Newport Tower Mysteries

The town of Newport on Rhode Island in America is the source of an ongoing mystery... in the town is a large stone tower that still stands today. General belief is that it's a 17th century windmill, but there are others that insist there is evidence (since debunked) that places the tower's creation centuries before that date; making it older than Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas.

The one discovery that has yet to be disproved are the architectural anomalies that point to it not being a windmill, but some form of observatory instead.

Four of the eight supporting pillars of the tower face the main points of the compass. In the 1990s, William Penhallow, an astronomer at the University of Rhode Island, studied the windows in the tower and said that he found a number of astronomical alignments. At the summer solstice the setting sun should shine through the "west" window (actually just south of true west) onto a niche in the inner wall, next to the "south" window. (This no longer happens due to urban development and park trees.) Similarly, the angle from the "east" window through the "west" window is about 18 degrees south of west, which is the southern extreme of moonsets during what is known as the "lunar minor standstill". The smaller windows also form alignments, on significant stars. These alignments could be accidental, but if they were deliberate it would explain why the pattern of windows seems, according to Penhallow, "so odd". - Wikipedia

Granted, these discoveries are too recent for our time period, but that doesn't mean that others hadn't known of them earlier. The ideal situation for this is a government backed cult using the tower as a focal point for it's mythos investigations into Homeland Security. Just imagine the havoc that that would cause if something broke out?

In fact, 1938 saw a massive hurricane start in the Atlantic that devastated the eastern coast of America, causing over 600 deaths in New England. A large percentage of these deaths were in Rhode Island...

One possible situation is:

A government backed group of sorcerers try to harness the power of the sea to create storms to defend shipping lines to Europe. Unfortunately either the Germans, or something else, attack during the ceremonies causing the sorcerer's control over the storm to waver, sending it spinning across the American coastline causing mayhem wherever it hit. The investigators may be part of the ceremony, or just sent to guard it from outside forces; having to defend the sorcerers from otherworldly powers until they can get the storm under control.