As our love of the first three Indiana Jones movies proves, the world has kind of a love affair with archaeology, with all its sparkly treasures, dangerous expeditions and bullwhips. But as enchanted as we are with the search for Holy Grail-esque treasures, every so often a discovery comes along that excites us so much that we forget to ask whether it might be bullshit.

5 Drake's Plate of Brass

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Sometime in 1579, British sailor Sir Francis Drake landed in California and declared it the property of Queen Elizabeth, to the bemusement of the people who already lived there. Since then, archaeologists have figured it would be really cool to find something he left behind. UC Berkeley professor Eugene Bolton was particularly obsessed with the legend of a brass plate that Drake apparently minted, and he frequently bored his colleagues with this during pub sessions with a club known as the Ancient Order of E Clampus Vitus, who described themselves variously as "a historical drinking society" or "a drinking historical society."

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In 1936, someone dug up a brass plate signed by Drake in the California mud, and Bolton immediately lost his shit over the discovery. Before anyone could sit him down and sober him up, he'd shelled out thousands of dollars for the hunk of metal and told the world how it was all sorts of really real. And if Bolton's fangirlish squealing, shaking and crying wasn't a convincing enough declaration, the word of the California Historical Society's president and directors seemed to do the trick. The plate was displayed at the Smithsonian, Golden Gate International Exposition and Bancroft Library. When Bolton eventually kicked the brassy bucket, he did so with the knowledge that his life's goal had not been a failure, and that's where the story ends.



Later, Uncharted immortalized Bolton by having him jump off a 400-foot cliff while drunk.

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But Wait ...

It took until 1977 before the truth about Drake's plate of brass came to light -- it was a cruel prank on Bolton by his drinking buddies.

Those wacky professors of Clampus Vitus became so exhausted by Bolton's obsession that they decided to make his dreams come true, and then set them on fire. Together, they forged an insanely detailed replica of the missing plate, buried it in the ground and waited for the fun to begin. Of course, they did leave a sign that the plate was a forgery -- they painted the club's logo on it, in fluorescent paint that can be seen under a black light.





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The only problem was that when the plate was dug up, nobody bothered analyzing it for secret black light messages, because why the hell would they? That's when things began to spiral out of control. It turns out that the Clampus club had created such an awesome forgery that it went on to fool every expert that they had hoped would uncover their prank, laugh and buy them a round of beers. Very soon, it had gone so far that the club members presumably spat in their hands and vowed never to talk about it, thus wasting everyone's time for the next 40 years.