Mysterious X Articles: Dan Dillman's Field Writings

In July of 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition dropped 115 English colonists, men, women, and children, on Roanoke Island off the coast of present day North Carolina.

The legend goes back to 1735. A woman known in the stories as Mother Leeds, in a small Pine Barrens cabin, gave birth to her thirteenth child on a stormy night.

In 1986, a Japanese diver named Kihachiro Aratake was scouting a new site for hammerhead shark tours off the coast of Yonaguni Island. Eighty feet down, he swam over the edge of what looked like a cliff and stopped cold.

If you stand on the cliffs at the western edge of San Francisco, just past the Cliff House, you can look down at the concrete bones of what was once the largest indoor swimming complex on Earth.

Six months to find his skull. A bullet hole drilled clean through it. The Lost Dutchman Mine has cost more lives than any single gold find in American history, and people keep going in.

In 1862, a farmer clearing a field in Veracruz, Mexico hit something with his plow. Not a rock. A face carved in black basalt.