In late summer of 1937, a man named Louis E. Hammond emerged from the tupelo gums and cypresses of the North Carolina wilderness with a 21-pound piece of quartz, onto which had been inscribed a nearly indecipherable, enigmatic message. The Californian had been traveling through on vacation when he’d stopped at Edenton, on the northern shore of Albemarle Sound, near the mouth of the Chowan River. It was in the forest along the Chowan’s banks, he would later explain, that he’d found the strange rock, which he took to Emory…
