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,

explosive discoveries, from a ticking time bomb

underneath our nation's capital...

As he peers down into the hole, he's stunned.

They are panicked.

This is a real World War I mortar shell.

To remnants of a killer asteroid.

From the size of the crater,

the asteroid was about twice the size of the Superdome,

striking the Earth at over 45,000 miles per hour.

The impact was a cataclysmic event.

To a lost weapon of war.

It's loaded with over 270 pounds of high explosives.

In other words, this thing could bring down

a small building.

Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.

When fishermen head out to sea,

they hope to return with a full net,

but one captain hauls in a catch that might just sink him.

It's October 2022, and Captain Glenn Westcott

and his crew are fishing off the coast of Rhode Island.

It's a family operation,

so helping him man the rigging are his son and nephew.

As they haul their catch and drop it on deck,

fish are flopping around everywhere.

That's when Captain Glenn notices something unusual.

Mixed with the fish is a large, corroded metal barrel.

But it doesn't look like a normal barrel, like an oil drum.

It's covered with all these bolts and metal plates,

and it's really heavy.

The captain's first move is to call the Coast Guard,

who then races a boat out to evacuate the crew.

The Coast Guard quickly realizes

that they're in over their head, so they call in the Navy.

When the Navy explosive experts arrive,

they lose no time in identifying the threat.

It's a World War II MK-6 depth charge,

loaded with 270 pounds of TNT.

It's enough to bring down a small building.

During World War II,

depth charges played a vital role,

serving as a primary defense against German U-boats.

After these depth charges

roll off the back of a destroyer escort or a frigate,

they sink very rapidly,

and when they reach a specific depth,

which has been preset by the crew,

the pressure fuse triggers the bomb,

and it goes off, and it sends a shockwave,

and that shockwave reaches the enemy submarine hull

and crushes it.

The goal was to sink any submarines lurking in the area.

In some cases, multiple ships would rain down

hundreds of depth charges,

hoping one of them will cause the destruction of the U-boat.

Based on where it was found,

naval historians believe this particular depth charge

was dropped in one of the final sea battles of the war.

So in May 1945, a Coast Guard frigate

and a Navy destroyer spot a German submarine, U-853,

just two miles off the coast of Rhode Island.

The two American ships unleashed a barrage

of 195 depth charges, hoping to sink the sub.

Eventually, the relentless pounding

sent the German U-boat to the ocean's floor.

Apparently, not all those depth charges detonated,

because here one is 80 years later,

in Captain Glenn's net.

All of those control measures

that are in the depth charge

to keep it from going off, have all corroded.

It really could go off at any minute.

So the Navy works with the Coast Guard to set up a perimeter

to ensure that nobody gets too close.

The Navy carefully removes this

from the fishing boat.

They take it out to sea. They're a mile offshore.

They put other explosives around it, and they detonate it.

It's an explosion bystanders said they could feel

on the shore.

I know fishermen are full of tall tales

about the one that got away,

but in this case, I'm sure that Captain Glenn

and his crew were happy to let this one go.

The ocean floor isn't the only place

that World War II left behind a few surprises.

Just ask the kids who uncovered something

just as shocking on a beach a decade earlier.

In May of 2008, two nine-year-old boys

are playing on the sands of Houvig Beach in Denmark

on a family vacation.

They're jumping in the water, running around;

they're having a great time.

One of the boys spots something near a bluff.

It looks like a bucket sticking out of the sand,

so he runs over to check it out.

But when he gets there,

he finds something even more interesting.

Buried in the sand next to the bucket

is what appears to be a metal door with concrete around it.

They clear the sand from around the door

and pry it open.

When they peek in,

they discover something amazing and horrifying.

This is a concrete room that's about 200 square feet,

and it's filled with beds, uniforms,

and military equipment.

They even find that some of the equipment

is marked with a swastika.

The authorities finally arrive and call in archeologists

who confirm what the locals already suspect.

They found a long-lost Nazi bunker from World War II.

In the early days of the war,

German forces invade Denmark, but the Danish military

is no match for the Nazi war machine,

and the country quickly falls.

The Germans then spent the rest of the war

fortifying Denmark's western shoreline.

These bunkers are part of a broader system

that Germany built during World War II

that consists of over 7,000 bunkers and fighting positions

that stretch from Norway

all the way to the Franco-Spanish border.

It's designed to defend their conquered territory

from a counterattack by the Allies.

The project is known as the Atlantic Wall.

The scale is staggering.

It took over 300,000 workers to build these bunkers.

They used over 700 million cubic feet of concrete

and over a million tons of steel.

The Danish bunkers are designed to hold out

against anything the Allies can hit them with.

They have six-foot-thick walls to stop bomb blasts,

mortars, and gunfire.

With thousands of such bunkers

and fighting positions along the Danish coast,

archeologists are convinced

that there could be more hidden by sand dunes.

So they start searching.

Sure enough, nearby, they find two more bunkers

poking out of the sand.

These things have been buried out of sight

for nearly 70 years,

and now suddenly they've found three of them.

What's really amazing is that the inside

of these bunkers, they're like time capsules,

untouched since the end of the Second World War.

They find boots, socks, underwear,

Hitler postage stamps,

soda bottles, mustard.

They even find half-finished bottles of schnapps

and a pipe with tobacco still in it.

What they don't find are any bodies

or remains of German soldiers.

When the war ended with the German surrender

on May 8th, 1945,

the soldiers inside these positions simply walked out,

closed the doors, walked to the nearest town,

and surrendered.

Soon after, many of the bunkers

were looted and stripped,

but some were never discovered,

until now.

In the end, all of the items inside are preserved

and sent to a museum, and the bunkers themselves,

although once hidden,

are now preserved and open to the public.

They attract thousands of visitors every year.

When you're digging in your yard, you have to be careful.

You could hit a pipe, sprinkler line,

or if you're really unlucky, something much more dangerous.

In 1993, in the Spring Valley section of Washington, D.C.,

a construction crew is preparing to dig a trench.

They're surrounded by some of the fanciest houses in D.C.,

the kind of place where your next-door neighbor

might be a U.S. senator or an ambassador.

A backhoe operator fires up his engine and begins digging.

Suddenly, the bucket on his backhoe hits something

and makes a large clang.

He climbs out of the machine to go down

and have a closer look.

As he peers down into the hole, he's stunned.

What he's hit isn't a rock, and it looks pretty alarming.

It's metal and shaped like a foot-long bullet.

They are panicked, so the crew calls the fire department.

When they see it, they panic and call the cops.

And yes, the cops also panic, so they call the bomb squad.

The bomb squad confirms

that this is a real World War I mortar shell.

Concerned there could be more bombs buried nearby,

the authorities carefully search the rest of the area.

They find dozens more of these mortar shells.

Of course, they immediately evacuate

25 of the surrounding homes, and they call in the Army

to try to get a handle on the situation.

Even though these shells are old and corroded,

they're still live, therefore still dangerous,

so they could explode.

When the Army arrives,

they start carefully removing these shells,

and within a few days, they've uncovered 140 of these.

However, what looks like standard ammunition

hides an even deadlier secret.

These shells were not designed to kill

and maim through fragmentation.

It's worse than that because this site

used to be home to a U.S. Army chemical weapons depot.

Inside of these shells

are some of the deadliest chemical compounds

known to humankind.

World War I broke out in 1914,

and it was the first war that started

since the Industrial Revolution.

A lot of new weapons

were being tried out for the first time,

and one of the worst of these was chemical weapons.

Highly poisonous compounds like mustard gas

were loaded into shells and fired at the enemy.

When they hit, they'd unleash a cloud of death.

It would burn and blister flesh, destroy soldiers' lungs,

cause blindness,

and often they'd lead to an excruciating, painful death.

In 1917, as the United States

is preparing to intervene in the First World War,

it establishes a chemical weapons service

in the U.S. Army.

The new U.S. Army Chemical Service

enters into an agreement with the new American University,

and together they establish

this facility called Camp Leach.

There, they tested chemicals on soldiers' skin,

tried out new designs of gas masks,

and they developed toxic chemical compounds,

loaded them into mortars,

and fired them there right on site.

But before the new weapons could be sent

to the front, Germany surrendered

and the war was over.

Camp Leach was shut down.

They dug pits in the ground,

stuffed the chemical weapons in, and just buried them.

At the time, the military thought

these chemicals will dissipate on their own,

so no one really thought much when, 10 years later in 1928,

the ground was turned over to developers

to build what would become this ritzy neighborhood.

Now, seven decades later,

these canisters remain just as lethal

as the day they were buried,

making this wealthy neighborhood a dangerous minefield.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

and several private hazardous waste disposal companies

have been working to try

to bring this problem under control,

but the problem keeps getting bigger and bigger.

They'll clean up one burial site

of former World War I chemical weapons

and then immediately find another one.

The Spring Valley site is about 661 acres of land,

and nearly 1,600 private homes, several embassies,

and American University

sit atop this collection of toxic chemicals.

In the end, it took the government nearly 30 years

and $250 million to clean up the mess.

They remove over 1,000 military shells

filled with the deadliest chemicals

and poisons man has ever developed.

And yes, today they say they think they've got it all,

but honestly, if I were buying a house,

I'd be looking for a discount.

Next up, another war era surprise

washes up on the shores of Normandy,

just in time for its close-up.

In 1961, a film crew is clearing the beaches

where the historic D-Day landing site occurred

in Normandy, France.

They're prepping to start filming

their own World War II epic film called "The Longest Day,"

starring none other than the Duke himself, John Wayne.

Before the cameras can start rolling,

the beach just has a lot of debris on it.

It's gotta be cleaned up.

As they comb the sand,

they uncover what at first looks like

a random piece of metal,

but as they begin to clear the sand away from it,

it gets bigger and bigger.

They at first think they've uncovered some kind of vehicle,

maybe a jeep.

They keep digging, and it becomes pretty clear

that this thing, it's way bigger than a jeep.

It is a buried full-size tank.

The film's military advisors

quickly identify the machine.

It's a vintage World War II Sherman tank

used by the Americans on the D-Day landing beaches

17 years earlier.

On June 6th, 1944,

nearly 160,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel

and landed on the Normandy beaches.

This was a coordinated attack along

50 miles of German-controlled and fortified coastline,

and it turned out to be one of

the bloodiest battles of the war.

One of the reasons that it was

so difficult for Americans, was because that initial wave

was also supposed to include 64 Sherman tanks.

The tanks were supposed to provide cover, lay down fire,

and then roll over German fortifications.

Unfortunately, nearly half of the tank fleet

sunk in the rough waters of the English Channel

before they reached Normandy.

While this particular tank

was lucky enough to make it to the shore,

it quickly ran into another problem.

The film's military advisors think that the tank

may have broken down not long after it made it to the beach

and that it was left behind during the Allied advance.

Eventually, it sank into the sand,

where, in the end, it was covered by a dune.

But it turns out to be a fortunate find

for the producers of "The Longest Day."

They're desperately looking for period-accurate props

for the movie, so when they find the tank,

they're ecstatic.

The film crew refurbishes the tank,

slaps on a fresh coat of paint,

and gives it a role in the D-Day sequence of the movie.

And that's how a lost, forgotten relic

turned into a motion picture star.

Sure, home improvement projects

often come with surprises,

but for one couple in France,

what was hidden in their wall was no mold or mouse nest.

In 2017, in France's Burgundy region,

a couple is remodeling their home.

And as they're doing so, they pull down the drywall,

and in one area of the house,

they see that there's something hidden inside.

As it turns out, the object is an old pistol.

They pull it out of the wall,

and they're shocked to see there's another gun behind it.

Then another, and then a submachine gun.

By the time they're done, the couple has pulled out

three Sten submachine guns, three pistols,

over a dozen live hand grenades,

and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

The biggest mystery is that two of the machine guns

have names engraved on them:

Pepette and Alice.

The couple contact a local military museum,

who date the weapons back to World War II.

Turns out, at the same time,

French Resistance leader Armand Simonot

was living in the house.

The French Resistance was a paramilitary unit,

waging guerrilla warfare against the German occupation.

It started as a scattered and loosely organized group,

but by 1943, French General Charles de Gaulle

was coordinating the activities of multiple factions

from exile in England.

The French Resistance blew up rail lines,

sabotaged supply routes, rescued downed Allied pilots,

and by 1944, they grew into a 400,000-strong force

that was a major thorn in Germany's side.

Among them,

the well-armed Commander Armand Simonot.

It's clear that Simonot hid these weapons in his house

from prying eyes or to keep them close

in case the enemy came knocking.

When he died, the secret died with him,

and it wasn't unearthed until a sledgehammer hit the wall.

It still leaves one question:

who were Pepette and Alice?

Researchers wonder, were Pepette and Alice fighters,

or were these just simply nicknames

that people gave to the guns?

Fortunately, the couple that found these items

understood their historical significance.

They donate them to a local museum,

and they remain on display as a testament to the courage

and the sacrifice of the French Resistance.

Finding an arsenal hidden in your wall is pretty wild,

but that's child's play

compared to what's found at one playground.

On January 14th, 2025, a crew is hard at work

expanding a children's park in Northumberland, England.

They're adding things like a balance beam and a net bridge,

and they have to clear the land

and lay foundations to install those.

As they dig, one of the workers strikes something solid,

and it rings out with a clang.

Work grinds to a halt as the rest of the crew comes over

to take a look at this partially exposed object.

As they clear away more dirt,

a shape comes into view that stops them cold.

It's a bomb.

It's a foot long with a conical shape

and what looks like a fuse at one end.

The first call goes to the local police,

and within minutes, the bomb squad is on site.

The experts quickly identify it

as a British World War II-era bomb.

It's not big.

It's only 10 pounds,

so it's quite a bit smaller than most World War II bombs.

But with a live fuse and an intact charge,

it's still lethal.

Authorities evacuate the entire park.

Local officials bring in a private bomb disposal company

for what they expect will be a couple of days of searching

the site to make sure there are no more explosives.

It soon becomes clear that this is

a much bigger job than they expected.

By the end of the first day,

they've uncovered 65 more bombs.

The next day, they find 90 more.

Altogether, they remove 176 bombs and smoke devices.

The real mystery

isn't just how many bombs there are,

it's why they're here in the first place.

It turns out this playground was sitting on

what used to be a British Home Guard training site.

These are specialized training munitions

that were called practice bombs.

Don't be fooled by the name.

"Practice" does not mean harmless.

These bombs have a smaller explosive charge

than regular ordnance, but they can still explode,

and when they do, they can kill.

These bombs are used in training exercises

where the bomb is dropped over a target.

When it strikes the ground, it can either produce smoke

or a visible flash that allows the trainee

to ascertain whether or not they hit the target.

During World War II,

the Home Guard was a last line of defense,

a citizen militia trained to fight

in case the Nazis invaded.

But the German invasion never occurs.

And then in the aftermath of the war,

the practice bombs that were located there

were not carefully dealt with.

They were simply buried under the training grounds

and forgotten about until now.

Until authorities are confident

that every bomb has been found,

the playground in Northumberland remains closed.

But when they are able to safely reopen,

there's no doubt the kids will have a real blast.

Some explosions don't impact cities or battlefields;

they ripple through space.

And on one quiet night in 2016,

an amateur stargazer catches something

no one has ever seen before.

One night in September 2016,

Victor Buso is outside taking pictures with his new camera

when he gets a cool idea.

He attaches the camera to his 16-inch telescope

to try to take some pictures of the stars.

After searching around for something interesting to shoot,

he spots what appears to be a distant spiral-shaped galaxy.

Victor sets the camera to take a sequence of images,

each with a 20-second exposure.

He waits for the camera to click,

and then he checks to see how each photograph turned out.

The images turn out about how he was expecting:

some great images of the spiral-shaped galaxy.

Cool, but ultimately unexceptional.

But then in one of the last photos,

he sees something strange.

A bright dot of light suddenly appears in the galaxy.

But what's even weirder is that the dot of light

gets brighter and brighter in subsequent images.

Victor thinks he's captured something interesting,

but he's not really sure what it could be.

So he posts the pictures on an astronomer's message board,

where they catch the attention of some Argentinian astronomers.

They immediately freak out.

It turns out that Victor Buso has captured something

that no one has ever imaged before.

One of the holy grails of astronomy.

It's a supernova event

taking place over 60 million light-years away.

A supernova occurs when a very massive star,

which is essentially a nuclear furnace, runs out of fuel.

In that case, the outer layers of the star collapse inward,

crushing the supernova down onto the core.

A shockwave goes through the entire thing,

and that triggers the biggest explosions in the universe.

When a supernova blows,

it destroys everything in its solar system.

All the moons, all the planets, everything.

The blast is so powerful, it can affect planets

and other star systems light-years away.

Victor's incredible photos

give scientists their first visual evidence

that many of their theories about supernovas are correct.

It's one thing to think you know how something happens;

it's another to see it with your own eyes.

He just happened to be pointed in the right place

to capture a star that burned for billions of years

at the exact moment that flash of light hit planet Earth.

It's proof you just never know what you might find

the next time you look up into the night sky.

Not all evidence of huge space explosions come from above.

Sometimes it's hidden far beneath the waves.

In 2017, engineers are exploring the seafloor

off the coast of Guinea in West Africa.

They work for a company

that's looking for offshore oil deposits,

and they use sound waves to create

a map of the Earth deep underground.

When Dr. Uisdean Nicholson starts breaking down their data,

he notices something strange,

and it has nothing to do with oil.

About 3,000 feet beneath the ocean's surface,

there appears to be a small ridgeline or mountain range.

What's strange is that it doesn't fit

with the known geology of the region.

As he expands his search,

Nicholson realizes this odd geological feature

stretches nearly five miles,

and it's in the shape of a circle.

He's looking at a massive round ridge,

and in the center appears to be a mountain.

He also sees that outside of this ring

is debris that looks like it's been

blown out of the center in all directions.

Nicholson has an ah-ha moment

because he's seen this type of formation before.

It's the site of a massive meteorite crater.

News spreads in the scientific community

about the discovery,

which becomes known as the Nadir crater.

From the size of the crater,

astronomers are able to calculate

that the asteroid that created it was about 1,500 feet wide.

That's an object twice the size

of the Superdome in New Orleans,

striking the Earth at over 45,000 miles per hour.

Upon impact,

it would've created a tsunami 2,600 feet high.

That's a wall of water

twice the height of the Empire State Building

crashing upon the Atlantic Coast, wreaking complete havoc.

But the real surprise comes when scientists

date samples from the impact zone.

It turns out that this asteroid struck

66 million years ago,

and that catches everyone by surprise

because there was another very well-known asteroid

that also struck around the same time.

That asteroid was called Chicxulub,

and its impact is credited with wiping out the dinosaurs.

That asteroid was between six and nine miles wide,

which is wider than the island of Manhattan.

It left a 124-mile crater under the Yucatan Peninsula

and it blackened the skies with ash and debris,

triggering global fires

and wiping out 75% of all life on Earth.

So the discovery of the Nadir crater led to the question:

was the extinction event due to two asteroids at once,

like a one-two punch?

Or is the Nadir crater

a completely separate event,

a few hundred years before or after the Chicxulub impact?

Until scientific dating methods are more precise,

we'll likely never know.

Either way, the impact was still a cataclysmic event

of the magnitude that we

certainly wouldn't want to experience in our lifetimes.

It started as a search for something ordinary, water,

but what surfaced was anything but.

In 1709, in the town of Resina, Italy,

a group of workers is digging a well for a monastery.

When they get about 50 feet down,

they strike something hard.

It appears to be a man-made wall,

five stories underground.

They decide to break off some pieces

so they can show them to the local Prince of Lorraine,

Emmanuel Maurice.

The prince examines the stone and identifies it as marble.

This gets the prince thinking.

If there's a marble wall down there,

then maybe there are more treasures to be found as well.

He orders some crews to dig a tunnel.

When they do, they find that the wall is part of

an entire buried building,

and it's stuffed with ancient artifacts.

These incredible finds are buried

under several feet of solid stone

that the workers have trouble cutting through.

Eventually, it becomes too difficult, and they give up.

The site lays undisturbed for nearly 30 years

until King Charles VII of Naples

hears about the mysterious underground structure.

Charles hires military engineers

to conduct a proper excavation.

As the king's engineers restart the dig,

they realize that this discovery goes

way beyond marble walls and statues.

First, they find more rooms in the uncovered building.

Then they discover more buildings,

and soon they realize what they found is incredible.

An entire city buried underground.

There are city streets, beautiful frescoes,

bronze sculptures, ornate jewelry,

and even statues of Roman emperors.

Clearly, this is a city of wealth and importance.

It's a stunning discovery,

so experts scramble to figure out what city it could be.

They scour ancient records and texts,

trying to put some clues together,

and eventually, scholars realize

that this is the long-lost city of Herculaneum.

Herculaneum was an exclusive seaside retreat

of luxurious houses for the Roman elite.

Think of it as the Hamptons of ancient Rome,

but this paradise turned into hell.

In the year 79 AD,

the nearby volcano, Mount Vesuvius, erupted.

This is the same eruption

that famously buried the nearby city of Pompeii.

The cities were struck by a wall

of 750-degree superheated gas,

rock, mud, and ash.

Within five minutes, the entire city

was buried under the volcanic tuff.

Ironically, the same searing heat

that brought devastation also preserved items from the past.

Wood, textiles, loaves of bread,

even human waste were instantly cooked by the intense heat,

preserving their shapes in a kind of charcoal.

It's a process that's called carbonization,

and many items look exactly like they did

on the day of this disaster.

What archeologists don't find are any human remains.

Then in the 1980s, archeologists discover

300 human skeletons packed together in a boathouse.

They speculate that these were residents

trying to escape the eruption by sea,

but they didn't make it.

The extreme heat was so intense that it burned away flesh

and violently contorted bodies in an instant.

All that's left are twisted skeletons, all piled together,

frozen in their final moments.

While much of Pompeii has been uncovered,

it's estimated less than a third of Herculaneum

has been explored.

Considering what has already been found,

there are surely more discoveries to be made

in this unique and tragic archeological site.

Not all blasts bury history.

Sometimes, they reveal it.

In 1954, workers are clearing out

and rebuilding an area of Walbrook Square in East London.

The city as a whole is basically still recovering

and rebuilding from the massive amount

of damage inflicted upon it

by German bombers during the Blitz of World War II.

As the workers are digging test wells

in preparation for construction,

they hit something long and flat.

It doesn't look like a slab of rock or part of the rubble,

so the workers are confused.

What they've struck isn't a World War II casualty.

It's something much older.

So the workers call over an archeologist

to take a closer look.

21 feet down

lies what looks like a pinkish-gray mortar floor.

They continue the excavation

and expose more of the foundation.

What they find is a floor

that's roughly 60 feet long, 30 feet wide,

a perfectly rectangular chamber

buried below ground with the remnants of pillars

that must have stretched all the way up to the ceiling.

Then they start finding amazing artifacts,

sculptures and statues.

There's a bust of the goddess Minerva.

There's a statue of the god Mercury seated next to a ram.

They begin to put two and two together

and realize this isn't just some random assortment

of relics; this is some kind of temple or a shrine.

They feel it most likely dates back to the Roman origins

of the city when it was still called Londinium.

But beyond that, the archeologists are mystified.

Then, on the last day of their excavation,

the team makes a critical discovery.

It's another bust, this time of a man

wearing a special hat known as a Phrygian cap.

The archeologists know this particular image very well.

It's the Roman god Mithras.

Mithras was originally a Persian god

that was adopted by Roman soldiers

in the second or third century.

He became sort of a patron saint to them,

representing loyalty, strength, and secrecy.

In fact, he was so revered that his followers

sort of built a secret society around him.

Followers traveled all throughout Europe,

and they built hidden temples called Mithraeums

where they could worship in secret.

We do know that only men were allowed inside

to worship Mithras, but beyond that,

it's mostly a mystery.

Despite the mystery, archeologists date the site

to 240 AD, and they turn it into a museum.

As many as 30,000 people come out

and wait for hours just to see the site.

This temple stands once again,

and the mystery and intrigue of Mithras lives on.

Imagine your life's work going up in flames,

but when you return to assess the damage,

you find an even bigger mystery.

That's just what happened to one researcher in Wyoming.

In 2003, Wyoming state archeologist Dan Eakin

is researching wooden animal traps

left behind by the Indigenous Shoshone people.

On one summer day, he's watching uneasily

as storm clouds gather over the forest.

Sure enough, within moments,

lightning strikes and trees erupt in flames.

Over the next few days, this fire burns

over 11,000 acres of the Shoshone National Forest.

Dan is devastated because he really believes

that all these wooden traps that he's been looking at

and any other sort of artifacts

would've perished in this kind of a blaze.

As soon as authorities give the all-clear

to reenter the forest,

he goes in and tries to survey the damage.

The devastation is even worse than he had initially feared.

The fire had burned through nearly all the trees and brush,

leaving behind only smoldering earth.

And the ancient wooden traps

he's dedicated his entire career to

are nearly all wiped out.

But as Eakin surveys the charred ground,

something catches his eye.

Scattered on the smoldering earth

are hundreds of ancient-looking artifacts.

There are arrowheads, flint tools,

glass beads, and ceramics.

Eakin recognizes that these are Native American items,

but he's stunned to suddenly find so many

where none had been noticed before.

He contacts some fellow archeologists,

and soon they're combing all over the fire zone.

What they uncover is staggering:

thousands of artifacts, from bone knives to metal tools.

They find a tri-notched projectile point,

once used for a spear, and the remains of Indigenous lodges.

Now, what's really extraordinary about this

is that these objects weren't just placed there anew.

What has happened is that the fire has burned

all of the underbrush,

and what it did is reveal centuries-old artifacts

that have been lying there the entire time.

This accidental discovery is just the beginning.

With each wildfire season, more artifacts emerge.

Some date to just after the last Ice Age.

Even more surprising,

metal artifacts were found at the site.

This means once Europeans came on the scene,

locals were trading with them much earlier

and more widely than previously thought.

In all, over 600 previously unknown sites

have been revealed,

leading to the discovery of more than 160,000 artifacts.

The finds are remarkable, but once uncovered,

these relics face a new challenge: staying intact.

They can be washed away by rain, trampled by wildlife,

and stolen by looters looking to make a buck.

So it's ironic that these destructive wildfires

have revealed these lost artifacts,

but now, researchers are in a race against man

and nature to catalog them as quickly as they can

before they're lost once more.

Whether it's an explosive asteroid from the heavens

or a fiery eruption that covers an ancient city,

these blasts from the past left an unforgettable mark.

I'm Danny Trejo.

Thanks for watching Mysteries Unearthed.