Across caves, jungles, and deserts, archaeologists are piecing together traces of societies that slipped from written history yet left unmistakable fingerprints in stone, bone, and buried ritual.

Still, the fancy persists, implanted like a microchip, ever since Erich von Däniken’s 1968 best-seller, “Chariots of the Gods ...

Scott Wallace was a traveling salesman who made his headquarters in Sikeston in 1925. History doesn’t record exactly what he peddled, except for a wild story of an “ancient city” located in a 40-acre ...