the Polynesian people's believed this was the place of the ancestors and they said this is where we came from originally why did they believe this if this was untrue is it really possible that the coldest place on Earth was once warm enough to be inhabited by humans well in 2017 German geologists collected core

samples from deep within the frozen Antarctic seafloor in order to analyze what the continent's climate might have been like thousands of years ago what they discovered was astonishing in the case of that expedition in early 2017 we used a very special seafloor drill rig that hasn't been used before in Antarctica so when we used this special drill rig and the sediments came up we saw immediately more than 60 different taxa of plants similar to something that you would find in a rainforest in a temperature regime that was similar to what we today know from Northern

Italy and finding that on the Antarctic continent that was the most exciting thing because the climatic conditions doesn't today allow any vegetation to survive under those conditions So based on that location and the environment we found I think that the Antarctic continent and the secrets that still need to be recovered will tell us a lot about planet Earth Cairo Egypt a plateau just a few miles west of the Nile River is the Giza necropolis perhaps the most famous collection of ruins in the entire world believed to be constructed during ancient Egypt's fourth Dynasty around 2550

BC these Limestone monuments attract thousands of tourists every day who come to Marvel at the immense pyramids forbidding tombs and a mysterious Stone Sentinel known as the Sphinx I think you can argue that the Sphinx is the most recognizable statue anywhere in the world its scale is immense it's one single piece of stone it is cut from the natural rock of the Giza plateau the Sphinx stands 240 feet long 66 feet tall and 62 feet wide for thousands of years this massive statue has been an object of both Fascination and wonder but even after centuries

of study the Sphinx holds many secrets that archaeologists are still trying to unravel the Sphinx that we know today there's things from the Great Pyramids of Giza is the most famous of all sphinxism but there are sphinxes all over ancient Egypt there are smaller sphinxes there's an Avenue full of sphinxes between the temples [Music] but the Great Sphinx at Giza is something very different it's a single sculpture it sits in a very particular place it doesn't seem to have performed the same function at all what was it for this is what we really want to

know no one has understood exactly what it means because for literally thousands of years the Sphinx was buried up to its neck and sand so it's only a head sticking out of the sand for much of its history there is a very famous painting of Emperor Napoleon standing in front of the Sphinx buried still at this point up to its shoulders you might think what does Napoleon got to do with Egypt and sphinx well in fact Napoleon LED an invasion of Egypt in 1798 which had a big impact back in Europe in raising awareness and

interests in ancient Egypt sites it wasn't until the 1920s that a team of archaeologists led by engineer emir barrez succeeded in unearthing the Sphinx from the Desert Sands they were able to expose it and to sow to reveal for the first time in centuries that this was not just a head of a disembodied head but a full Sphinx sculpture and this is a watershed moment for us understanding the Sphinx archaeologists and the gypologists like myself believe that their Sphinx was sculpted around 2500 BC by King Catherine as a part of his funerary complex but a

lot of Scholars disagree about these things and there's a lot of mysteries surrounding when was the Sphinx actually sculpted one of the most important documents we have to do with the dieting of the Sphinx is the inventory stealer this is a commemorative stone that actually records details of how the Pharaoh Khufu repaired the Sphinx after it was struck by lightning the significance of this is that kufu came before Cafe the pharaoh who is conventionally said to have constructed the swings the inventory Stella has an inscription that goes back to about 4 600 years ago and

that inscription says that the Sphinx is a much older structure that the Egyptians adopted and repaired and venerated based on the inscriptions on the inventory Stila there are some archaeologists who believe that the Sphinx is so ancient that it could predate any records in human history that are known to exist and some researchers are convinced that physical evidence of the Sphinx's true age can be found on the structure itself [Music] first time I visited the Sphinx was in the summer of 1990 my early studies of the Sphinx looked at the erosional features on the body

of the Sphinx and comparing that to other erosional features right on the Giza plateau and what I found was the body of the Sphinx and the walls of the Sphinx enclosure are weathered differently than everything else on the Giza plateau the rest of the plateau shows classic wind erosion but what is on the Sphinx is water weathering it's rainfall precipitation and this makes no sense when the Sphinx is sitting on the edge of the Sahara Desert that has been a bone dry desert for literally thousands of years so what I concluded is that the body

of the Sphinx and therefore the original Statue had to go back to pre-saharan times when there was a much more temperate climate much more moisture much more rainfall and it has to go back not just a little bit into that period but quite far back given that we have incredible amount of weathering and erosion on the Sphinx I now think that it goes back to the end of the last ice age Circa 10 000 BC I am convinced that it is a ruin from pre-dynastic agent Cincinnati Ohio just outside the city are the normal Suburban

Street in an ordinary neighborhood is the home of Greg and Dana Newkirk from the outside their home is not much different from any other house on the Block but inside it contains something quite extraordinary because there is a room in the basement that is filled with a collection of strange objects sent by people from all over the world that are believed to be cursed Greg and I lead normal lives and we we go about our life the same way that everyone else does we just happen to be caretakers for very strange objects the way that

we got started collecting cursed objects was complete accident it wasn't something that we had set out to do never would have imagined myself doing this we were just interested in in general weirdness my wife and I investigate all manner of high strangeness and we were both very interested in the idea of cursed objects we slowly gained a reputation as being particularly good people for this and so anytime anyone had a problem with an artifact they would come to us and say I don't know what to do with this this thing is affecting my life will

you just take it off my hands it'd be easier to just give it to you and let you deal with it so we built up this collection of very bizarre things visitors to the newkirk's home are given an ample warning that the basement is filled with objects that are cursed we have a lot of haunted robes but curiously every day the new Kirks receive requests from people who are eager to view their cursed collection you would think with cursed objects you want to avoid them but there is a draw to them when an object is

said to be cursed another word you could use is special it's special if this chair is cursed it's different from every other chair in the world and that makes it unique that makes it interesting and that draws our attention every single time and the fact that that specialness is that it hurts people that appeals to a certain Macabre streak that we all have as human beings people think of cursed objects as being kind of fun and spooky but working with them it feels a lot less about that and a lot more about that kind of

heavy responsibility to keep some of these objects with us under lock and key and maybe out of the wrong hands and maybe in a place that's safer not only for for everyone else but for them Kirk's collection includes several objects that are considered to have the power to inflict harm on anyone who comes near them this is the cursed deer skull we drove down to Nashville to pick up from a woman who saw this in an antique store and took it back to her office and almost immediately her employees started getting sick one of her

employees was hit by a car and then the wall that this was hanging on actually fell down and took half of the building with it there are certain objects specifically in our Museum that without people knowing why they feel this the way that they feel they will definitely have heart palpitations anxiety we've had people almost faint we've had people throw up we've had people dry heat people have very visceral physical reactions to being around some of the objects among the accursed objects in the new Kirk's collection is a deadly ring that it's claimed to kill

anyone who wears it a Bible used during a failed exorcism and a doll that is believed to spread illness wherever it goes but of all the cursed objects and eucharists have come across there is one that is so harrowing they refuse to keep it in their collection it is an unsettling wooden Effigy known as the Chrome the Chrome really is the definition of kind of a cursed object it is a carved statue of a woman someone at some point in time took this object and attached The Noose and the nails it was given to us

by some hikers who found it in the Catskills off the beaten path and a cave they took it home and initially started to experience really frightening things their animals were behaving strangely they were finding wet footprints on the ground and they didn't know what to do someone who we had worked with previously put them in contact with us and after you know having some communication with them they they sent the Crone to us people who would get near the crone they would be just overwhelmed with anxiety this guy came all the way from Canada to

come and see the crone he begged us to take it out of the box almost immediately his eyes roll up in the back of his head and he starts to bleed from his mouth and he has a violent seizure and he has to be taken out by the paramedics and that's when Dan and I looked at each other and we said we have to do something about this it got to a point where the Crone was just too dangerous for even us to take care of bring her back to the Catskills which is where she's

from [Music] to remove the Crohn's curse the new coach plan was to return to the area where it was originally found by two hikers many years before at which point they would remove the nails embedded in the Chrome in a cleansing ritual we wanted to bring her back and every time a nail was pulled out the intention was that we were pulling that curse out of the object he hiked into the woods for miles I set up a circle the idea of setting up a circle was basically just to create an energetic space for containing

this ritual the whole time we were doing this we were hearing footsteps strange sounds that weren't animals around our Circle we couldn't see anything we were absolutely terrified but we started performing the ritual I pulled the nails out soon as that happens we feel this almost electric pop in the air [Music] when we were done every coyote on the mountain just started howling and the ritual was finished and what we were looking at was just a block of wood and we just kind of knew that we had done what we went there to do in

the lower Jordan River Valley distinct rises from the landscape but this is no ordinary Ridge because buried under layers of dirt and rock are the ruins of an ancient city that dates back almost 4 000 years modern archaeologists have named the site foreign from satellite imagery it's long and it's narrow it's about a mile from end to end we believe that as many as 50 000 people occupied the city according to experts is shrouded in mystery we don't know what it was named in ancient times or who lived there but in recent years some archaeologists

have theorized that tal elham is actually the ruins of the biblical city of Sodom in Genesis you have these cities Sodom and Gomorrah and there's wickedness there's inequity in the city but then God decides no this city is doing a horrible kinds of things so I'm literally going to rain fire sulfur down I'm gonna Destroy This City God said enough is enough fire and burning Stone came forth out of the heavens from Yahweh and consumed the city in fact the Bible says that every person crop plant tree twig anything that was living was destroyed the

Sodom and Gomorrah story is fascinating and it's meant to be a metaphor an understanding of oh when human beings don't do what they should do here's what God does to destroy us it's God's power being manifested it's an act of God the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah has long been associated with the wrath of God until recently many scholars thought that the story was only a myth so why do some experts not believe that could be the remains of the city of Sodom there is more geographical data in the biblical text for the location of

Sodom than there is for any other biblical site the Bible was very very clear that it was north and east of the Dead Sea and it was very clear that it was east of Jerusalem and tell him on matches geographics of the text it matches the time frame of the text it matches all the possible descriptions of the text describes it the idea that Tyler Lamar matches the location of Sodom in the Bible is intriguing and researchers also claim that there is physical evidence on site that confirms the biblical description sodom's destruction the actual destruction

event is recorded in just two verses in Genesis chapter 19 verses 24 and 25. where it talks about the fact that rock and fire came down from the heavens and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah one theory is that an incoming meteor or meteor fragment exploded over the North End of the Dead Sea and destroyed tala hamam there are numerous proxies that give strong indication that an air burst or impact event have occurred first is the evidence of thermal damage that's represented through melted building materials and partially melted Pottery fragments the second is the appearance and occurrence

of micro spherols very very tiny spherical shaped melted pieces of mineral grains and Sands and the third is a high concentration of rare Earth elements Rare Earth elements are very common in asteroids not so common on the Earth what's interesting is that the middle layer of tall hamam has a really high salt concentration it's so salty that a lot of times we excavate Pottery that's just coated with thick salt crystals that's pretty unusual why is that layer so salty well it's the same salt as found in the Dead Sea probably because this airburst event will

pushed a massive amount of dirt water and salt over the landscape a meteor explosion in the sky if tal and her mom really was Sodom could such an explosion be the reason why the city is now buried in dirt that has a high concentration of salt some experts believe the answer is yes and they point to the biblical story for further evidence of the connection between the destruction of Sodom and salt the story of Sodom essentially picks up in Genesis 19 where you have these two angels that look like men who travel down to visit

lot who's living down in Sodom and lot shows them tremendous hospitality supposed to be kind to immigrants you're supposed to be kind to foreigners as lot has done God has decided to destroy the city because of its wickedness so the Angels grab lot and his family and as they're leaving Sodom the Angels give them the command don't even look back and then you have this fascinating detail where it says that Lot's wife turned and looked back and she turned into a pillar of salt what could be the significance of Lot's wife turning into a pillar

of salt does this detail from the story support the theory that a meteor explosion in the sky buried Sodom and dirt and salt perhaps but is a meteor explosion a natural event or is it an act of God there's been a lot of question about fire in Brimstone coming down from the heavens right this is one of these Unexplained Mysteries and there have been a lot of theories and this probably has something to do with wanting evidence that proves faith a lot of people believe in these stories and Archeology can confirm them I think from

a point of view of science as we look at the biblical text and we look at the statement of this was fire and burning Stone from God out of the heavens if such an event actually occurred would it have left some evidences around well of course yes that's all confirmed by the science and how science can't tell me one way or the other whether it's an act of God but the event is confirmed Pompeii Italy 79 A.D at approximately 1 pm on a peaceful late summer day this ancient Roman city in the shadow of Mount

Vesuvius is shaken by a massive volcanic eruption within minutes superheated gas and lava engulfed the city and its surroundings in an inch to thousands of people are buried alive as a city that was once their home suddenly becomes their tomb nearly 2 000 years after the eruption Pompeii is a city that remains Frozen in Time this eruption was what we call a pyroclastic eruption where clouds of of Ash and debris hundreds of degrees hot came flowing down the mountain flash flying everything in its path and miraculously the heat of this Cloud was enough to carbonize

and Preserve rather than destroy all kinds of information we have well-preserved architecture wood and organic materials foodstuffs human remains animal remains that have been preserved for two thousand years beneath this volcanic debris [Music] today the excavated ruins of Pompeii offer archaeologists and tourists a breathtaking look at the doomed ancient city perhaps the most intriguing Discovery found beneath the ash from Mount vesuvius's eruption was an ancient Roman structure located not far from Pompeii known as The Villa De papyrus the villa de papiri was a Roman luxury Villa that was full of sculpture and marble and bronze

The Villa was discovered by chance in 1750 by welldiggers who tunneling about 75 feet through volcanic debris first hit a colored marble floor with an amazing pattern made up of bright red and yellow marbles and we think this was once a vacation home of a Roman senator of the highest rank of an old Noble family named Lucius calpurnia's Pizzo the volcanic ash that buried Villa De papyri did not only preserve the physical structure it also entombed a library that contained more than 1800 Papyrus squirrels these scrolls are an extraordinary record of the thoughts and writings

of people who lived nearly 2 000 years ago those texts were discovered when the city was excavated and some of the artifacts were first found they people who discovered them didn't know what they were they thought that maybe they were pieces of branches or logs because they were rolled up and carbonized until someone finally realized these are texts I'm papyrus the villa de papiri Library very significant because it's the only surviving library from Antiquity with its contents there were Scrolls found that date to the third second and first century BC in the First Century A.D

about 300 of them or so have been unscrolled and they contain mostly philosophic texts some poetry some literary criticism a little bit of history but many of the scrolls are so tightly bound together and carbonized that there's been a moratorium on attempts to open them fear of damaging the Scrolls left many of them virtually untouched for over a hundred years but new technology has presented a potential opportunity to read these mysterious ancient texts scientists in the computer science department at the University of Kentucky have developed a new method known as virtual unwrapping which uses a

sophisticated x-ray machine to scan the Scrolls without damaging them the virtual unwrapping that we innovated basically allows 360 degree set of views to be collected from an object that rotates in front of an x-ray beam is a real scroll that's 2000 years old and in cross-section see there's there's damage there are parts that are missing sections that are broken now we're using our software for the Second Step which is to trace these wraps all the way through so that we can build a 3D model that lets us flatten that out and then read the text

that's on it once we're done we've achieved this image that's on the left which is the final completely unwrapped version this is a quote from Democritus who was an early Greek philosopher and is very well known for having postulated with others that materials are made of atoms it's remarkable that 2 000 years ago Greek philosophers were postulating what we now know is true from science [Music] thus far the team has been able to digitally scan two complete Scrolls and a number of fragments they hope that in the future technology will advance and allow them to

reveal even more What secrets might be contained in those two thousand year old Scrolls one exciting possibility that has been suggested is that the original letters written by Jesus's Apostle Paul could have been kept within the library of villa de papyrus The Villa of the papyri wasn't tomb about 40 to 50 years after the death of Jesus at this time the original Apostles are now out doing their mission work in various parts of the Mediterranean so it's entirely likely that Villa of the papyri could have a collection of copies of Paul's letters if the letters

from the Apostle Paul circulated and found its way into the collection such a discovery would represent the earliest Christian material that we have almost dating back to the time of Christ and the disciples being able to use these techniques to understand history in a way that's almost forensic is going to bring surprising things forward and we're going to be revealing more secrets than we'd ever imagined before [Music]