While one person's trash may be another's treasure, there have been a few items rescued from the proverbial garbage pail that proved to be simply baffling.
YouTube user Dark5 has put together a rather riveting collection of cases where an odd item found in the trash yielded a head-scratching mystery.
Perhaps most famous of all these tales is that of a Prussian immigrant to Texas named Charles Dellschau and his mystifying notebooks.
Around the turn of the 19th century, Dellschau crafted a series of books containing fantastic drawings of flying machines and stories of a secret group known as Sonora Aero Club, who surreptitiously built and tested early aircraft.
Upon his death, Dellschau's books, which were seemingly for his own personal collection and never mass produced, were confined to a shelf in the home of one of his surviving family members.
Following a fire at the house in the 1960's, the works were summarily dumped at a Houston landfill where they were miraculously discovered under circumstances which remain a mystery to this day.
Eventually, the breathtaking drawings by Dellschau caught the attention of the art world and the twelve volumes of work found their way into university libraries, museums, and private collections.
Although he is credited today as an 'outsider artist' by mainstream scholars, Charles Dellschau is seen in a much different light by conspiracy theorists, who believe that his works were a true account of an underground aeronautical society in the 1800's.
While skeptics may scoff at such a suggestion, numerous questions still surround the Dellschau books and no one can definitively say whether they were fact or fiction.
One thing that is for certain is that if they were never found in that Houston landfill, the entire tale would have been lost in a literal garbage heap.
Other remarkable stories featured in the collection are the Arizona landfill found to contain thousands of discarded Atari cartridges and a haunting sandwich bag full of children's fingers that was fished out of the trash in Honolulu.
Check out the complete video and, who knows, maybe your next dumpster dive will unearth another vexing mystery.
Source: YouTube