Posted on 03/04/2005 6:47:53 PM PST by The Loan Arranger
At least 200 have been found, and extracted out of deep rock at the Wonderstone Silver Mine in South Africa, averaging 1-4 inches in dia. and composed of a nickel-steel alloy that doesn't occur naturally.
Some have a thin shell about a quarter inch thick, when broken open are filled with a strange spongy material that disintegrates into dust upon contact with air.
A complete mystery according to Roelf Marx curator of the South African Klerksdorp Museum, as the one he has on exibit rotates on its own, locked in a display case, free of outside vibrations.
The manufactured metallic spheroids have been mined out of a layer of pyrophyllite rock and geologically and by the various radio-isotope dating techniques are shown as being 2.8 - 3 billion years old, long before man, as shown at the bottom of the graph.
Somebody or Something obviously has been around for a long time, before primivive humans.
They also baffled NASA, according to info from the Museum.
http://community-2.webtv.net/WF11/MysterySpheres/
߃--¹¹ Psybertronist
(Excerpt) Read more at community-2.webtv.net ...
Hey! I dated some older women in my younger, more dissolute days- but none of them were artifacts!
Oh boy.... THEY were right... OMG!!! Art Bell was right!!! what are we supposed to do now when the insane are right??
Oh boy.... THEY were right... OMG!!! Art Bell was right!!! what are we supposed to do now when the insane are right??
What's wrong with that? I always call the Space Alien Hotline before I go to vote to ask which candidate he backs! Don't you all?
Have always thought that 'science fiction'. . .was fifty percent imagination. . .fifty percent; memory. . .
I guess Twinkies don't last forever after all ...
A bit off-the-wall, but you may find this of interest for the list.
When I was a kid I went with my grandfather to a place on the lake Huron shoreline in Canada. There were perfectly spherical rocks that were natural formations there.
"The Trouble with Tribbles"
Prehistoric Democrat Brains perhaps???
However, as a hoax, someone has put some thought into this one or got lucky. Most meteorites are made of iron and nickel. One of the referenced sites suggested that these things were formed under zero-gravity conditions. If little bits of iron-nickel molten metal were thrown off by some astronomical event and they contained a fair amount of absorbed gas, I could see them maybe ending up in the form mentioned. As a floating puddle of molten iron-nickel in space, they might tend to form little balls. A sphere has the lowest surface area to volume ration, so forming a sphere is a way for the molten metal to minimize surface energy. If the outside quenched and solidified while a large amount of gas was still in the metal, the inside might form pockets of gas and be spongy. With time and enough heat, hydrogen gas might break down into hydrogen atoms, diffuse through the metal, reform on the outside surface, and leave as a gas. In refineries, high temperature hydrogen diffuses into carbon steel under certain conditions, so the process could be the same. Eventually, they fell to earth as part of a meteorite.
I don't have an explanation for the ring around the equator of these things except that I still think they are a hoax.
Bill
If not a crock of horsehockey...
Very Interesting!
If we had had that World War Three that everyone half expected, I wonder what traces of us would still be around after a few million years?
Me, too. Good point.
Perfect spheroids are favored by any natural process that involves a great deal of surface energy. A sphere has the lowest ratio of surface area to volume, so the best way to minimize surface energy is form a sphere.
You think so? You know me, I'll believe anything. What are you afraid of? Think out of the box!
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