Salvatore Michael Trento

Sal Trento did his early archeological work on the Spanish Balearic Islands in the early 1970s. There he helped excavate 3000 year old megalithic monuments. He also assisted the National Geographic Society on Majorca and Minorca for a magazine story on the mysterious ruins scattered about those islands.

Upon return to his Hudson Valley, New York home in 1976, Trento formed an archeological research center to investigate stone ruins and inscriptions then being found throughout the country. His teams, which consisted of geologists, archeologists, pilots, and graduate students spent eighteen months surveying and recording the unusual array of stonework. Their work found evidence suggesting that an ancient maritime people may have sailed to and visited America sometime in the dim past.

Trento next focused his research attention on western hemisphere islands. His early work on the mysterious stone "walls" found in 20 feet of water off Bimini's northwestern shore in 1981 led him to develop a technique for estimating sea-level rise/fall by analyzing solution cave stalactites.

While an associate professor at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the mid 1980s, Trento began an annual investigation of sea-level rise/fall via Bermuda's unusual cave formations. Trento has since expanded the work to the massive cave systems of Belize in the Yucatan.

Since moving to Denver in 1991 Trento has been busy mapping out archeological and geological anomalies throughout the Rocky Mountain west. He has published over a dozen professional articles, and the highly publicized The Search For Lost America (Contemporary Books, 1978, Penguin Books, 1979) which sold over 170,000 copies worldwide. Trento received major media attention (NPR, NBC Morning News, Today Show) at that time for his pioneering work on ancient America.

His recent books include the regional best-sellers The Field Guide to Mysterious Places of the West (Pruett, 1994), The Field Guide to Mysterious Places of the East and The Field Guide to Mysterious Places of the Pacific (both from Henry Holt, 1997).

Over the past few years Trento has appeared on the Fox television show Sightings where he detailed a 5000 year old stone ruin in central Massachusetts. His work has been featured in Backpacker Magazine, Cosmopolitan, USA Today, The New York Press, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, The Denver Post, and elsewhere.

His most recent television work involved a film shoot for Disney's The Learning Channel (TLC). Trento took the film crew to an Oregon mysterious site. The episode premiered in February, 1999 on TLC's new series, Strange Science.

Trento is at work on a television series detailing his "Mysterious Places" Field Guides.