Welcome to our top 10 astonishing roundup of lost and later found objects that will make you question how anything—let alone a city or a spaceship—can simply disappear and then reappear.
Top 10 Astonishing Highlights
10 Journal Of ‘The Father Of The Yukon’
In the late 1800s, frontier entrepreneur Jack McQuesten—often called “The Father of the Yukon”—helped set up trading posts for gold‑seeking adventurers heading north. Although his personal diary was believed to have perished in the 1967 Dawson City blaze, it was uncovered by Dawson resident Ralph Troberg as he sifted through boxes inherited from his deceased father.
The manuscript records McQuesten’s activities from 1871 through 1885, the period he spent roaming the Yukon. While a printed version appeared in 1952, this original, untouched notebook is valuable precisely because it remains unedited.
McQuesten supplied prospectors with essential gear—food, clothing, and other provisions—on credit, expecting payment once they struck pay‑dirt. Today the diary resides in the Yukon Archives in Whitehorse, Canada.
9 1937 Cord 812 Supercharged Convertible Phaeton
In 1960, Tulsa high‑school shop teacher Glenn Pray needed cash to help buy the struggling Auburn‑Cord‑Duesenberg brand, so he put his beloved 1937 Cord 812 Supercharged Convertible Phaeton—entirely restored by his own hands—on the market.
Local TV station owner and collector Jimmy Leake snapped up Pray’s Cord for $8,000, later reselling it in 1962.
After Pray passed away in 2011, his son Douglas was startled by a call from a Michigan resident who claimed to own the very Cord Glenn had been searching for. The car had languished untouched in a barn for roughly 45 years, and the caller offered to sell it to Douglas.
Once the documentation proved legitimate, Douglas shelled out six figures to reclaim his father’s treasured automobile. Though the Cord briefly returned to Tulsa, Douglas soon flipped it again, using the proceeds to fund his enterprise.
The vehicle later appeared for sale at the Leake Collector Car Show & Auction—now run by Jimmy Leake’s descendants—and Douglas has hinted he may attempt to buy it back in the future.
8 BMW
In June 2016, a fellow borrowed his friend’s BMW to attend a Stone Roses concert at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium, parking it in a multi‑storey garage. After the show, he couldn’t recall which level he’d left the car on and began a frantic search.
After five days of fruitless hunting, he threw in the towel. Two months later, the vehicle’s owner, after emailing nearby businesses and contacting police, filed a lost‑or‑stolen report.
Police eventually located the missing BMW and estimated that the owner now faces roughly $6,150 in accumulated parking charges.
7 Nuclear Bomb
In 2016, diver Sean Smyrichinsky believed he’d stumbled upon a UFO while fishing near Haida Gwaii, only to discover it was likely a “broken arrow”—the term for a lost or mishandled U.S. nuclear weapon.
On 13 February 1950, a B‑36 bomber pilot apparently jettisoned a Mark IV nuclear bomb—five tonnes, three metres long, resembling a blimp—before his aircraft crashed in British Columbia during a training mission.
Fortunately, the device was a practice model, containing lead instead of a plutonium core, rendering it incapable of a true nuclear detonation.
The Canadian Navy has pledged to investigate the find to determine any potential hazard and to decide whether the bomb should be recovered.
6 Eastern Airlines Flight 980 Flight Recorders
Eastern Airlines Flight 980 was on final approach to Bolivia’s El Alto Airport near La Paz when it crashed on 1 January 1985. At an elevation of 4,000 metres, El Alto is the world’s highest international airport, and none of the 29 occupants survived. The aircraft’s flight recorders were deemed unrecoverable due to the inaccessible crash site.
In May 2016, Boston adventurers Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner scaled Mt Illimani to 4,900 metres and retrieved the mangled recorders. Because investigations are governed by the nation where a crash occurs, the U.S. NTSB had to secure Bolivia’s consent before analysing the tapes.
After Bolivian approval, Futrell and Stoner handed the orange‑hued metal fragments and magnetic spool to NTSB investigator Bill English, who shipped them to the agency’s Washington, D.C., lab. The analysis results remain pending.
5 Shipping Containers
A wayward shipping container resting on the seafloor has become a subject of scientific scrutiny, as an estimated 10,000 containers are misplaced underwater each year, with shipping firms typically recouping losses through insurance.
Marine biologists found that the 12‑metre (40‑ft) container, inverted on the ocean floor, now serves as a micro‑habitat for sea snails and the crabs that feast on the snails’ eggs.
Researchers remain uncertain how thousands of such submerged containers might influence marine ecosystems, fearing they could act as stepping‑stones for invasive species migrating between coastal harbors.
4 Battleship
Billionaire and Microsoft co‑founder Paul Allen financed the hunt for the Musashi, a World War II Japanese battleship that, at the time of construction, held the record as the largest and heaviest warship ever built.
Allen’s team spent eight years locating the wreck, eventually finding it in the Sibuyan Sea among the Philippine islands. Allen pursued the mission out of a lifelong fascination with World War II, inspired by his father’s service in the U.S. Army.
The Musashi met its end after absorbing 17 bombs and 19 torpedoes, with nearly half of its 1,023 crew perishing during the Battle of Leyte Gulf—Japan’s most devastating naval defeat. While the wreck was explored, Allen’s crew treated it respectfully as a war grave.
3 Lost City
Legends of a vanished metropolis, known as the City of the Monkey God or La Ciudad Blanca (“The White City”), proved true when an expedition uncovered a remote, still‑secret site deep within a Honduran rainforest.
Researchers employed LIDAR—laser‑based remote sensing—to pierce the dense canopy and map the terrain, revealing the city’s layout. Among the artifacts was a statue portraying a man morphing into a jaguar.
Once the site was secured against looting, scientists began cataloguing the ruins, concluding that the discovered city could be just one of many hidden settlements in the region.
2 Underwater Egyptian City
In the year 2000, divers located the submerged ancient Egyptian city of Thonis‑Heracleion—known to the Greeks as Thonis—lying 6.5 km (4 mi) off Egypt’s coast in Aboukir Bay.
Prior to its unearthing, the city was mentioned only in classical texts and a handful of inscriptions. Researchers believe it sank beneath the sea after a catastrophic event—perhaps a volcanic eruption, flood, tsunami, or soil liquefaction—caused the clay foundation to give way.
The excavation yielded astonishing finds: wrecks of 64 vessels, gold coins, statues towering up to five metres, stone slabs bearing Egyptian and Greek inscriptions, small limestone sarcophagi possibly once housing mummified animals, and over 700 ship anchors.
1 Spaceship
While misplacing a spaceship sounds implausible, NASA actually did just that. After a two‑year quest to locate the STEREO‑B satellite—paired with its twin STEREO‑A for solar monitoring—NASA finally re‑established contact in August 2016.
STEREO‑B vanished from communication for three months while orbiting the Sun’s far side. Anticipating such a scenario, engineers equipped the probe with a fail‑safe that would reboot the system after 72 hours of silence.
During a system check, only STEREO‑A responded; STEREO‑B remained silent. NASA specialists suspect a malfunction in the subsystem that reports the spacecraft’s spin rate, rendering it unable to orient itself or keep its solar arrays aimed at the Sun.
After pinpointing the rogue probe, NASA powered down its batteries and announced plans to retrieve it. However, recovery won’t be feasible before 2019, as engineers must first ascertain its spin rate, potentially enlisting the Hubble Space Telescope for assistance.
Gary Pullman, who resides just south of Area 51—a fact he attributes to an abundance of “…,” authored the 2016 urban‑fantasy novel A Whole World Full of Hurt, published by The Wild Rose Press. He also teaches at UNLV and runs several blogs, including Chillers and Thrillers and Nightmare Novels and Other Tales of Terror.