7 case files, newest first.
A block-like outcrop in New Zealand's central North Island was promoted in the 1990s as the remains of a pre-Māori pyramid. Geologists showed it is naturally jointed ignimbrite, volcanic rock that cracks into regular blocks.
Small grooved spheres found in pyrophyllite mines near Ottosdal, South Africa, have been promoted as 3-billion-year-old manufactured objects. Geologists identify them as natural concretions.
Between 1924 and 1930, lead crosses and swords with Latin inscriptions came out of the caliche beside an old lime kiln on Silverbell Road. They seemed to tell of a Roman-Jewish colony in eighth-century Arizona. The 1925 skeptics had it right: they're a hoax.
A shipwrecked bronze calculator from the ancient Mediterranean — out of place only until the gear trains are counted.
Parthian/Sasanian jars with copper and iron: König’s battery hypothesis remains popular; many archaeologists favor scroll containers.
1869 “petrified man” exhibited as wonder, quickly exposed as carved gypsum — museum-education staple about evidence standards.
Yale’s undeciphered illustrated codex: the library dates it to the late 15th or 16th century and does not endorse decipherment claims.
