Original subtitles

Mysteries can be buried anywhere.

Under the earth, beneath the sea,

or even right under our own feet.

And when we stumble upon them,

sometimes what we find can change history.

Tonight, lost national treasure.

From a grand slam score at a garage sale-

Most people wouldn't give this old wooden bat

a second look, but Bruce

grew up watching the game

and something about this bat

just seems really familiar to him.

To an American masterpiece

sealed behind a secret wall-

He's afraid of losing the painting

in the settlement so he secretly

makes a copy.

Even the staff at the Norman Rockwell Museum

thought they had the original.

To a discarded piece of Hollywood history.

This thing is incredibly detailed

and it doesn't really seem like a

trash can at all.

It gets Todd thinking,

could this be a prop from the actual, "Star Wars" movie?

Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.

Everyone knows

flipping houses comes with risks,

but for one man, a routine renovation

leads to something unexpected,

a discovery that blows the roof off his expectations.

In 2013, in the small town of Elbow Lake, Minnesota,

a guy by the name of David Gonzalez

buys a home that was built in 1938 for $10,100.

He's a house flipper,

and while the house has good bones, that's about it.

He begins demo on the investment property,

but he soon notices something strange within the walls.

The house isn't insulated like you would expect.

It's not foam or fiberglass.

There's a lot of crumpled newspapers in between the studs.

Now for David, this s just another day at the office

so he starts pulling out the crumpled pieces of newspaper

section by section, until he sees something colorful

in between all of that black and white.

He pulls it out from the newspapers and realizes

it's a comic book, and on the cover is none other

than the man of steel himself, Superman.

The comic is showing its age.

It's beat up on the corners, it's yellowed,

but David immediately notices something startling.

The date on the cover, June, 1938,

the same year the house was built.

David isn't a comic book collector,

but he obviously knows that Superman

is one of the most iconic comic book heroes of all time.

So he figures a really old Superman comic

has to be worth something.

David leaves the newspapers in a pile

and jumps online.

What he finds nearly knocks him off his feet.

In David's hands is, "Action Comics" number one.

This is the holy grail of comic books.

This comic isn't just the origin story of Superman.

It's like the big bang for the modern day superhero genre.

Without action one, you don't get Batman,

you don't get Wonder Woman, you don't get Spider-Man,

you don't get all of DC comics, Marvel comics,

you don't get superhero comics at all.

But before it kick started a billion dollar

superhero empire, "Action Comics" number one

was just another novelty on the newsstand.

Back in 1938 when, "Action Comics" number one

was released, it was selling for about 10 cents a copy,

which in today's money's around two bucks.

At the time, nobody would've thought anything of its

worth beyond its inherent entertainment value.

You read it, you enjoy it, you throw it out,

or in this case, stuff it inside the walls of a new house.

Around 200,000 copies were originally printed,

and today, only about 100 are believed to still exist.

So David could be sitting on a gold mine

worth far more than the house flip.

Needless to say, the man is thrilled.

And so, he brings it home

and he wants to show it off to his family,

and they're all just as excited.

They invite friends and more family to come over

and see this rare find and everything is going well,

until his wife's aunt shows up.

She grabs, "Action Comics" number one

and starts waving it around.

David attempts to grab it back.

In the chaos of the moment,

the back cover rips.

Damaged or not, this is still one of the most sought

after comic books in the world, so David puts it away

for safekeeping until he can put it up for sale at auction.

Even in less than perfect condition,

it sells for a whopping $175,000.

But experts think that the tear cost David

anywhere between 50 and $75,000.

So without that tear,

this copy of, "Action Comics" number one

could have sold for a quarter of a million dollars.

Thanks, auntie.

It was a costly mistake,

but David bought the house for just over $10,000

and he's walking away with more than 17 times that,

from something that he literally pulled out of the wall.

All in all, it's a much better return

than any house he could have flipped.

Meanwhile, in the heart of Iowa,

another sharp eyed citizen makes a major league discovery

hiding in plain sight.

In 2013, Bruce Kapaki visits a garage sale

in Des Moines, Iowa.

He's a history buff and he likes to see

if there's anything of historical value

that he can then resell for pocket money.

He's not looking for anything in particular,

but as he comes to the table full of sports gear,

he spots something interesting.

It's an old beaten up wooden baseball bat

tucked underneath a few other metal ones.

The price tag for this bat is a dollar.

Now, most people wouldn't give this old wooden bat

a second look, but Bruce grew up watching the game

and something about this bat

just seems really familiar to him.

The grip of this bat is very distinctive.

It has a thick handle and base with a unique knob.

And that's when it hits him.

He's seen a bat like this before.

Bruce is a baseball nut.

He knows most players' names are burned into the barrel

of the bat, and he has a sneaking suspicion

of whose name is on this one.

Excitedly, he approaches the woman running the sale,

Sue McKinney.

He asks for a pencil, she hands one over

and Bruce gently rubs the pencil over the barrel of the bat.

Suddenly, something extraordinary happens.

As if by magic, a name slowly appears, Jackie Robinson.

In the '40s and '50s, Jackie Robinson played 10 seasons

in Major League baseball.

He was a Lifetime 313 hitter, a World series champion,

and now a hall of famer.

But today, he's much more known

for breaking all kinds of barriers.

Jackie Robinson was the first Black American

to play major league baseball in the modern era,

so he changed not only baseball, but the country forever.

Robinson's legacy is legendary.

So how did his bat end up at a Midwestern garage sale?

Turns out Sue's Uncle, Joe Hatten, also known as Lefty

Joe pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers from '46 to '51.

When Bruce discovers Jackie Robinson's name on the

bat, Sue starts to connect the dots.

Her Uncle Joe played five seasons for the Dodgers

alongside Robinson and was even the starting pitcher

on the day that Robinson broke the color barrier

during his major league baseball debut.

The two weren't just teammates, they were friends.

They even roomed together on the road,

something a lot of Jackie's white teammates

wouldn't do at the time.

Sometime in their playing days,

he must have been gifted the Jackie Robinson bat

or traded for it, because he ended up with it.

It seems crazy, but Sue just assumed

that this was just one of Uncle Joe's old bats.

She even let her kids use it to hit balls

and rocks around when they were younger.

Thankfully, all that backyard batting

didn't take a hit on its value.

Sue gets the bat appraised and the result is a

grand slam. In its current condition, it's worth about

$20,000. But it could be worth even more

if she has it professionally restored.

Sue has no plans to sell the bat saying,

"It's something that belongs to our family."

It's incredible to think how close she was

to parting with this precious artifact.

But thanks only to the kindness of a stranger

who was doing the right thing,

this American treasure remains in her family's hands.

Sometimes the most valuable finds

are the ones we overlook.

Take this next story about a rare piece of American history.

March, 1962, 56-year-old George Walton

is driving in heavy rain in North Carolina,

when his car collides head on with another vehicle.

Tragically, he doesn't survive the crash.

The police arrive and it's a mess.

There's glass, there's metal,

there's just debris everywhere.

But there's something unusual scattered around the highway.

Dozens upon dozens of coins,

but these aren't just regular nickels and dimes.

The coins look old

and really unfamiliar to the officers, so they pick them up

along with George's other belongings.

George was a bachelor,

and so his estate gets managed by his siblings

and ultimately,

his coins get sent to an auction house to sell.

It turns out George's quiet hobby

is worth a fortune,

and his collection sells for a staggering $875,000.

But not all the coins are sold.

One of them is a 1913 Liberty nickel,

one of the rarest coins in history.

This 5 cent piece is engraved

with a likeness of Libertas,

also known as the Goddess of Liberty,

whose image originates from ancient Roman coins.

Liberty nickels officially stopped being

released in 1912, but in 1913, a mint employee named Samuel W.

Brown ended up secretly striking five of these

to sell on the black market.

Over the years, four of them have been located,

but the elusive fifth liberty nickel has yet to be found.

The nickel has all the markings

of a historic discovery until experts take a closer look.

Unfortunately, the coin is determined to be a fake.

George's siblings take the forgery, put it in a closet

and forget about it.

Dismissed and forgotten,

the nickel stays buried for decades

until a 2003 coin convention in Baltimore

puts it back in the spotlight.

The main attraction is that this coin convention

is featuring the 1913 Liberty nickel.

The organizers of the show put out a call to the

public hoping that someone might come forward with the final

coin, and that's when George's family starts to wonder.

Should they give the fake coin one last look?

So they dig it out, head to the convention,

and in a secret room at the Baltimore Convention Center,

six experts compare their nickel with the other four,

including one that has been authenticated

by the Smithsonian.

And it turns out the so-called fake is actually real,

and one of the most sought after coins in history.

In the 1940s, George purchased the coin for $3,750.

He held onto it for years,

and in 1962, he packed it up alongside his collection

and drove them to a coin convention.

Sadly, he never made it, dying in that fatal car crash.

In 2013, George's family

puts the Liberty nickel up for auction

and it sells for $3.2 million.

All told, George's collection brings in over $4

million. A nickel that everyone thought was worthless

turns out to be priceless.

So as they say, don't take any wooden nickels,

but buy all the rare ones you can.

Not all treasures shine.

Some are hiding on a dusty shelf,

just waiting for the right person to find them.

On February 19th, 1988,

a fisherman wanders into a New Hampshire book barn.

It's basically an old rustic shop full of used books.

Amid all the mundane stacks of old and used whatever,

he finds a beaten up old copy of, "Tamerlane

and other poems."

But strangely, the author is not listed by name.

It says it was written by a Bostonian.

It just so happens that the fisherman had recently

read about, "Tamerlane,"

which happens to be one of Edgar Allan Poe's earliest works.

So he figures for 15 bucks,

he might as well own this 40 page poem.

Back home,

the fisherman's curiosity gets the better of him,

and he can't get past the fact

that if this is an Edgar Allan Poe book,

why is it not attributed to Edgar Allan Poe?

There can't be two 40 page epic poems called, "Tamerlane."

So he starts doing a little bit of digging.

When he first published, "Tamerlane" in 1827,

Poe was an 18-year-old nobody.

So he published it anonymously under the pseudonym,

a Bostonian hoping it would lend air of mystery.

He only has about 50 copies printed

and he sends them off to critics,

and ultimately no one is really interested

and most of the copies sort of vanish into obscurity.

By 1988, there are only 11 known copies to exist.

Later publications of, "Tamerlane"

do include Poe's name on it,

but this first edition is so rare,

so sought after by collectors,

they call it, "The Black Tulip of Literature."

Could it be possible

this is one of those rare first editions?

The fisherman doesn't know for sure,

but the book looks old

and his research has been exciting him.

So he calls the Sotheby's Boston office.

Their response is immediate.

They dispatch an armored car to his house

and take the book to their New York City headquarters.

The Sotheby's experts meticulously compare his version

with the other 11 known versions.

They check the paper quality, the topography,

even the binding,

and when they're done, the verdict is clear.

This is the genuine real deal,

authentic rare first edition of, "Tamerlane."

This is massive.

We all know that Poe goes on to become

one of the Great American authors.

Which makes a rare edition of his first ever published work,

an incredibly valuable find.

So the fisherman decides to put his 150-year-old

copy of, "Tamerlane" up for auction,

and that fisherman's little old $15 book sells for $198,000.

Now that is a really good catch.

Imagine you're cleaning out your father's

estate with your brother, sorting through years of

memories, then hidden among it all, you find something

that doesn't belong here,

something that should be hanging on a museum wall.

In 2006, Dave and Don Trachte

are sorting through some things in their late father's home.

Their father, Donald Trachte Sr. was a well-known cartoonist

and they're just going through his estate

to see what they want to keep and what they wanna sell.

They've been through these rooms hundreds of

times, but as they're talking about their dad's life

and reminiscing, something odd catches their eye.

It's a bookcase tht their father built himself,

but it looks a little off.

The brothers notice a gap in the wood paneled wall

behind it, and when they press into it,

the wall slides open.

Behind the false wall, they find paintings.

And not just any paintings, these are by artists

that were very prominent in publications like,

"The Saturday Evening Post."

You're talking about artists like Mead Schaeffer,

George Hughes, Gene Pelham,

and while those paintings are interesting,

there's one piece in particular

that stops the brothers cold.

It's, "Breaking Home Ties" by Norman Rockwell,

one of America's most renowned artists

from the middle of the 20th century.

The brothers are confused,

they're very familiar with the painting,

and they know that it's supposed to be

at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

And that's because back in the 1970s,

their dad donated it to them

and it's been on display ever since.

To solve the mystery,

the brothers turn to experts and what they uncover

raises more questions than answers.

After testing and brushstroke analysis,

it's determined that the painting

in their father's secret room is authentic.

The brothers are stunned.

They work with investigators

to try to put the pieces together,

and soon a picture starts to emerge.

Back in the 1950s, their father,

a cartoonist that was known for his comic strip, "Henry"

lived in Arlington, Vermont.

And his neighbor was none other

than renowned Americana artist, Norman Rockwell.

The two men became friends and at one point,

Trachte bought, "Breaking Home Ties from Rockwell for $900.

It then hung proudly in the family home for years,

alongside other works the cartoonist had collected.

But in 1973, Trachte and his wife

go through a contentious divorce,

and he's afraid of losing the painting in the settlement.

So as a talented artist in his own right,

he secretly makes a copy, a near perfect one.

Even though Trachte wound up getting to keep the

painting in the settlement after all, he was still paranoid

that someone would try to take it away from him.

So he donated the copy of the Norman Rockwell painting

to the museum, all while secretly keeping

the actual painting in his home

so that no one would go looking for it.

His copy was so good

that even the staff at the Norman Rockwell museum

thought they had the original.

That is until the Trachte brothers

discovered that hidden space up in Vermont.

In late 2006, the Trachte family

decides to sell the original painting,

and it nets an amazing sum of $15.4 million.

It's certainly an American story,

just not the type that Rockwell painted.

Next, another work of art

uncovered in an even more unlikely place, church.

In the fall of 2022, a carpenter named Paul Brown

is walking through an old church in West Philadelphia.

It's being renovated by new owners

and they're gutting the place,

getting rid of many of the building's old fixtures.

Brown's attention is immediately drawn

to two large stained glass windows.

They're covered in grime and encased in the wall,

but even under all that dirt,

there's something about them that speaks to him.

The church is just planning on

throwing these old windows away, but he hates the idea

of them just ending up on some trash heap somewhere.

So he offers to buy them.

Back home, he wants to clean them up and restore

them, but he's not quite sure

how to handle delicate stained glass.

So he calls up a local auction house for advice.

They tell him he didn't just buy some pretty

windows. He now owns custom pieces,

handcrafted by Tiffany and Company.

Founded in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany,

the company becomes an iconic name in American luxury.

While Charles was known for his glitzy jewelry,

his son Lewis Comfort Tiffany developed a particular knack

for crafting stunning stained glass lamps.

What's not as well known

is that Tiffany also crafted church windows

during America's gilded age.

In 1901, as Philadelphia's St. Paul's

Presbyterian church was under construction, they turned to

Tiffany to create two eight foot rose shaped windows.

But over the ensuing decades, the special origins

of these windows get completely forgotten.

By the time the new owners take over,

nobody recognizes these gorgeous treasures

that are hanging in plain sight,

at least until Paul Brown walks in.

But the Lord works in mysterious ways.

After the Tiffany attribution is confirmed,

Brown sells the windows for over $250,000,

and he ends up donating a portion of the proceeds

back to the very church that almost threw the windows away.

For one woman, a regular morning stroll with her

dog turns into something wild

when she picks up what she thinks is trash.

In the summer of 2022, an account named Maria

Carrillo takes her daily break to walk her dog.

She steps out the back door of her Anaheim office

and into the alley behind.

Now, normally this alley is sort of full of

squatters and she also uses te opportunity while walking the

dogs to straighten up and take care of any of the trash

that they might've left behind.

As she stops to clean up after her dog,

she spots something on the ground.

It's a crumpled up McDonald's bag,

something that she's seen a number of times before

and just thrown away.

She picks it up to take it to the nearest trash

can, but she realizes something's off,

this bag is much heavier than it should be.

Curious, she uncrumples the bag and looks

inside. This is no leftover Big Mac,

there, beside some ketchup packets

and leftover french fries is something that's gold.

Maria pulls it out and she reads it

and she can't believe her eyes.

Etched into the side, it says, "Games of the 32nd Olympiad,

Tokyo 2020," a real deal, authentic Olympic gold medal.

Maria calls her husband

and asks what he thinks they should do,

and they have a friend who works for the Anaheim

Police Department, so they decide they should call him.

It turns out, this is the break Anaheim PD

has been waiting for because four weeks earlier,

an Olympic gold medal was reported stolen.

But the story of how it got there

and who earned it is even more surprising.

In the 2020 Tokyo Olympics,

the US women's indoor volleyball team took home the gold

for the first time in the program's history.

It's an incredible achievement,

and Jordyn Poulter dubbed the best setter of the tournament,

was a huge part of the team's success.

When Jordan got home, everyone wanted to see, and

touch, and hold an authentic Olympic medal.

Could you blame 'em?

So she started toting it around with her

to show off and show her friends.

I mean, honestly, who can fault her?

This is a generational achievement,

the first women's volleyball medal for the United States

and your part of that success?

But one day, she left it in her car and forgot to lock

it, and someone stole all her belongings from the console,

including the gold medal.

A few weeks later,

the perpetrator is found and arrested,

but not with the medal.

Police believe that he was attempting

to sell the gold medal at a pawn shop down the street

from Maria's office, but when he was turned away,

he abandoned it in the alley.

Thankfully, this story has a happy ending.

For Jordyn and her teammates, that medal is

priceless. She's so grateful to have it back,

she actually gives Maria and her husband a $1,000 reward.

And very wisely, she says, from then on,

she's gonna keep the medal at home.

2,000 miles away, another golden discovery is made

at an equally odd place.

This time, buried in a field.

In early 2023,

a Kentucky farmer is finishing up a hard day's work.

As he walks back to his truck, he looks out across the dirt

as he's done countless times before.

But this time, the setting sun throws up a glint

of something in the ground.

He walks over and he sees a small, round,

yellowish shape in the dirt.

He picks it up, wipes it off,

and he realizes it's a gold half dollar.

The farmer tosses the coin in his pocket

and keeps walking,

but that's when he sees another glint coming from the dirt.

It's another gold coin.

And then he keeps walking and he finds another one,

and another one, and another one.

There's a trail of shiny little dots in the dirt.

This is the most insane thing ever.

And look, I'm still digging 'em out.

There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, six more coins.

After about 45 minutes, he's found more than 700 coins

all dated from between the 1840s and the 1860s.

He reaches out to a coin dealer named Jeff Garrett.

Garrett is astonished.

Most of the coins are $1 gold pieces

known as Indian Princess Dollars.

But mixed in, are also 20 $10 Liberty Head Eagles

and eight $20 Liberty Double Eagles.

The Liberty Double Eagles

are especially unique.

Minted in 1863, fewer than 150,000 double eagles

were ever created, and most of them were never circulated

due to widespread hoarding.

So today, they're exceptionally rare

and highly sought after by collectors.

The discovery becomes known

as The Great Kentucky Hoard.

But no one's sure how it got here.

Some speculate that the coins might have been hidden

by a landowner who didn't trust the security

banks of the time could provide.

Remember that in the early 1860s, the Civil War is raging.

Kentucky declares itself a neutral state,

but it's caught between union and confederate forces.

Kentucky's banks and homes were frequent targets

of Confederate raids, so perhaps the owner of the coins

was just burying them in his field to keep them safe.

Others think that it could have been raiders

themselves who buried the treasure.

It could have even been the infamous Confederate General,

John Hunt Morgan, notorious for his violent raids

in Kentucky and other states.

Luckily, the coins now belong

to the farmer who found them.

And it turns out, these gold dollars

are worth more than a pretty penny.

They have a face value of $1,200,

but when he puts them up for auction,

they net him over 3 million.

Now that's a remarkable find.

When most people move into a new house,

they hope they don't find the last owner's trash.

But what one Long Island man finds is priceless.

It's 1994, and a machinist named, Bruce Campbell

is cleaning out the basement of a cabin on Long Island

that he's just purchased.

It's a mess filled with the former owner's belongings.

As he's cleaning out the basement, he comes across a

box that's filled with what to him

first looked like old home movies,

but on closer inspection, these turn out to be Amertape.

This is a reel-to-reel audio technology

used in the early 20th century.

With no idea what's on them and with no way to play

them. Campbell reaches out to an audio expert

who might have the equipment that will get the job done.

Bruce takes them over and together they have a listen,

but the audio that comes outta the speakers

is not what Campbell was expecting.

The audio starts with whizzing airplanes, yelling,

gunfire and the occasional explosion.

Cutting through it all is a steady voice

describing the horrific scenes

of a beach front invasion and battle.

Bruce has stumbled upon an original recording

of radio correspondent, George Hicks's D-Day reporting

from the coast of Normandy.

On June 6th, 1944, Hicks was aboard USS Ancon,

just off the coast of Normandy.

He speaks into a primitive tape recorder

called, a record graph,

reporting on the D-Day invasion as it happened.

Amid the chaos of war, Hicks delivers a gripping

play by play in a calm, clear voice.

His report was just 13 minutes and 29 seconds long.

But when the recording hit the American airwaves

later that night,

it conveyed the intensity of the fighting

to the American home front.

The press hailed it as the greatest recording of the war.

It's been decades

since anyone has heard these recordings.

So how did the originals end up in the basement

of a cabin in Long Island?

Bruce does some digging through property records

and discovers that the former owner

was once an executive at a record graph company.

That's the recording system

that the reporter Hicks used on that fateful day.

The executive was a bit of a collector,

and it turns out he'd been using his cabin as storage

for old recordings

and relics from the record graph industry.

When he passed away in 1992,

the collection just remained in the basement

waiting for the next owner to find.

In 2019, Bruce donates the tapes

to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation,

ensuring that the sounds and voices

from one of the war's most important battles

will continue to be heard and never forgotten.

I guess one man's trash is another man's treasure,

which is literally the case in our next story.

In 1993, Todd Frankln and a couple of his buddies

are walking through this country western music venue

in Missouri.

The venue is closing down, it's going out of business,

so everything inside is up for sale.

Among the clutter, Todd spots a trash can

that he just can't take his eyes off.

It's overflowing with garbage,

but the bin itself looks a lot like the Death Star.

Every, "Star Wars" fan knows what the Death Star is,

the famous moon sized planet killing weapon

that Luke Skywalker and the other rebels blow up

at the end of, "Star Wars."

Todd is quite the sci-fi buff,

and while he is seen a lot of, "Star Wars" merchandise

over the years,

he's never seen a Death Star trash can before.

So he approaches the owner and buys it.

When he gets it home, he takes a closer look.

This thing is incredibly detailed

and it doesn't really seem like a trash can at all.

While it does have a small opening,

the inside isn't completely empty.

There is all these metal cross beams

to keep it perfectly spherical.

So not only does this make it a pretty ineffective

trashcan, but it gets Todd thinking.

Could this be a prop from the actual, "Star Wars" movie?

Todd reaches out to the one place

that can tell him for sure, Lucas Film

the producers of, "Star Wars."

When he finally gets someone on the phone,

they tell him that the props were stored offsite

in a warehouse, but after production finished,

they didn't wanna continue paying storage fees,

and so they had everything thrown out.

Lucasfilm tells him he must be in possession

of some sort of replica.

They don't think much of it, so they're like, "Bye, Todd."

Regardless, Todd hangs on

to the strange object as a conversation piece.

A few years later, Todd attends a lecture

by Mark Thorpe,

a model maker from Industrial Light and Magic.

This is the company George Lucas used

to make the props and special effects

for the, "Star Wars" films.

After the lecture is over, Todd approaches Mark

and tells him about this Death Star model

that he has in his possession.

Now, Mark has firsthand knowledge

of how the Death Star was built

and the details surrounding this replica sound very similar.

Todd tells Mark that Lucas Film insisted that

all the props were destroyed at the end of production,

but Mark's not so sure about that,

and he thinks the Death Star trash can

might be the real deal.

Mark recalls that there were these rumors

that there was an employee at the Warehouse

who allegedly took the Death Star model home.

Instead of destroying it, he kept it for nearly a decade.

Then in the late 1980s, he moved to Missouri

and stored the prop in his mother's antique shop.

There, it stayed for years

until the owner of the music venue bought it.

Fueled with new information,

Todd decides to give Lucas Film one more call.

This time, they are shocked.

Now, even they believe

that Todd has the actual Death Star model

from the original movie.

So Todd decides that now would be the time

to sell his prized discovery.

Generously, he offers Lucasfilm the first shot

at purchasing it from him.

They offer him a tour of the Lucas Ranch

and an autographed picture of George Lucas.

It's a cool offer to be sure,

especially if you're a, "Star Wars" fan,

but Todd is convinced that somebody is going to pay him

a whole lot of cash for this model.

So he declines.

So eventually, in 1999, he sells the prop

to mega fan, super collector, Gus Lopez.

While the details of the sale are never released,

some estimate that the value of the Death Star model

could be as high as a million dollars.

But Gus doesn't keep it for himself,

He loans it to the Museum of Pop culture in Seattle.

So now, it can be enjoyed by aspiring Jedi, Wookies,

and storm troopers for years

We've all walked into a thrift store

not expecting to find much more than a small bargain,

but one find turns out to be a relic

tied to the birth of a nation.

In 2022, workers at a Goodwill in Washington DC

do what they do day after day,

they sort through incoming donations.

As the workers dig through a bag of donated

clothes, they find a dusty old torn up rag with red trim.

They're about to toss it.

When someone notices a piece of paper attached to it,

they glance at it and see a name, George Washington.

This gets their attention and they look closer

and see it is a handwritten note

indicating that this piece of fabric

is a fragment of a tent used by the Revolutionary War hero

and first president of the United States,

George Washington.

It seems hard to believe,

but the workers save the cloth from the trash heap.

They decide to put it up for sale

on a Goodwill auction site

where people can bid on items found in Goodwill stores

across the United States.

And that's where it catches the eye

of an American history buff named, Richard Moore.

He decides to take the gamble and he buys it for $1,700.

But he's so uneasy about it

that he hides the purchase from his wife.

The prospect of owning a piece of a tent

used by George Washington is very compelling,

but Moore is unsure since a handwritten note

is not exactly rock solid documentation that this is real.

Anxious to figure out

if the fabric is the real deal, Moore contacts

Philadelphia's Museum of the American Revolution.

They tell Moore that Washington used two main tents

during the war.

There was a large tent that he used as both his office

and sleeping quarters, and that's on display at the museum.

And then there was a smaller dining tent,

which is currently stored at the Smithsonian in Washington.

Moore sends this piece of cloth

to the museum in Philadelphia for analysis.

When it's compared to the tent that's on display there,

it turns out it's not a match.

Holding onto hope, he sends the cloth to the Smithsonian,

and when they compare it to Washington's smaller tent,

it turns out to be a perfect match.

Moore is thrilled,

but now that it's authenticated,

everyone still wants to know how a piece

of George Washington's dining tent

ends up in a Goodwill store.

After Washington's death, the tent was passed down

to his family and they would often display it publicly.

In 1907, the tent was put on display in Norfolk,

Virginia to celebrate the 300th anniversary

of the founding of Jamestown.

It was there that someone named John Burns

allegedly cut a six inch piece of fabric from the tent

and attaches a note explaining its origin.

Historians believe that the piece of cloth

that Burns cut from the tent is the same

as the one that Richard Moore purchased from Goodwill.

But to this day,

nobody knows how it got from Burns to Goodwill.

The value of the tent piece has been estimated

to be in the tens of thousands of dollars,

but for Moore it's a piece of family history.

Moore could trace his family tree

back to a revolutionary war soldier

who served under Washington at Valley Forge.

This means that the fragment of cloth was part of a

tent that his ancestor may have seen or even dined in

during the war that won America's freedom.

A mysterious stash of buried civil war coins,

a relic that belonged to our country's first president,

and a hidden artistic masterpiece worth a fortune.

These incredible finds

really are surprising national treasures.

I'm Danny Trejo, thanks for watching, "Mysteries Unearthed."