Excavator Hits Massive Hidden War Bomb (S2) - Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo

These are the biggest and baddest discoveries that refuse to stay hidden. 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 ordnance 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, failed 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 bombshell 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. 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 35mm 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 reel 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 Brothers Studio just four days before the earthquake. Turns out, two of the Miles Brothers 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 Brothers 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 Brothers Studio burned just a few days later as post-quake fires continued 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.