10 Big Things in America's Smallest State

"While Christopher Columbus is credited with discovering America for the European world, some see the Newport Tower in Rhode Island as evidence of an earlier contact. Widely accepted to be the remains of a windmill built in the 1700s, the squat round tower shows archeological signs that it was shaped by much older trans-oceanic influences. To the layman’s eye the structure appears to simply be a stone platform supported on a cylinder of tall arches, clearly the remains of some type of milling operation. While the tower was a relic in the 1800s, carbon dating of the mortar from the stones has placed the construction of the site sometime in the 1600s. Despite the continued scientific evidence, there are those who hold onto the belief that the tower is evidence of some unknown, pre-Columbian design. To the believers (or the deluded depending on your stance) the Newport Tower strongly resembles Scottish buildings from the 1100s, suggesting to them that a Templar crossed the ocean and settled the land. Others have claimed to have found a celestial alignment to the upper windows, implying that the stand was some sort of ancient observatory. This too has been widely refuted. Norse, Chinese, and Portuguese explorers and sailors have also been credited as creating the ancient stone tower, but none of these subsequent hypotheses have been proven correct (and are widely perceived to be discredited outright). The precise origin of this tower remains unknown." - ATLAS_OBSCURA