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,

we're diving into discoveries

that are big and bad.

From a remote island

crawling with lethal predators.

The venom can melt flesh in seconds.

Within an hour, it triggers kidney failure,

brain hemorrhages, and even death.

To a huge underground inferno.

The fire keeps raging for hours, for days.

The days become weeks.

The weeks become months.

The crew has unleashed something hellish.

To a massive bomb.

One wrong move

and the entire operation

could turn into a crater.

Join us now,

because nothing stays hidden forever.

You know the saying,

"One man's trash is another man's treasure."

Well, in this case,

that trash is the key

to a $100 million mystery.

It's February 17, 2003.

A retired grocer named August Van Camp

is out hunting rabbits on his land in rural Belgium.

It's a beautiful day.

The only downside is his land

is right next to a busy motorway.

Drivers treat his land like a dump.

All kinds of trash are tossed

by motorists from their vehicles,

and August is fed up.

Sure enough,

today he finds himself another mess.

You've got an empty bottle of wine,

a half a sandwich,

and these colorful rectangles

with these crumpled up little white envelopes everywhere

and scattered around those white envelopes: gemstones.

So August calls the cops.

He gets their attention,

because he mentions three words that

are printed on those white envelopes:

Antwerp Diamond Centre.

The city of Antwerp is just

20 miles away from August's property.

Around 80% of the world's diamonds

pass through Antwerp at some point,

and the hub of it all is the Antwerp Diamond Centre.

Its vault is a fortress.

It's two stories underground

sealed behind a three ton steel door.

There's 10 layers of security,

guards everywhere,

cameras, magnetic locks,

sensors for motion, heat, light.

The vault's final defense is a combination lock

that has up to 100 million different codes.

It is nearly impossible to get into this vault

without the proper permission.

But in the early morning hours of February 16,

someone did get into that vault,

and they vanished with around

a $100 million of diamonds, gold,

and other valuables.

It's the biggest diamond heist in history,

and thanks to August's discovery,

investigators now have their first official lead.

Among the litter on August's land,

police find a business card

for an Italian electronics expert.

Well, they pay him a visit,

and they quickly have their first suspect in handcuffs.

But that's not all they find on August's land.

Hidden among all the other debris

is a crumpled sandwich receipt,

so police trace the receipt back

to where the sandwich was purchased.

Look at a surveillance camera from the shop.

Find the person in question that they're looking for.

Now they have their second suspect.

Now the biggest break from the trash comes

from an invoice for a video surveillance system

with a name on it:

Leonardo Notarbartolo.

Police run his record,

and they discover that he's an Italian national

with a long rap sheet for robbery.

His arrest marks a turning point.

Authorities now see the operation for what it was,

an inside job carefully staged over months.

Leonardo posed as a diamond dealer

renting space inside the Antwerp Diamond Centre.

There he had a front row seat

to the Diamond Centre's security operations.

He even hid a tiny camera near the center's vault

and was able to observe security guards

punching in the code.

The details investigators uncover

reveal just how carefully the heist was planned.

On the night of the heist,

the crew sprayed hair spray on

the heat sensors to disable them,

and they covered the light and motion sensors in styrofoam.

Then they drilled into 123 safe deposit boxes,

and they took gold, cash, jewelry,

and of course diamonds.

The job goes off without a hitch,

but during the escape, things start to unravel.

As they sped down the motorway,

the getaway driver got spooked,

and so he stopped to throw out

some trash and some of the evidence.

But along with those things,

he also threw out some of the spoils.

And the next day,

August found the lost loot.

So that pile of garbage led police

straight to the three members of the crew,

but it also exposed a fourth unknown accomplice,

who's never been caught.

As for the loot, so far,

police have managed to recover only

17 diamonds that they can trace back to the heist.

The rest, potentially millions of dollars worth of diamonds,

the crew isn't talking,

and so it's still out there somewhere.

That last find brought down a big heist.

This next one nearly brings down a major city.

It's August of 2017,

and a crew of construction workers

is busy digging the foundation for

a new faculty building at Goethe University,

which is right in the heart of Frankfurt in Germany.

Everything's going smoothly

until an excavator lowers

its bucket into the ground,

and the bucket clangs against something

creating this very harsh metallic sound.

Work stops immediately.

The foreman comes over.

Looks down into the hole,

and sees a large curved hunk of metal.

He knows what this is.

Doesn't hesitate.

Evacuates his crew,

and calls the police.

Soon the police bomb squad arrive on site,

and they confirm

this is a bomb,

Not just any bomb.

It's a British HC 4000 from World War II

packing 4,000 pounds of high explosives.

During World War II,

Frankfurt is pounded by Allied bombing raids.

25,000 tons of ordinance is dropped on the city,

killing thousands of civilians

destroying entire neighborhoods.

The HC 4000 could level

an entire city block in an instant,

but this one along with around 15%

of the bombs dropped on Frankfurt

during the war fail to detonate.

The scary thing with an unexploded bomb

is it doesn't get safer over time.

Decades underground make them

unstable, unpredictable, and deadly.

Over the years,

unexploded World War II bombs

have killed hundreds of people in Germany,

including 11 bomb techs since the year 2000.

That's why when construction workers

find this bomb,

officials move quickly, ordering what becomes

the largest evacuation in Germany since the war.

Police go door to door checking

every home and every apartment.

Meanwhile helicopters use thermal sensors

to ensure that nobody is left behind.

Nearly 70,000 people are evacuated.

That's 10% of Frankfurt's population.

Finally, officials clear nearly

a one mile radius around the bomb site.

The evacuation includes the university

and Germany's Central Bank, which holds

half of the country's gold reserves.

Then comes the most dangerous part.

The bomb's outer casing is rusted and corroded,

and its fuse is degraded and volatile.

When you get a bomb in a condition like that,

it cannot be exposed to heat, pressure, or friction.

With steady hands and surgical precision

technicians remove the nose cap

and slowly remove the aging fuse.

One wrong move

and the entire operation

could turn into a crater.

Finally, after hours of work,

the bomb is declared safe.

The bomb shell itself is carried away,

and the entire city breathes a sigh of relief

as residents return to their homes.

The crisis in Frankfurt may be over,

but across Germany the danger still lurks

buried under the surface.

Experts estimate that there could be as many as

a quarter of a million bombs still hidden under streets

and in backyards across the country,

and they get more and more dangerous

the older they get.

Drilling for oil is always risky.

You never know what you're going to hit,

which is exactly what one Soviet crew learned

the hard way.

It's 1971, in the scorching

Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan,

an Asian country just north of Iran.

A team of Soviet geologists

are surveying the land looking for oil.

They find a spot that they think is good.

They move their equipment in,

and they start drilling.

Without warning,

the ground begins to shake,

and then a sinkhole opens,

swallowing sand as well as some of their equipment.

The workers scramble,

and they barely make it out alive.

When the dust settles, there is a crater

230 feet wide right there in the desert.

But beneath that crater

is something far more dangerous.

Their drill had actually pierced

an underground pocket of methane gas.

This is an invisible gas,

a deadly one, and a highly explosive one,

and now it's hissing out of the ground.

There's no easy way to seal it up,

so ultimately they decide that

they're going to set it on fire.

And I know it sounds crazy,

but that is the common practice

when there is an environmental

geologic gas leak.

The thinking is that the fire will burn off

the methane within a few days,

and so allegedly someone throws a hand grenade

into the crater to ignite it.

The crater erupts into flames,

but instead of burning off quickly,

the crew has unleashed something hellish.

The fire keeps raging for hours, for days.

The days become weeks.

The weeks become months.

The crew has created something

much larger than they ever expected.

They've uncovered one of the largest

reserves of methane on the planet,

and now they've started a fire they can't extinguish.

The Soviets call it the Shining of Karakum,

but locals give it a different name:

The Gates of Hell.

Temperatures inside the pit can reach a scorching

1800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The burning pit is so bright,

that it can be seen from space.

This is one of the biggest

manmade disasters of all time.

And it keeps burning for decades,

slowly transforming a catastrophe into a curiosity.

The government builds roads,

some simple infrastructure around it,

and soon they're attracting something

like 10,000 visitors a year.

After years of treating it as a spectacle,

Turkmenistan's government commissions

a fresh task force in 2022

to try to extinguish the fire once and for all.

They reopen old gas wells around the crater

and use more recent technologies to try

to divert the gas away from the site.

By June 2025, they announced that

the fire has been reduced by a third.

So for now, the Gates of Hell aren't quite shut yet,

but at the very least, they're also not wide open.

On the other side of the world,

another accidental discovery brings

a much older disaster back into focus.

It's a sunny day in San Francisco in 2016,

when David Silver, a vintage camera collector,

is browsing a local flea market

hoping to score some old gear.

As he passes a stand with some 35 millimeter cameras,

he spots a guy holding up a vintage film reel

to the sunlight while smoking a cigarette.

David's alarm bells go off.

It looks like an old nitrate film stock,

which is extremely flammable,

and the combination of the sun and a cigarette

could send the whole thing up in flames.

He rushes over and he warns the guy,

and then he takes a closer look at the film.

He sees tiny street scenes

with pictures of horses and carriages,

and he knows nitrate film is pretty rare,

so he buys it.

Back home David doesn't have a projector

that will play this old reel,

so he unspools the film down his hallway

and breaks out a magnifying loop to inspect it.

What he sees stops him dead in his tracks.

Destroyed buildings standing like skeletons

and rubble in massive mounds in the streets.

David keeps looking through the film,

and eventually sees some intact

buildings that look familiar.

Suddenly it all clicks for him.

He realizes he's looking at the aftermath

of one of America's worst natural disasters.

The film reel captures the devastation

caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

On April 18, 1906,

a 7.9 magnitude earthquake

rocked San Francisco.

The situation went from bad to worse

when ruptured gas lines sparked fires

that raged across the city for days.

By the time it was over,

over 80% of the city was gone

and over 3,000 people were dead.

Back then cameras were a rare luxury.

Filmmaking was in its infancy,

so hardly any footage exists showing

what San Francisco looked like right after the quake,

which makes David's find extraordinary.

David shares the discovery

in an online forum for history buffs,

and almost immediately someone's

eager to get their hands on it.

A film collector offers to buy the film and restore it,

and David agrees.

The film's new owner spends

eight grueling, excruciating months

restoring the whole nine minute film frame by frame,

all 8,655 of them.

Tears are repaired,

scratches are cleaned up,

images are brought back in focus,

and then it's all digitally

pieced back together.

When he finally hits play,

something about the footage feels strangely familiar.

The footage matches a 13 minute silent film called

"A Trip Down Market Street",

shot by the local film studio

called the Miles Bros Studio

just four days before the earthquake.

Turns out two of the Miles Bros had left

for New York on a train the morning of the quake,

carrying a fresh print of "A Trip Down Market Street".

When they heard about the disaster,

they turned around, came back to San Francisco,

and brought their cameras back into the chaos.

The Miles Bros reportedly captured

nearly two hours of post quake footage.

For much of it, they followed the same route

from their previous shoot now reduced to rubble.

When you watch "A Trip Down Market Street"

alongside this newly restored footage,

it's jaw dropping.

On one side you see a city

bustling and full of life,

and then rubble,

a city that is a husk of itself.

Sadly, almost all of that footage was lost

when the Miles Bros Studio burned

just a few days later,

as post-quake fires continue to rage.

David's reel is the longest

and best preserved piece ever discovered.

The films together,

they form an unparalleled before

and after time capsule of a city forever changed,

and if not for David, a cigarette

could have sent it all up in smoke.

In the quiet countryside

of Denmark,

a simple dig takes a very dark turn.

It is 1956, in the wetlands

of the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark

where workers are digging out an irrigation canal.

This is back-breaking work.

You are six feet below ground

shoveling through thick peat.

One worker stabs his shovel into the earth

and picks up something solid.

It's a human skull staring up at him from the peat.

He drops down to clear away some of the peat,

and he soon discovers another skull and then another.

The authorities are called in,

and soon a team of archeologists is on site.

As they begin to excavate,

even more bones emerge, ribs, femurs, spines,

more skulls all tangled together in a big chaotic mess.

The experts launch an investigation

to find out why these bodies are here,

and why are they in this crazy chaotic knot of death.

Over the next 70 years, the site becomes

one of Europe's most perplexing Iron Age discoveries,

as generations of researchers attempt

to figure out what happened here.

Carbon dating shows that these people all died

around the same time, that is in the 1st century AD,

but these people didn't all die of disease or old age.

The bones themselves tell a story

of an ugly and violent end.

One femur is hacked completely in half.

One skull has a deep puncture wound,

which is consistent with a spear thrust.

These are injuries from battle,

and the participants aren't random.

They're all males,

mostly age 20 to 40,

but some as young as 13.

Even more disturbing is

that the violence didn't end with the fighting.

Marks on the bones indicate that animals,

like wolves and foxes gnawed on the bodies,

meaning that the dead lay exposed for months.

As the investigation continues,

researchers uncover a critical detail about the site itself.

2,000 years ago, this marsh wasn't a marsh.

It was a lake.

These people were killed somewhere else,

and then they were brought here

and thrown into a lake.

As the evidence builds,

experts think they weren't simply discarded,

but placed here for a specific purpose.

In Northern Europe during the 1st century AD

people believed that bogs and lakes

were portals to the world of the gods,

and very often weapons,

and, yes, sometimes animals or humans

were sacrificed at these very sites.

So these bones might have been the ultimate offering,

fallen warriors given over as sacrifices to the gods

as trophies of war.

So far, archeologists have only

excavated a small portion of the bog,

so there are potentially hundreds

of more skeletons to be found.

Next up, a different kind of watery grave

where something big went down and stayed down.

In the mid 1970s,

British Petroleum is planning

a new underwater pipeline off the coast of Scotland.

To prepare,

their crew surveys the sea floor using sonar.

Most of the readings come back as expected,

reefs, rocks, trenches,

but about 12 miles southwest

of Cruden Bay, Aberdeenshire,

there's a loud ping

from the sonar.

The sonar picks up something big and solid,

and it looks manmade.

Maybe a ship or a downed plane?

Whatever it is, the team's curiosity is peaked.

Once they're back on land,

the team checked log books

for shipwrecks in the area,

and finally they find a match.

A lost German U-boat from World War II.

U-1206.

U-1206 was a Type VIIC submarine,

one of the most advanced underwater

military vessels of its time.

Type VIIC subs were the pride of the Nazi fleet.

They had state-of-the-art torpedoes,

deeper diving capabilities.

They were faster, deadlier, and built

to stay submerged longer than any other submarine.

But this sub barely made it out to sea,

sinking just eight days into its first mission.

So what went wrong?

On April 14, 1945,

U-1206 was nine miles off the coast of Scotland.

Commander Karl-Adolf Schlitt

was in charge when nature called,

so he headed to the submarine's bathroom.

Now the U-1206 was the first U-boat

outfitted with a flush toilet.

Earlier U-boats had to surface

to dispose of waste risking detection.

The U-1206's new system

allowed it to be expelled underwater,

but it depended on a complex series of valves.

On the morning of April 14th,

Captain Schlitt decided to try to flush the toilet,

but he turned one of the wrong valves,

and suddenly,

the bathroom began filling up with sea water.

Things go from bad to worse when the water floods

the compartment below where the batteries are stored.

The moment that the sea water hit the battery,

it creates deadly chlorine gas.

The boat started to fill with toxic fumes,

so Schlitt had no other choice

but to surface to get fresh air.

Unfortunately, the sub surfaces

directly below an Allied aircraft,

which immediately attacks.

Faced with deadly gas and Allied bombardment,

Schlitt orders the crew to abandon ship.

Commander Schlitt and most of his crew

made it onto life rafts,

where they were eventually picked up

and taken prisoner by Allied ships.

Within four weeks, Hitler was dead.

Germany surrendered, and the U-boat

was forgotten at the bottom of the ocean.

Decades later,

when the BP team finds the wreck,

they track down the commander himself,

and he reveals the official report

about the toilet mishap was actually just a cover story.

Schlitt claims that he and the crew

knew that the Germans were fighting a lost cause,

so they decided to surrender

instead of continue to risk their lives.

Commander Schlitt knew

that if they openly surrendered

and were taken to an Allied POW camp,

they would've been labeled as traitors

by their fellow Germans.

So to protect himself and his crew,

Schlitt faked an accidental toilet malfunction,

as a pretext to surrender.

So far, no one has been able to enter the wreck of U-1206

to check whether the toilet is indeed broken,

but hopefully someday,

someone will get to the bottom of it all.

In 2013,

a discovery in New York City

brings the past crashing back

to one of the darkest days in American history.

It's April of 2013 in Lower Manhattan.

There's a team of surveyors that are inspecting a property

that's scheduled to be demolished to make way

for a brand new building.

It's a routine job.

They're mostly there to measure things,

but then they peer into a gap

between two old buildings,

and they find that it's packed with trash.

The space is only about 18 inches wide.

It's the gap between two five-story tenement buildings.

It's barely big enough to move around,

let alone haul stuff out.

As they start clearing debris,

they see something that's

a bit out of place.

There's a large piece of metal

wedged in between these two buildings.

It's about three feet by five feet,

silver, metallic,

and with gears attached.

They call 911 to report what

they think is damaged machinery.

And when the NYPD arrive on the scene,

they recognize that this piece of metal

is far too big to just pull out of the gap sideways.

So they bring pulleys to the scene,

because they realize that the only way

they're gonna be able to get this piece of metal

out in one piece is by pulling it straight up.

Once it's clear,

they inspect it closely,

and notice a serial number.

They run it into the system,

and then everything stops.

It's a piece of a wing

from a United Airlines airplane,

and it's found just three blocks from Ground Zero.

Eleven-and-a-half years earlier on September 11, 2001,

two Boeing 767s were hijacked

and flown into the World Trade Center.

Almost 3,000 people lost their lives that day

in the biggest terrorist attack

ever carried out on American soil.

In the months after the attack,

Ground Zero was meticulously combed over.

Debris was sorted, cataloged, and cleared.

Any human remains that were found

were painstakingly identified.

Ground Zero was treated with military precision.

Finding something this big

more than a decade later is unsettling.

So investigators reexamine the site

to make sure nothing else was overlooked.

The NYPD locks down the site,

and forensic teams come in to search the area.

After a thorough examination by the medical examiner,

no human remains are found.

Finally, the two tenement buildings

were demolished

and replaced with a glass high rise.

As for the piece of metal,

it is now enshrined

in the National September 11 Museum.

While disaster often leaves devastation behind,

sometimes they also reveal big secrets.

In the coastal town of Mahabalipuram, India,

a group of fishermen are starting their day as usual.

They're fixing their nets

and preparing to set out to sea,

but today they notice something alarming.

The sea is beginning to pull away from the land.

Water drains rapidly from the beach.

Boats are left high and dry on the sand,

and coral reefs emerge into the sunlight.

Further out, the fisherman's spot

something even stranger.

A perfectly straight line of massive stones

rising from the exposed sea floor.

Each one is the size of a refrigerator.

It looks almost like the remnants of a wall.

But the exposure of this eerie formation

is actually the calm before a deadly storm.

What they're witnessing is the ocean retreating

ahead of a massive tsunami

triggered by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake

off the coast of Indonesia.

Moments after the massive stone formations appear,

a 12-foot wall of water

comes crashing into the coast

devastating the town of Mahabalipuram.

It's actually part of what's

the deadliest natural disaster

of the 21st century.

It kills nearly a quarter of a million people in India,

Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.

In the aftermath,

global attention turns to relief and recovery,

but those fishermen by the shore can't forget

what they saw before the waves crashed down.

They tell local authorities about these

strange rock formations revealed on the sea floor.

Soon scientists from the archeological survey of India

arrive on the site accompanied by a dive team

from the Indian Navy.

Using sonar mapping,

they locate underwater features

that match the fisherman's descriptions,

rows of chiseled stone blocks a short staircase

and a 33-foot-long stretch of six-foot tall structures.

It looks like part of a large manmade complex.

As researchers continue

to investigate the underwater structure,

they find an intriguing connection back on land.

Mahabalipuram is famous for the Shore Temple,

a five-story masterpiece dedicated to the gods

Shiva and Vishnu and built around the year 700 AD.

But local legends say that the Shore Temple

was once one of seven grand sanctuaries

that once lined the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

If those legends are true,

the Shore Temple may be the last visible remnant

of a much larger religious complex,

one that later disappeared beneath the sea.

According to the story,

the seven temples were so magnificent

that the Hindu god, Indra, who was the god of storms,

was incredibly consumed by jealousy,

and he orders a great storm to come down and destroy them.

The legend says that six of the temples were swallowed

by the sea leaving only one standing above the waves.

Now thanks to the tsunami,

nature reveals what time has hidden.

The tsunami washed away layers of sand

from around the Shore Temple and exposed

precious statues and carved reliefs.

Archeologists find detailed carvings of a lion,

a horse, an elephant, all dated to around 950 AD.

This was roughly the time that legend has it

that the temples vanished beneath the waves.

The evidence may never prove the full legend,

but thanks to a tragic twist of fate,

one of India's oldest stories

may be closer to fact than fiction.

In a world full of big, bad discoveries,

few are as deadly as an island

where every step could be your last.

In the early 1800s

about 20 miles off Brazil's southern coast,

a fisherman feels hunger gnawing at him.

He spots a small island on the horizon,

sees banana trees near the shore,

and steers his canoe towards land.

Hours pass,

then suddenly his canoe

is found drifting offshore.

Inside,

his lifeless body lies twisted in agony.

His arms and legs covered in puncture wounds.

What happened to him remains unclear

until others return to the island

and make a chilling discovery.

Decades later, a budding entrepreneur

wants to build a banana plantation on the island

until he realizes,

this island is crawling with venomous snakes!

This deadly slithering mass

makes the island impossible to inhabit.

His solution?

Burn them out.

He sets the forest ablaze.

The fire scorches the trees,

but not the snakes.

They survive,

and they multiply.

From that day forward,

locals refer to the terrifying landmass as Snake Island.

At just 106 acres,

this little island in the Atlantic Ocean is home

to the highest concentration of venomous snakes on earth,

about one per every 10 square feet.

The most dominant predator

is the golden lancehead viper.

It is one of the 10

deadliest snakes in the world,

and this is the only place on the planet

where they even exist.

If a person's bitten by one,

the venom acts fast.

It can melt flesh in seconds.

Within an hour, it triggers

kidney failure, brain hemorrhages,

intestinal bleeding, and even death.

But how did these killer snakes

get to the small island in the first place?

There's a legend that the snakes were placed there

by pirates to guard their treasure.

But scientists have a different theory.

They believe the island was once connected

to the mainland by a natural land bridge.

When the last Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago,

the rising seas cut it off,

and with no predators

and no other competition,

the snakes took over.

They quickly wiped out most other animals on the island.

In order to survive,

they turned to eating migrating birds.

To catch birds before they took flight,

they needed speed and stronger venom.

Over time, their venom evolved

to be five times more potent

than that of their mainland cousins.

These snakes don't just strike from the ground,

they also hunt from the trees.

They coil themselves around tree branches

and dangle while they wait.

So anyone setting foot on Snake Island has to watch,

not only the ground under their feet,

but the trees over their head.

It's so dangerous the Brazilian government

restricts access to just a handful of

expeditions each year.

Now scientists are allowed on Snake Island

to collect venom,

but it's not to test its deadliness,

it's to test its healing potential.

Researchers hope that proteins in the venom

can unlock new treatments for blood disorders

and even cancer.

In fact, one lifesaving blood pressure drug

has already come from it.

It's an irony that no one misses.

The world's deadliest snakes could

someday save lives around the world.

Fear can drive people

to make strange choices.

One of the oddest was found right under

New York's Brooklyn Bridge.

It's 2006 in New York City,

and engineers are conducting a routine inspection

of the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge,

an iconic structure that represents the borough

and that has stood for over 130 years.

They're examining a row of old

stone archways long ago sealed up,

and behind one boarded up arch,

they find something strange:

a padlock door beneath layers of grime.

No one remembers this being there.

So out of curiosity,

they cut the lock and open the door.

The door creaks open,

revealing a dark narrow passage,

and something no one expected.

Stacked inside are 140 boxes of crackers.

Alongside them are crates filled with paper blankets,

first aid kits, and these giant water barrels

that also serve as emergency toilets.

You could see that all the boxes very clearly marked,

"Civil Defense All Purpose Survival Crackers,"

with a date stamp of October 1962.

The crew calls in historians

to figure out what this is,

and why it's hiding under one

of America's most iconic bridges?

Historians focus in on the fact that

on all of this there are two dates: 1957 and 1962.

'57 is the year that the Soviets launch Sputnik,

and 1962 is the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This government has maintained the closest surveillance

of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.

These were key moments in the Cold War,

an era when the U.S. government and its citizens

were full of fear and paranoia about the Space Race

and about the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviets.

During those years of the Cold War,

the fear of nuclear warfare was everywhere.

Students practiced duck and cover drills in their schools.

Families were encouraged by the government to dig

underground bunkers in their backyards,

and nearly 200,000 citizens did that.

But in New York the plan was different.

Residents were told to head for designated fallout shelters,

like this secret space under the Brooklyn Bridge.

New York City was considered a prime target

in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

And to be prepared for this,

the city built over 17,000 fallout shelters

filled with items to accommodate

as many as 11 million people.

While the supplies were real,

the sense of security was mostly an illusion.

Even with concrete walls,

experts say that shelters,

like the one underneath the Brooklyn Bridge,

wouldn't have protected people from a nuclear blast.

And even if it did,

it certainly wouldn't have protected them

from the radioactive fallout that would've

followed in the months after.

Fortunately, for all of humanity,

the Cold War never turned hot,

and bombs never fell.

And as for the bomb shelters,

they were largely boarded up and forgotten about.

For decades, hundreds of thousands of people

crossed the Brooklyn Bridge never knowing that

there was a very dreary reminder just below their feet

of just how close the world was to disaster.

From ancient battlefields buried in bogs,

to bombshells beneath city streets,

and snakes so deadly,

they have their own island,

these are the biggest and baddest discoveries

that refuse to stay hidden.

I'm Danny Trejo. Thanks

for watching "Mysteries Unearthed".