5 Strange Discoveries Found in Florida That No One Can Explain

On 5 December 1945, five Navy aircraft left Fort Lauderdale on a routine training flight and never came back. Neither did one of the flying boats sent to find them. After one of the largest air and sea searches in history turned up nothing, the Navy board closed the file on "causes or reasons unknown" — and more than eighty years later that is still the last official word on record. Florida Empire counts down five things found in Florida where the not-knowing is documented, then explains three famous mysteries that were never mysteries at all. What's covered: • The bar every item has to clear — something was found, it is still unexplained, and an agency, a journal or a board put the not-knowing in writing • The Myakka photographs, mailed anonymously to the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office in a letter received 29 December 2000, by a woman who never identified herself • Why the real question there is who sent them and why she chose a sheriff, not whether an ape lives in the Florida scrub • The Crystal River stelae, found in 1964 by Ripley Bullen's team — two limestone slabs, one with a human head incised into it, radiocarbon-dated to about AD 440 and published in American Antiquity • Why a monument form that belongs in Mexico, Guatemala and the islands south of Cuba is standing on Florida's Gulf coast • Coral Castle — Ed Leedskalnin, close to a thousand tons of oolite limestone cut and set alone over 28 years, at night, by lantern light • The move nobody watched: a finished multi-ton monument relocated about ten miles from Florida City to Homestead in the 1930s, stone by stone • The Miami Circle at Brickell Point — 24 basins cut into solid limestone bedrock in a ring 38 feet across, found in 1998 by surveyor Ted Riggs on a lot cleared for a condo tower • Charcoal dating the circle to roughly two thousand years, and why the equinox alignment everyone quotes is still argued about inside the field • The standoff that ended with the state and Miami-Dade County buying out a tower already under construction for about $26.7 million • Flight 19 — five TBM Avengers, a compass, weather closing in, and a Navy board that laid out the most likely chain of events and could not prove any of it • Spook Hill in Lake Wales, one of the oldest gravity hills in the country, and the optical illusion behind it • The Devil's Millhopper, 120 feet deep and 500 feet across, and why fossil shark teeth are sitting at the bottom of a sinkhole in Gainesville • The Cassadaga Devil's Chair, which is a mourning bench, and a legend much younger than the furniture This isn't a video about the paranormal. It's about the difference between a question nobody has answered and an answer nobody wanted. Subscribe to Florida Empire for long-form documentaries about Florida's engineered places, land, governance, and the records behind them. #FloridaEmpire #Florida #FloridaHistory #MiamiCircle #Flight19