In 1587, more than a hundred English settlers vanished from Roanoke Island, leaving behind only the word "CROATOAN" carved into a post. Forensic geologist Scott Wolter investigates the Dare Stones, a set of inscribed rocks first surfacing in the 1930s that claim to record the colony's inland trek and violent end, allegedly written by Eleanor Dare herself. Wolter runs forensic tests on the quartzite the stones are carved from and X-rays 16th-century maps for erasures and hidden marks, checking whether the carvings could really date to the period they claim. The film moves between the original Roanoke settlement site, present-day archival collections, and Wolter's lab work, weighing the Dare Stones against the decades of scholarly dismissal that followed their discovery as forgeries. Interviews with historians and document examiners lay out both the case for authenticity and the case against it. The mystery of what happened to the colonists stays open, but the stones themselves get a rigorous physical examination rarely given to them on screen before.