OOPARTS (Out of Place Artifacts)

Ooparts ? What are Ooparts? That stands for Out of Place Artifacts. Things that show up where they shouldn't, a piece of gold chain found in a coal seam, what appears to be a sparkplug embedded in rock that is thousands of years old and what appears to be a bullet hole in the skull of a mastodon. These things are ooparts.

Workmen quarrying stone near the River Tweed below Rutherford, Scotland in 1844, found a piece of gold thread embedded in the rock of the quarry eight feet below ground level. A small piece of the thread was sent to the offices of the local newspaper, the Kelso Chronicle, "for the inspection of the curious." (The Times, London, June 22, 1844)

Geodes resemble ordinary stones from the outside, usually spherical, or elliptical in nature, and sometimes hollow, but their cavities can contain a wonderful display of crystal structures and minerals. When sawn in half they reveal their wonderful displays, and are highly sought after by rock collectors. I have about 40 of them, cut and uncut and I never tire of looking at the patterns within.

In 1961 a fossil encrusted geode (although this one was not hollow) was picked up in the Coso Mountains, six miles northeast of Olancha, California, near the top of a 4300' peak overlooking the dry bed of Owens Lake by some rockhounds. What was discovered after it had been cut in half, ruining a diamond saw blade in the process, is something that has caused much debate over the years, and continues to this day.

In the middle of the geode was a metal core approximately .08" in diameter. Encircling this was what appeared to be a ceramic casing which was also surrounded by a hexagonal sleeve of wood, which had become petrified. This was encased by the outer layer of the geode which was made up of hardened clay, pebbles, and bits of fossil shell, and two nonmagnetic metallic objects resembling a nail and a washer. A fragment of copper still remaining between the ceramic material and the petrified wood indicates that possibly the two may have been separated by a copper sleeve.

X-rays of the objects were taken and examined by Paul Willis, then editor of INFO Journal who noticed a startling similarity between it and a modern spark plug. An unnamed geologist in the original report of the find came up with an age estimate of 500,000 years based on the fossils contained in the matrix (note-this would not indicate what date the accretion was formed).

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/coso.html http://www.eskimo.com/~pierres/coso/cosopreview.html

Mrs. S. W. Culp, of Morrisonville, Illinois, was breaking coal into smaller lumps for her scuttle, one day in 1891, when she noticed a chain in the midst of the coal. When she reached down to pick it up, she saw that the two ends of the chain were firmly embedded in two separate pieces of coal that had clearly been a single lump only moments before. (The Morrosonville Times, June 11, 1891)

Another great oopart is THE crystal skull discovered in Mayan ruins called "Lubaantun", City of Fallen Stones, in British Honduras, Now called Belize. The skull was discovered in 1924 by Anna Le Guillon Mitchell-Hedges daughter of F.A. Mitchell-Hedges who was in charge of the digs at Lubaantun. The story goes that his daughter, Anna, was exploring inside some ruins thought to have been a temple, when she found the exquisitely carved crystal skull which was then missing the jawbone. The missing jawbone was found three months later, about 25 feet away from where the top part of the skull was found.

Evidently the story of the skull's discovery is a fabrication. There are supposedly documents in The British Museum that prove it was bidding against Mitchell-Hedges for the artifact at a Sothebys auction in London in 1943.

The Mitchell-Hedges skull is made of clear quartz crystal, and both cranium and mandible are believed to have come from the same solid block. It weighs 11.7 pounds and is about five inches high, five inches wide, and seven inches long. Except for slight anomalies in the temples and cheekbones, it is a virtually anatomically correct replica of a human skull. Because of its small size and other characteristics, it is thought more closely to resemble a female skull -- and this has led some to refer to the Mitchell-Hedges skull as a "she."

The Mitchell-Hedges family loaned the skull to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories for extensive study in 1970. Art restorer Frank Dorland oversaw the testing at the Santa Clara, California, computer equipment manufacturer, a leading facility for crystal research. The HP examinations yielded some startling results.

Researchers found that the skull had been carved against the natural axis of the crystal. Modern crystal sculptors always take into account the axis, or orientation of the crystal's molecular symmetry, because if they carve "against the grain," the piece is bound to shatter -- even with the use of lasers and other high-tech cutting methods.

To add to the enigma, HP could find no microscopic scratches on the crystal which would indicate it had been carved with metal instruments. Dorland's best hypothesis for the skull's construction is that it was roughly hewn out with diamonds, and then the detail work was meticulously done with a gentle solution of silicon sand and water. The exhausting job -- assuming it could possibly be done in this way -- would have required man-hours adding up to 300 years to complete.

Under these circumstances, experts believe that successfully crafting a shape as complex as the Mitchell-Hedges skull is impossible; as one HP researcher is said to have remarked, "The damned thing simply shouldn't be."

The skull remains in the possession of Anna Mitchell-Hedges. She resides in Canada and displays the skull on frequent tours. Anna has maintained for all these years that she discovered the skull, even though there is reason to doubt that she was present at the Lubaatun expedition at all.

There is an area in Rajasthan, India with a layer of radioactive ash covering a three square mile area ten miles west of Jodhpur. The radiation is so intense that the area is considered dangerous. Scientists are investigating the site which was being developed into a housing development.

It was established that the area had a high incidence of birth defects and cancer while the area was under construction. The levels of radiation have measured so high on instruments that the Indian government has now restricted access to the area.

Scientists discovered an ancient city at the site which shows evidence of and atomic blast which the experts date back to between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago. The blast destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people. One researcher has estimated that the blast was comparable to one of the bombs dropped over Japan during W.W.II

The Mahabharata, an ancient Indian document, describes a devastating explosion that shook the continent.... "A single projectile charged with all the power in the universe...An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendor...it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race...the corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair fell out, pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected. To escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves in the river."

Historian Kisari Mohan Ganguli says that Indian sacred writings are full of such descriptions, which sound like an atomic blast as witnessed in Japan in 1945. References in the ancient writings also mention fighting sky chariots and the final weapons. "An ancient battle is described in great detail in the writing titled the Drona Pavra, which is a section of the Mahabharata. The passage tells of combat where explosions of final weapons decimate entire armies, causing crowds of warriors with steeds and elephants and weapons to be carried away as if they were dry leaves of trees," says Ganguli.

Archeologist Francis Taylor says that etchings in some nearby temples he has managed to translate suggest that they prayed to be spared from the great light that was coming to lay ruin to the city.

The radioactive ash seems to add credibility the these ancient Indian records that describe atomic warfare thousands of years before our current (re)discovery of the atom.

Construction has halted while a five member team conducts an investigation of the site.

During blasting work at Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1851, the broken halves of a bell-shaped vessel were thrown by the force of an explosion from the vessel's resting place in solid rock. The vase, about 4 1/2" high, is made of an unknown metal and embellished with floral inlays of silver - the "art of some cunning workman," according to the local newspaper report.

The editor of Scientific American gave as his opinion that the vase had been made by none other than Tubal-cain, the biblical father of metallurgy. In response, Charles Fort - a lifelong connoisseur of anomalies and a dedicated opponent of scientific dogma - said "Though I fear that this is a little arbitrary, I am not disposed to fly rabidly at every scientific opinion." (Scientific American, 7:298, June 5, 1852)

In 1851, Hiram de Witt, of Springfield, Massachusetts, accidentally dropped a fist sized piece of gold bearing quartz that he had brought back from California. The rock broke apart in the fall, and inside it de Witt found a 2" cut iron nail, slightly corroded. "It was entirely straight and had a perfect head," reported The Times of London. (The Times, London, December 24, 1851)

A nail partially embedded in a block of stone taken from Kingoodie quarry in Scotland was described at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1845, Sir David Brewster, who gave the report, said that about an inch of the nail was embedded, the rest lying along the stone and projecting into a layer of gravel, where it had rusted. The depth from which the 9" thick block of stone bearing the nail had been removed is not on record, but the quarry was said to have been worked for about twenty years prior to the discovery. (Charles Fort, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, pg. 133)

An "iron instrument" apparently resembling the bit of a coal drill, was found inside a lump of coal taken from an excavation in Scotland in 1852 (Scotland again!). It was at first supposed that a miner had broken his drill while working the seam and had left the piece of metal embedded there. But the surface of the coal was unbroken: it showed no signs of drilling or any present or former opening by which the drill might have passed into it's interior. If such a thing were not quite impossible, according to every date in the geology text books, observers would have to believe that the coal would somehow have formed around the mysterious piece of metal. (Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1:1:121, December 13, 1852

Extensive quarrying was done near the city of Aixen -Provence, France between 1786 and 1788, to provide the large quantities of limestone needed for the rebuilding of the Palace of Justice. In the quarry from which the limestone was taken, the rock strata were separated from each other by layers of sand and clay, and by the time the workmen had removed 11 layers of rock they had found they had reached a depth of some 40 feet or 50 feet from the original level of the area.

Beneath the 11th layer of limestone they came to a bed of sand and began to remove it to get at the rock underneath. But in the sand they found the stumps of stone pillars and fragments of half worked rock, the same stone and rock that they themselves had been excavating. they dug further and found coins, the petrified wooden handles of hammers, and pieces of other petrified wooden tools. Finally they came to a large wooden board, seven or eight feet long and an inch thick. like the wooden tools, it had also been petrified into a form of agate and it had been broken into pieces. When the pieces were reassembled, the workmen saw before them a quarryman's board of exactly the same kind they themselves used, worn in just the same way as their own boards were, with rounded, wavy edges.

How a stonemason's yard equipped with the kind of tools used in France in the late 18th century, had come to be buried 50 feet deep under layer of sand and limestone 300 million years old is a question even more vexing today than at the time of the original discovery. For we now know, thanks to advances in geological and anthropological dating, that such a thing is absolutely impossible. And yet it does seem to have happened. (The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1:145-46, 1820)

In 1958, Dr. Johannes Huerzeler, of the Museum of Natural History in Basel, Switzerland, unearthed a human jawbone at a depth of 600 feet, in a coal mine in Tuscany, Italy. The bone had belonged to a child, between the ages of five and seven. Though flattened like a sheet of iron, the jaw was declared by several experts to be not only human, but modern-looking at that. But what mystified them was that it had been encased in a Miocene stratum - geologically dated at 20 million years. Dr. Huerzeler declared it to be the world's oldest man" - but his fellow anthropologists did not dare give it the same distinction. Here were human remains more modern in appearance than all the "ape-men" forms ever found - yet they were five times as old as any of them. In fact, the jaw bone is as old, if not older, than many ancestors of the apes. The bone raised more problems than answers - so the find was quickly "shelved," and no further work was ever done to give it due recognition.

Early in November of 1926, archaeologist J.C.F. Siegfriedt made a discovery in another mine, this one the Number Three shaft of the Mutual Coal Mine of Bear Creek, 55 miles southwest of Billings, Montana. What Siegfriedt found was a human tooth, in which the enamel had been replaced by carbon and the roots by iron, by seepage petrification. In an account published in the Carbon County News and dated November 11, 1926, Siegfriedt reported that he had meticulously preserved the mineral matrix that had been deposited around the tooth, and several dentists identified the mold created as being a human second lower molar. The tooth, however, came from the lower level of the mine - from an Eocene deposit dated at 30 million years old. Siegfriedt could generate no interest in his find among other specialists, and as far as is known, no one has done any further study of the mystery.

The Stargate skull?

Thousands of these crystal skulls exist now and more every day. Maybe twenty are the genuine old ones.

Today we have ancient artifacts, perpetual motion, Alqaida letting cattle run loose in Indiana, Lunar He3, and Obama ready to loose the hordes of Young Democrats on Pakistan. No rain of frozen chickens as yet.

8 posted on 08/01/2007 1:00:50 PM PDT by ADemocratNoMore (Jeepers, Freepers, where'd 'ya get those sleepers?. Pj people, exposing old media's lies.)

The burden is not on me to disprove these “discoveries”, the burden is in the finder to substantiate their claims. I don’t believe any unsubstantiated claim of oddities “discovered” in the ground. There are many hoaxes attempted to gain some money or notoriety. Some uneducated manual laborer’s word that he found something embedded in stone fifty feet down isn’t good enough for me.

Thanks, I think though that this is a duplicate. The M-H skull (topic of the 1970s paperback, “The Crystal Skull”) was thin on provenance, and may (or may not) have had modern tools involved in its construction. In any case, there’s not much to be construed from them, kinda like the best-case scenario for Crop Circles — even if they were, uh, authentic (I very much doubt that crop circles are anything but human-made eccentricities), there’s not much way to relate them to anything in particular. :’)

Thanks Lurker.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

I wish we could embed audio on an FR thread, this thread calls for the X-Files theme song playing in the background.

I have a small collection of very interesting artifacts which I display openly on my book shelves.

After the grand kids have visited I have found a lot of my artifacts are out of place.

JA, if you liked that battery check out the Antikythera Mechanism. If you google it it will come up. I have followed it for a while and it, also, is a fascinating device.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.