OOPARTS

Point of View:

We have a Biblical viewpoint on the world. Ooparts are evidence, we think, that the Flood actually happened. News items or magazine articles that report them may not have the same perspective that Christians do. When we read for instance, a scientific article that puzzles over our lack of genetic variability, we think of the Flood of Noah. We would include that article here, without editing, because we expect Christians to use their filters on such an article. That does not mean that we agree with the evolutionary timeframe given in said article.

We think it’s more interesting when general newspaper articles or science articles observe data that they might see one way, but that Christians might see another way given our own knowledge about God, creation and the flood. It’s more interesting to quote Stephen Jay Gould saying that “the lack of transitional fossils is the trade secret of paleontology”, than it might be to hear another Christian say it.

So, no we don’t believe the universe is millions or billions of years old. We don’t know how old it is—we just know who created it and how long it took Him. We do not believe in pre-Adamic races, though we do believe that there were “civiilizations” prior to the Flood. We don’t believe in space aliens or cooties. We expect you to use your own knowledge filter on this topic of Ooparts.

INTRO

Do unexplained technologies of the ancients provide possible proofs of Pre-flood civilizations? If you believe that the flood of Noah actually happened, what was the state of the technology of pre-flooders? Could they have left physical evidence of their existence?

Much of what we think we know about the past is wrong. Columbus discovered America? That's wrong for so many reasons--and must have come as some surprise to the people who were living here at the time. First manned flight by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk? No! Marconi invented the radio? Not at all!

Why is the oldest pyramid, the Great Pyramid, the one built with the highest technology; bigger blocks with closer fit? "Newer" pyramids are crumbling because they were built with less skill. Some are suggesting that the Great Pyramid of Giza is much, older (relatively) than previously thought

It's also been said that the Great Pyramid is the largest and most accurately designed single building in the world even by today's standards.

On these pages, we want to look at history through another lense.

Photo 1, is a section of a relief on an Egyptian temple wall at Abydos; (photo by Dr. Ruth Hover). Photo 2, the Saqqara Bird. Both items are dated at a minimum of 2000 years. Note the other interesting bas relief objects in Photo 1.

The Saqqara Bird is the cargo plane in the Logo Picture at the top of this web page and the helicopters and chase planes are also electronically snipped items from the wall at Abydos in Photo 1. More about these and other such items later.

On November 17, 3398 B.C., two billion people, with their astonishing technology, vanished from the face of the earth. This lost super race beat us to the moon(?), to computers, and to nuclear war. A cosmic disaster occurred which wiped out a super civilization and generated 6,000 foot tidal waves the disaster known to early civilizations worldwide as the great flood (the deluge mentioned in the book of Genesis in the Bible, for which Noah constructed the Ark to save a remnant of mankind). :

...The descendants of this super race branched out from Ararat (Armenia) to create civilizations less advanced technologically, but still with some knowledge of their original civilization. The theory of evolution, which believes in the gradual progression of man, cannot stand up to the evidence governed by the laws of thermo-dynamics. The evidence of fully developed cities and an advanced technology of a superior man, whose society deteriorated over time is irrefutable. :

...Early "cave men" wore clothes like ours? (more later & see Those Sophisticated Cave Men) That man knew the secret of flight before the twentieth century? That early civilizations performed open-heart surgery and fluoroscopy? That there were once shining cities illuminated by a means of electricity unknown to us today. The list is endless and fascinating, pointing to a super civilization, evidences of which can no longer be ignored. :

..Archaeological and anthropological evidence that something very big happened on this planet in the past..something so big it wiped traces of just about everything from the face of the earth. From around the world, "impossible" ancient inventions have been surfacing of late, and some of them from a technology as advanced as our own. :

Nearly all the writings of ancient people worldwide tell the same story, that of decline from an original "Golden Age." That a cataclysmic disaster wiped out the advanced world. Today's diggings worldwide show that these traditions tally with the facts.

Enormous stone masses or metal fragments are there; they cannot be argued away. (Photo shows ancient stone hewn from single block and weighs at least 2.4 million pounds. No modern crane could move it. More later.) I believe that this original advanced world, gave impetus to all succeeding civilizations, and is well within the framework of scientific thinking. :

PHYSICAL REMAINS ALSO:
There are recently discovered artifacts that cannot be dismissed, namely, objects of metal sitting in museums, unquestionably made in the ancient world, that would have required very advanced technology to produce. A technology not to be repeated until our day. :

The entire world is really a "dead man's tomb," a treasure hunter's paradise. As we pry open the coffin, suspense builds. Slowly we're lifting the lid on a lost technology which almost smacks of science fiction?

THE DELUGE:
The global flood catastrophe is one of the key facts of all history. Not only is there a mass of geological evidence,it has left an indelible impression on the memory of the entire human race. An analysis of some 600 individual flood traditions reveals a widespread concurrence on essential points: the prior corruption of mankind, a flood warning unheeded by the masses, a survival vessel, the preservation of up to eight people with representative animal life, the sending forth of a bird to determine the suitability of reemerging land, significance in the rainbow, descent from a mountain, and the re-population of the whole earth from a single group of survivors.

(Photo: under water monument off the coast of Japan)Especially remarkable is the persistence of that biblical name Noah. And this is particularly so when you consider the ultimate language differences between peoples, and the extreme local distortions which (developed in flood legends. Yet the name survived virtually unchanged in such isolated places as Hawaii (where he was called Nu-u), the Sudan (Nuh), China (Nu-Wah), the Amazon region (Noa), Phrygia (Noe) and among the Hottentots (Noh and Hiagnoh). :

SUDDEN APPEARANCE:
Are you aware that "ALL CULTURES BEGAN SUDDENLY" and were fully developed? A long preliminary period is not supported by archaeology. Before cities on earth, there was nothing. There was no transition whatsoever between the ancient civilizations and any primitive forebearers. They were at their peak from the beginning. :

...Great cities, enormous temples, pyramids of overwhelming size. Colossal statues with tremendous expressive power. Luxurious tunnels and tombs. Splendid streets flanked by magnificent sculpture, perfect drainage systems. A decimal system at the very start. A ready-made writing, already perfected. A well established naming system (in which each Pharaoh had as many as five names). Society already divided into specialist classes. An army, civil service and hierarchy minutely organized. A court exhibiting all the indications of well-defined precedence and form. Egypt came from a clearly established civilization.

The only conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence is that,1 Each of the first civilizations appeared suddenly, already fully developed. 2) That a connection existed between them. 3) Their footprints led back to the Middle East mountains where Noah and his family left the Ark. :

The sudden appearance of civilization is itself a memorial to history's one great catastrophe. More importantly, the flood is a historical event of tremendous testimonial importance to modern man...... :

Ancient Maps:
....hard evidence that shows the ancient's knowledge of planet earth as seen through their cartographers eyes was far more sophisticated than we have previously supposed. Their maps are surprisingly accurate and reveal knowledge of parts of the earth that were not known until very recently. They also show profound changes have taken place in man's lifetime since the flood, especially at the poles as you shall see. :

Maps drawn from the 11th to the 17th century were obviously copied from maps probably drawn thousands of years before. Some maps show Greenland and Antarctica free of ice. (The Piri Reis Map from 1513 shows Antartica):

HAD TO BE COPIES
Obviously these maps..had to have been copied from earlier sources. They display a scientific achievement far surpassing the abilities of the navigators and map-makers of the Renaissance, Middle Ages, the Arab world, or any ancient geographers. THEY HAD TO BE THE PRODUCT OF AN UNKNOWN PEOPLE ANTEDATING RECOGNIZED HISTORY.--end of quote

" Science supports the Bible. That's just how it is. On the other hand, there's the theory of Evolution which is not science. What sustains it? FAITH !Science as Religion. One has to believe that all matter is self created, that this matter in turn created intelligence and; in spite of the fact that it has never been seen, that this inorganic self-creating matter then created life in opposition to observed science. All of this in violation of the 1st and 2nd law of Physics, probability theory, biogenesis and common sense.

This belief system necessitates extraordinary explanatory contortions, strange suppositions and sleight of hand. For example, since catastrophic events in our history would lend too much credence to the truth of the Flood of Noah event, those theories are avoided. It is thought and promoted that man has evolved both physically and technologically from the primitive to the modern on a uniform basis.

Given that presupposition, what do you do as a scientist when you encounter ancient artifacts produced by antique high technology?

As a scientist, you’d better be careful what you say or risk ridicule and professional suicide. As a result one can wind up convincing oneself, other scientific disciplines and the public that these things can be explained by elbow grease or some other arcane theory which is best not examined too closely.(That's how items like true optical lenses get described as "worship artifacts"--because everyone knows the ancients didn't have optical lenses).

If the Bible account is true, evidence in the form of archeological artifacts and the like should be occasionally found in the fossil and archeological record--and they are!

On subsequent pages we discuss some of the evidence that indicates that what we've been told by science may not be entirely accurate. One note of caution: this information comes from a variety of sources with a variety of beliefs and ideas behind them. Our viewpoint is that of Christians who believe that there is one God and that He created the universe at some time in the past-- nowhere near millions or billions of years ago. Exactly how long ago is besides the point. We believe that there was a worldwide flood and that evolution as an explanation for our existence is a fairy tale. If you believe differently perhaps we can at least agree that what we're being told about origins and the past is seriously flawed.

The "Helicopter" and other Strange Objects at Abydos

On the left, another view of the relief on Egyptian temple wall at Abydos. "Dr. Ruth Hover, and her husband

took a trip to the pyramids and temples of Egypt. In the temple at Abydios, she photographed a wall panel in a section where an overlaying panel with Egyptian heiroglyphics crumbled and fell, revealing an older panel beneath it. This older panel, shown below, contains embossed images of what appear to be ancient aircraft."

What we do know about these images is that they are not fakes. By that we mean, that the images do actually exist. What is in question then is what do they mean--what do they represent? Egyptologists certainly think that they know what they mean. Their explanation includes the notion that it is a combined image of a later symbol over an older one.

Of course, those same experts can't adequately explain how the pyramids were built, how and why the Egyptian civiliztion appeared fully developed or why the oldest pyramid, the Great Pyramid was built with higher technology than later pyramids.

On these pages, because the items we're looking at usually aren't being scrutinized by science or experts, there is a liklihood that some objects will turn out to have fairly straightforward explanations. This could be the case here. However, undeniably we have what nearly 100% of people would recognize as an advanced modern helicopter--if they didn't know where it had been found. Add to that the fact that symbols proximate to the "helicopter" also appear to be instruments of war. It's certainly an interesting find.

The Saqqara Bird

" While excavating an Egyptian tomb, near Saqqara in 1891, investigators came upon a small, birdlike object made of sycamore wood. ..and like the rest of the tomb's contents, dated to at least 200 BC. Little more thought was given to the matter until almost 80 years later, after the Wright brothers had made their landmark flight and ushered in the era of modern aviation.

To the next generation of Egyptologists, the birdlike artifact looked uncannily like an airplane. The resemblance was so striking that a team of aviation experts was assembled in the early Seventies to explore this hypothesis.

Their study revealed that the 5.6-inch long body was aerodynamically sound. In fact, one aeronautics engineer noted a remarkable similarity between the Saqqara bird and a new, oblique-winged aircraft that NASA planned to build. And when the tiny wooden relic was subjected to the ultimate test -- a flight trial -- it soared through the air with the ease and grace of a modern-day glider.To the experts, the conclusion was inescapable: The 2,000-year-old object was a model airplane."....

More: "The model has the exact proportions of a very advanced form of "pusher-glider" that is still having "some bugs ironed out". This type of glider will stay in the air almost by itself; even a very small engine will keep it going at low speeds, as low as 45 to 65 mph., while it can carry an enormous payload. This ability is dependent on the curious shape of wings and their proportions. The tipping of wings downward, a reversedihedral wing as it is called, is the feature behind this capability. A similar type of curving wings are implemented on the Concorde airplane, giving the plane a maximum lift without detracting from its speed".

The South American Airplanes (aerodynamic artifacts)

On the left, a number of small South American artifacts. Currently at the Smithsonian, they were found in a number of places including a grave. The small artifacts are made of gold, which means that conventional dating methods won't work on them. Even though archeologists admit that they don't know how old they are, it can safely be assumed from their surroundings, including other "dateable" artifacts, that they are a minimum of 1000 years old.

For a number of years, a disagreement has "raged" over the "meaning" of the artifacts. As seen from the pictures, the shape of the sample object is rather ambiguous. The archaeologists labelled these objects as zoomorphic, meaning, animal shaped objects.

The question is, what animal do they represent? When we compare these with other objects from the same cultures depicting animals, a curious facet of the comparison would be obvious: the other objects are recognizable, rendered usually with a great accuracy and attention to realistic detail.

There are several types of animals which fly; birds, insects, and several mammals, such as bats and some gliders, for instance flying squirrels, oppossums, and then there are some lizards; there are also some fish which for brief periods glide through the air.

There are water animals which seem to fly through the water, such as rays, skates and some selachians. But how does the depicted object compare with these choices? All its features taken into a consideration, we have no match. Seen from above, the object obviously has no fish features, but seems to show rather explicitly mechanistic ones.

The structures just in front of the tail are strongly reminiscent of elevons (a combination of ailerons and elevators) with a slight forward curve, but they are attached to the fuselage, rather than the wings. In any case, they look more like airplane parts than like the claspers of a fish.

No doubt adding to the mystery, an insignia appears on the left side of the rudder,where ID marks often appear on contemporary airplanes. Aeronautical engineers when approached thought that the objects had possible aerodynamic qualities but that they also had defects which likely would make them difficult to fly.

Click and drag photo to resize.

Erich von Daniken said 30 years ago that an artifact dug up from an Incan grave was not an insect as scientists said, but a plane.

In 1997, two Germans, Algund Eenboom and Peter Belting, put the theory to the test.

Eenboom centered his research on historical evidence and concluded the "wings" of all insects are attached at the top of the corpus, not at the bottom, and that all Incan artifacts except these few suspected "planes" were made correctly.

Belting made a model plane, first with a propeller, afterwards with a jet engine. Whereas the first has to be launched by hand, the jet engine one was also equipped with landing gear.

At the recent Ancient Astronaut Society World Conference in Orlando, Florida, the two researchers showed extensive footage of their model planes.

The propeller-powered plane flew perfectly stable. But the crowd almost gave a standing ovation for the jet-engine model plane. With an impeccable take-off, flight and landing -- and an exact match to the model found in the Inca grave -- the model is truly an airplane.

Right: Evolution Takes a Hit
Scientists fear evidence that man is as old as coal Photo Right:Hard evidence for hard hearts? Solid rock proof for hard heads? Smithsonian squelching evidence again?

"Physical evidence currently exists that proves man inhabited the earth while coal was being formed, shaking the very foundations of who we really are and how we really got here. An assortment of human bones and soft organs, transformed to rock-like hardness, has been discovered between anthracite veins in Pennsylvania.

Since one of the golden rules of geology is that coal was formed during the Carboniferous -- a minimum of 280 million years ago -- it means that man has existed multi-millions of years before the ... insectivore from whom the evolutionists claim we eventually evolved.

However, the scientific establishment has wielded its powerful disdainful influence -- deceit, dishonesty, collusion and conspiracy -- to prevent evidence of the most important discovery of the 20th century to be documented as fact and, therefore, keep us from learning a monumental truth about ourselves." ...Ed Conrad

"Aside from the evidence of bones, evidence of human occupation of this area in Carboniferous times included one particularly strange item: a petrified handle of some sort of a tool.

This item was totally petrified and appeared almost to be made of coal; "coalified" might be a better term. Other than that, it appeared entirely similar to and entirely as well-made as any normal handle to an axe or sledge hammer of our own day and evinced a fairly high level of technology. The grain structure of a wooden handle was there.

It appears that the bones in all cases were there first, that the shale formed up around the bones, and that the bone was then gradually replaced with minerals being carried into the cavities they left by water.

The human femur bone we saw was very large; I would guess that its owner was eight or nine feet tall.(see "Giants" Page 6) Other than that it entirely resembled a normal femur bone from a man about my size which we had along with us for comparison in photos. ...

Vine (an author) has also claimed that the American Indian was here in America from the beginning, his most recent book, "Red Earth, White Lies", strongly challenging the standard Bering land bridge thesis. I should think that what I saw would shatter the Bering land bridge thesis for anybody with lingering doubts.

The experiences which Ed Conrad has had in trying to present these findings to scientists are entirely in line with what I would expect, given what experience has taught me about scientists in these fields. He has had several writeups in local and regional papers, including one in the Reding Eagle which indicates that all relevant tests have been done, and that all favor Conrad's claims.

Conrad has had several prominent scientists agree to the validity of his claims, and yet these had their own schedules and projects and none were willing to attempt to take any of these findings and do anything with them, and attempts to deal with the Smithsonian and with major universities has been much like beating his head against a tree and, as of the last four or five years, he had simply given up. That, of course, was in the age just prior to the age of the WWW page...

Conrad has previously assumed that his findings indicated man's presence on Earth in the accepted period of the Carboniferous age, i.e. almost 300 million years ago, and his writings in some of the documents noted here reflect that.

The evidence seems to suggest one of three possibilities:

1. humans/hominids were around in the Carboniferous period, conventionally dated to 300m (million) years ago.
2. The Carboniferous period is vastly more recent than conventionally dated.
3. The evidence is the result of an elaborate hoax.

I rule possibility 3 out from my own direct observations; the femur bone embedded in shale along with other petrified bone embedded in shale boulders could not possibly be faked. Item 1 does not strike me as plausible for numerous reasons, not the least of which being that no complex species such as ours has ever lasted that long.

I thus see the second possibility as the only viable one, and would recommend the section of Velikovsky's "Earth in Upheaval" titled "Collapsing Schemes" as a starting point for anybody seeking further information.

It would appear that all of the dating schemes we are familiar with are simply FUBAR, standard army jargon meaning "Fouled Up Beyond Any Recognition". Either of possibilities 1 and 2 above should cause major grief for evolutionists; the one requires man to be here long before monkeys or apes were, the other indicates there hasn't been time for evolution."--Endquote

Right: The Baalbek Stones. Click Photo for more

This column was hewn as one solid piece and weighs 1200 tons. It's two cousins are in place in the base of the "Temple of Jupiter" and weigh in at over 1000 tons. (The "Temple of Jupiter" is pictured in the banner on the top right of this page and in the photo on the left.)

"The temple is one of the largest stone structures in the world. Some 26 feet above the structure's base are found three of the largest stones ever employed by man.

Each of these stones measures 10 feet thick, 13 feet high, and is over 60 feet long. Knowing the density of limestone permits weight estimates of over 1.2 million pounds. Some people with impressive engineering skills cut, dressed, and moved these immense stone blocks from a quarry 3/4 of a mile away.

A walk to this quarry introduces the observer to the Monolith, an even larger block of limestone: 13 feet, 5 inches; 15 feet, 6 inches; and 69 feet, 11 inches. The Monolith weighs in at over 2,000,000 pounds. In comparison, the largest stones used in the Great Pyramid tip the scales at only 400,000 pounds..."Science Frontiers Online

Notice the man perched on the column and another standing at the base. Forget the ancient airplanes, the ancient helicopters the world maps--this alone should set the; standard, straightline, primitive man-to-advanced man, and then to civilization, "scientific" dogma on its ear.

There is no way that this stone can be explained by the science and history they teach us in school. No technology existing today could move this stone much less transport it from where it was quarried, nor lift it upon its 23 foot foundation.** (Actually, it appears moving such a monolith is on the edge but within current technology--Benjamin K., a Christian engineer informs us that Mammoet, and another company; Lampson Cranes-- & perhaps a few others have machines that could do the job.)

The pre-existing stone foundation upon which the Romans built their temple at the site is 1/2 mile long on one side. No one knows who built it.

There are no historical records although the local folks think it is a Pre-flood City originally built by Cain--after his banishment.

The Pharoah's Chariot Wheels

Biblical Archeologist Ron Wyatt says that he has found the wheels of the Egyptian chariots under the Red Sea, (where the chariots of Pharaoh ended up according to the Book of Exodus,)proof of the existence of Joseph, Sodom and Gomorrah and more.

Left according to Wyatt and his researchers is one of a number of gold chariot wheels located under the Red Sea.

"They were covered in coral, which made it difficult to see them clearly, but it appears that the coral was the agent the Lord used to preserve them.

They found numerous wheels- some were still on their axles, and some were off. They found chariot cabs without the wheels, also: EXO 14:24 ...in the morning watch the LORD looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians, 25 And took off their chariot wheels, that they drave them heavily:...

So far, this coincided with the Biblical account. They found several 6-spoked wheels, as well as an 8-spoked wheel. And finally, in 1988, Ron found the 4-spoked gold chariot wheel, which looks almost perfect. The reason this one was so well preserved is that coral does not grow on gold. The wood inside the gold "veneer" was deteriorated, which made it very fragile and for that reason, he has not attempted to retrieve it from the water.

The significance of these wheels is of extreme importance to the dating of the Exodus and determining which dynasty was involved."

The Tomb of the Astronaut

"It was on June 15, 1952, that AIfred Ruz and his excavation crew looked upon a tomb that had been hidden away for over twelve centuries. It was from the inscriptions on Pacal's sarcophagus that we have learned about his life, reign, death, and beliefs about the afterlife (Schele & Mathews, 109-110)." To be sure conventional archaeology has what it thinks is a prosaic explanation for the strange markings on the sarcophagus lid; Pacal entering the underworld.

Too some others, this explanation is too conventional and does not explain the apparent machine from a culture supposedly without wheels or machinery. Some have suggested that this is a capsule, as in space capsule, with the orientation of the craft to be vertical rather than horizontal, as shown. Others believe it is some type of earthbound vehicle (perhaps built to negotiate the miles of tunnels found under the earth.

Yet, perhaps, we have an ancient man operating the dials of a machine, supported by a head rest, leaning forward, with evidence of some form of propulsion from the back. (To see a larger version of this artifact, Click either photo.)

"The sarcophagus showed a well shaved man wearing clothings much like a close-fitting space-suit. The man was half way lying on a wrapping seat which held his lower back and his thighs, his nape reclined on a head-rest. His hands seem to be moving levers and controls.

The obvious question is: is the man depicted, a Mayan? In fact, supposedly, the Maya did not know machines of any kind, and neither knew the wheel. Nevertheless, the side panels, the tubes and the other devices make one think of some high developed technology. That's why this tomb is called the tomb of the astronaut......" The Enterprise Mission

Ancient Precision Stone Cutting

The object on the left is thought to be an Aztec artifact of some antiquity. (photo from mysteries of ancient cultures;) Do you believe that these earplugs, made from obsidian, a fragile glass, were made by hand with primitive tools and sand as an abrasive? These objects can only have been made with advanced machining tools. Look at them; less than a millimeter thick and perfectly symmetrical. And why did they need earplugs anyway?

The kind of precision stone cutting and even stone transportation associated with the Egyptian pyramids cannot be explained by the use of the primitive technology available to the Egyptians.

In fact, the technology of the older pyramids is probably beyond the Egyptians ability. The thing is, this "stone technology" problem turns up all over the world.

The picture on the right is from Sacsayhuaman, probably an ancient stone fortress in excess of 2000 years old. Some of these stones are 10 feet high or more. Notice their irregular forms. They have been fitted together in an extremely precise manner which we would be hard pressed to duplicate with modern technology; much less the primitive technology supposedly available.

Click photo for more

The impressive architecture of the subterranean Hypogeum is more than 6000 years old. To try to force its existence into the current paradyme, scientist claim that its stone age builders built the huge underground structure using only "antler picks and stone mallets!"

That's enough to make milk come out your nose (if you happened to be drinking it when you heard it).

Today, a diamond drill can cut through granite at a rate only 1/500 of that achieved by the Builders of the Great pyramid (sonic drills?) according to expert Christopher Dunn. His eye-opening article shows what happens when a technology expert tries to swallow ridiculous theories put forth by non-technologists in order to support uniformism and the current scientific dogma. An excerpt from his site--Petrie was a well known early Egyptian archeologist;

"Egyptian artifacts representing tubular drilling are the most clearly astounding and conclusive evidence yet presented to identify the knowledge and technology existing in pre-history.

The ancient pyramid builders used a technique for drilling holes that is commonly known as "trepanning." This technique leaves a central core and is an efficient means of hole making. For holes that didn’t go all the way through the material, they reached a desired depth and then broke the core out of the hole.

It was not only evident in the holes that Petrie was studying, but on the cores cast aside by the masons who had done the trepanning. Regarding tool marks which left a spiral groove on a core taken out of a hole drilled into a piece of granite, he wrote:

"The spiral of the cut sinks .100 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, or 1 in 60, a rate of ploughing out of the quartz and feldspar which is astonishing."

After reading this, I had to agree with Petrie. This was an incredible feed-rate for drilling into any material, let alone granite. I was completely confounded as to how a drill could achieve this feedrate. Petrie was so astounded by these artifacts that he attempted to explain them at three different points in one chapter. To an engineer in the 1880’s, what Petrie was looking at was an anomaly."

More info on this topic from these two sites:

Egyptian Anomalies

Left is another interesting enigmatic "out of place" Egyptian artifact

"At the Hathor Temple in Dendera, Egypt, several intriguing glyphs are depicting strange scenes. In the opinion of a classical archeologist, there is hardly anything out of ordinary in the scenes. The explanation of the glyphs stirred some passion amongst amateurs and experts alike.

But then something curious happened: the book got noticed by electrical engineers. As a group of professionals who could not care less about what other experts think, they commented on the picture with an unequivocal 'wow!'

Ivan Sanderson gives an example of analysis in an already mentioned publication, "Investigating the Unexplained" done by an electromagnetics engineer, who knew nothing about the history or mythology of ancient Egyptians. It is necessary to quote him verbatim for contextual meaning:

"The items, as depicted, are most fascinating; certain elements, especially the cables, are virtually an exact copy of engineering illustrations as currently used. The cable is shown as very heavy, and striated, indicating a bundle of many conductors, rather than a single high voltage cable.

As a matter of fact, a single high voltage cable would be much thinner; if the insulation was required to be that heavy for extreme high voltages, or moderately high voltages at high currents, rest assured that no technician would be holding the associated device. Corona leakage would 'get' him most swiftly.

The supporting stands would be much taller and heavier to withstand such voltages. It is much more likely that the cable is, as stated, a multi-conductor, wrapped and insulated with an outer jacket. If this were a 'light bulb', the maximum size of both would be explainable by heavy current demands; but high voltage of such a size would not be required.

It would seem to follow that moderately high voltages are in use; a connector is obviously employed; some type of supporting base to glass seal seems apparent."

The monkey with knives in hand on the right of the picture is a glypth that supposedly coveys; danger for the uninitiated.

Obviously, these technologies did not belong to the Egyptians, if they are legitimate artifacts. We'd know if the Egyptians tooled around in helicopters and airplanes, or routinely used electric power. Note that the bas relief objects at Abydos were reported to have been found underneath newer, Egyptian artifacts.

All artifacts from the previous pre-flood age would not have been destroyed in the flood. If our civilization were wiped out in a worldwide flood, what artifacts would remain for post flood civilizations to find--and possibly use or revere? Skyscrapers, cars, metal objects? What if those men could not guess what their original uses were but incorporated them somehow as "sacred" objects or objects to recreate in art etc.?

Consider the Sphinx. New data concerning the WATER EROSION on the Sphinx indicates that it may be much older than previously thought--built by a civilization much older than Egypt's.

We still today can't replicate the technology of the "4th dynasty" pyramids. "Egyptologists thought (some still do) that the Sphinx was built during the 4th Dynasty of ancient Egypt. However this theory has more recently been challenged.

In contrast to the older pyramids, "3rd" dynasty pyramids were built with blocks manageably small enough to be moved by 5 or 6 men. 5th and 6th dynasty pyramids which are supposed to be more advanced, were so poorly built that most of them today amount to little more than large piles of rubble.

Fourth dynasty pyramids at Giza (where the Sphinx is also to be found) however, have survived thousands of years relatively intact--and the blocks are so large that it is difficult to understand how they were moved."

Bagdad Battery

Right, a "working" 2000+ year old battery.

The ancient battery in the Baghdad Museum, as well as those others which were unearthed in Iraq, are all dated from the Parthian occupation between 248 BCE and 226 CE. However,a Dr. Konig, the discoverer also found copper vases plated with silver in the Baghdad Museum, excavated from Sumerian sites in southern Iraq, dating back to at least 2500 BCE.

When the vases were lightly tapped, a blue patina or film separated from the surface, which is characteristic of silver electroplated onto copper base. It would appear then that the Parthians inherited their batteries from one of the earliest known civilizations.

Neanderthal Skull With "Bullet Hole" Behind Ear

An Auroch is an large, extinct "buffalo like" animal. Many skeletons of this extinct type have been found in Europe.

What is remarkable about one in particular in the Moscow Museum of Paleontology is that it has a bullet hole in its skull. The hole is round, without radial cracks that would result from slower projectiles like spears and arrows. The only known projectile that leaves this kind of smooth, round hole without radial cracks is a bullet because of its velocity.

I mention the auroch first because of a possible objection that can be raised. If it is indeed a bullet hole, perhaps the skeleton was shot many, many years after the animals' death. The problem here is that the auroch survived the wound and lived long enough for unmistakable calcification to appear at the site of the injury.

How did an animal that became extinct supposedly thousands and thousands of years ago come by a "modern" bullet hole in its skull

A similar round, clean, smooth hole without radial cracks was found in the skull of a "Neanderthal" man found in the early 1920's in Rhodesia. The man supposedly died over 40,000 years ago.

The skull is currently at the British Museum. The skull was found more than fifty feet below ground level. In addition to the hole consistent only with that made by a bullet, the other side of the skull was blown out from the inside!

Now, a word about this photo. There aren't that many Neanderthal skulls in "captivity". I heard about this alleged bullet hole several years ago and I knew that it was a particular skull at the British Museum. I found this photo several years ago and I think it is important to say that the museum made no mention of the bullet hole at all.

It was simply one of the photos of the skull. I think that bears a lttle on its authenticity--it did not purport to be a picture of a skull with a bullet hole. That fact is something that the anthropologists apparently overlooked. Cuozzo, in his book, Buried Alive mentions actually getting his hands on the skull.

Of course, there are alternative explanations given for the hole, but it appears to have been the fatal wound and nothing we know of makes that kind of wound except a bullet---or perhaps a small meteorite, presumably traveling horizontally to the ground.

On the one hand, you have Paleontologists offering alternative scenarios for the hole, and on the other you have a German forensic scientist who examined the skull who states categorically that the wound could have come only from a bullet because of the velocity neccessary to produce the characteristics of the wound. One assumes that the forensic scientist would have some experience with bullet holes that perhaps an anthropologist or a paleoentolist may not have.

Shot with an Arrow or A Spear This Toxodon Went Down 2 Million Years Prior To 1st Official Hunting Season

The Toxodon was supposedly extinct nearly 2 Million years ago and men are supposed to have been around only a few hundred thousand years yet; this Toxy has an arrow or a spear point in the bone. See blue arrow (no,that's not the one that got him).

The Antikythera Mechanism

Ancient Computer More Than 2000 Years Old

There is at least one artifact that proves beyond all doubt that one civilisation in the ancient world possessed technical knowledge which no modern scientists had previously suspected. As it was found in the sea off Antikythera, a small island north west of Crete, it is known as the Antikythera Mechanism.".

Though it is over two thousand years old, it represents a level which our technology did not reach until the eighteenth century. If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity, the industrial revolution might have begun a thousand years before Columbus. By this time we would not merely be puttering around on the Moon, we would have reached the nearer stars."-- Arthur C Clarke in "Technology and the Limits of Knowledge"

"In 1900, on the day before Easter Sunday, a team of divers discovered a shipwreck off Antikythera (left) whilst attempting to find sponges. The sunken ship's hull was full of bronze statues and other ancient artefacts that were later retrieved and delivered to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for cleaning and restoration.

It was not until 17th May 1902 that a leading archaeologist examined the artefacts and recognised the outline of cogwheels in one of the lumps of bronze and wood. The writing on the case confirmed that the item had been made in 80 BCE.

In 1958 Derek J. Solla Price, an Englishman who then worked at Cambridge University and who later worked as the Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University in America, examined the mechanism. Using a process for restoring oxidised objects, Dr. Price was able to salvage some of the mass and from these pieces he attempted to rebuild the device.

However it was not until 1971 when X-ray photographs were taken of the artefact by the Greek Atomic Energy Commission, that the mechanism's array of meshing gears was finally revealed.

Price remarked that, "nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion. On the contrary, from all that we know of science and technology in the Hellenistic age, we should have felt that a device could not exist".

Work on the artefact revealed that on the outside it had consisted of dials set into a wooden box with at least 20-gear wheels inside. The box was covered with inscriptions that included an astronomical calendar. The mechanism also included a system of differential years. A crank spindle set the gears in motion at various speeds, turning pointers on three dials that calculated the rising and setting times and phases of the Moon, and the positions of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all with a high degree of accuracy . "

It appears that this was, indeed a computing machine that could work out and exhibit the motions of the sun and the moon and probably also the planets" ...Solla Price

It could well be that the technology is-pre-Greek since there are no other indications that they had this type of technical ability.

Crystal Skulls

Who made them, why did they make them and how did they make them? We certainly can't duplicate them with modern technology, presuming that we wanted to. They have been found in various locations throughout the world. Microscopic examination of the "legitimate" crystal skulls shows no tool marks.

Scientists are finding it difficult to explain how a primitive culture (because the skulls are known to be at least several hundred years old and possibly some several thosusand) could have carved crystal into such precise shapes and against the natural axis of the crystal.

Crystal is a mineral characterized by perfect molecular symmetry . When a "jeweler" cuts crystal, and attempts to carve against this axis, the crystal shatters.

Even with todays elaborate laser equipment, it would be very difficult to create such crystal sculptures.

500 Million Year Old Footprint in Rock

This fossilized sandal print is embedded in rock which is supposed to be from 300 million to 600 million years old. It's clear that the rock was formed After this print was made.

Now, either 1)This is a fake (its been tested and is not) 2)or--This rock is not really 300 million plus years old 3)or---the rock is 300 million plus years old and man was around 300 million years ago.

This artifact was found in Utah in the 1960's. It's no wonder that geologists and the like are not swarming over it because, whichever of the solutions you accept above (except that it's a fake), it obliterates a number of the tenets of modern dating, geology and evolutionary science.

Large Shoe Print in Rock

This photo was taken in northern Washington state and was reportedly found with another partial imprint. It appears to be the shoeprint of a large individual (see man's shoe in lower left of photo for comparison)approximately 16 inches long from heel to toe.

The rock itself is judged by geologists in "evolutionary time" (as opposed to actual time) to be between 10 and 20 million years old. The point is, according to evolutionary theory, no one should have been around early enough to leave a shoe imprint in what is now solid rock. No one should have been around to draw one either.

There remains the possibilty of course that someone painstakingly chiseled out two convincing shoeprints in recent times and left them on a mountain.

Very Large Foot Print in Solid Granite

It's one heck of a climb to see the footprint; more than a thousand feet up a rugged mountain in the Cleveland National Forest. And James Snyder's house sits right at the bottom. "I go out of my way to make a slip trail where nobody else has been and I was actually looking for gold," said Snyder (the discoverer).

That was back in February 2002 . But instead of finding gold on Gowers Mountain, Snyder found a giant fossilized footprint, at least it looks like one, embedded in solid granite.

The footprint was found in what becomes a creek bed during the rainy season. It looks as though something big crossed the creek a long time ago leaving its footprint behind.

What made it and when? Who knows....Granite is supposed to have formed over 1 billion years ago.

No doubt scientists will try to argue that it just looks like a footprint as they do for every one of these types of anomalies. For science, if not fraud it's the only acceptable answer.

Incredible Piri Reis Map

Speaking about the Biblical flood of Noah, (weren't we) I wonder--could a worldwide flood which covered the earth to a depth of 20 feet over even the mountains have been a cause for continental drift? I digress, but the story of creation suggests that there was only one land mass initially. Scientists today believe that all the continents were at one time one mass as well. Whats more cataclismic than a worldwide flood?

We spoke briefly about this map in the Intro on Page 1. What can you say about a map which dates back to at least 300 that shows the full circumference of the earth to plus or minus 50 miles? How do you explain an accurate AERIAL map of all of the continents, during a period when most of the scientific world believed the earth to be flat?

What can be the scientific explanation for a map that shows Antartica as it existed before it was covered with ice? Before recorded history? Again,left over information from before the flood destroyed the earth and all its civilizations?

The map was found in the 1500's and according to writing on the map itself, was compiled from earlier maps dating back to the 300's.

The true mysteries of of this map were eventually discovered by professor Charles H. Hapgood and revealed to the scientific community in his book, "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings".

During scrutiny of the map, Hapgood discovered a partial charting of Antarctica, made during a period when the coast was free of ice. This coastal structure, now covered again by ice, was subsequently verified by satellite radar scanning. Ice core samples of the coastline have fixed the last ice-free period to between 11,000 B.C. and 4,000 B.C.

Our historical understanding of navigation includes a period of time before which it was impossible to determine a ships latitude (North to South position) in the Southern Hemisphere. This was because the known method involved sighting the angle of the only fixed star - the North Star - which cannot be seen in the Southern Hemisphere because of the curviture of the Earth.

Despite this handicap, these maps show amazing details and acurate latitude placement of many known islands along the southern most coastlines of Antarctica! But this paradox of history was made even more astounding.

Hapgood has proved that the Piri Re'is map is plotted out in plane geometry, containing latitudes and longitudes at right angles in a traditional "grid"; yet it is obviously copied from an earlier map that was projected using spherical trigonometry! Not only did the early map makers know that the Earth was round, but they had knowledge of its true circumference to within 50 miles!

The London Artifact

This is a hammer made from an alloy of iron which is very modern in technology, which is encased in "100 million" year old rock (according to geologists) which has formed around it.

You know the drill: fake; lousy geological aging techniques; or lousy evolutionary timeframes? I say perhaps a pre-flood relic given that the technology is modern yet it is encased in rock at least a couple of thousand years old. The following is excerpted from "Darwin's Mistake", by Hans Zilner.

"This ancient tool has a simple form, similar to the type of hammer that is still common in Germany today. The handle now is a very hard petrified crystal with an intact structure. It was possible to ascertain that the interior of the handle had partly turned into porous coal.

There is no way to scientifically explain this combination of carbonization and petrification. I have not heard of a similar piece, found anywhere in the world. Two very different processes must have occurred simultaneously or in short succession. Crystal petrifaction requires an ecosphere of running water whereas for the development of porous coal, one could, for example, assume that fire was the necessary agent. Water and fire, it goes without saying, are two very different and mutually exclusive elements.

The analysis of the subsiding of the Flood, to be undertaken at a later point in this book, will explain what now looks like a contradiction. The outer layers of the hammer handle reminded me of the petrified stumps and piles of wood I had seen earlier at the "Petrified Forest National Park" in Arizona, on a visit in 1988.

The exhibits there, pieces of the cut up piles of wood, had completely petrified and displayed a homogenous crystal structure. I do not know of one piece discovered in that park to contain a coal interior comparable to that of the fossil hammer. The age of the trees there is officially estimated at between 100 and 200 million years.

Wood petrifies when it is buried in silt deposited by flooding rivers or seas and silicates, such as are found in volcanic ash, dissolve and impregnate it. These substances replace the hydrogen and oxygen portions in the wood and begin the petrifaction process by silicification. This may produce very solid opal or quartz minerals. The final product is approximately 5 times as heavy as common pine wood.

This short description of the hammer handle should make it obvious that the fossil hammer must be authentic and very ancient. In spite of all our modern technical abilities, it has never been possible to produce petrified wood with porous coal inside.

It therefore is out of the question that such a hammer could be a hoax. I must clearly emphasize this point, as most artifacts which contradict the accepted view of the world we are accustomed to, are accused of being forgeries. Our traditional

schools of thought, however, are at a loss to explain this hammer.

Petrified wood, and therefore this ancient tool, is supposed to be at least 140 million years old. Official scientific authorities, however, say that humans capable of manufacturing high quality tools have only existed for a few recent millenia. Something concerning these datings and the enormous time intervals of the geological era must be erroneous.

Is humanity really many millions of years old or is it a young species? Did the processes of rock formation take place more recently than is believed?

Examination of the hammer.

Before I look into these questions, I would like to give a more detailed description of the hammerhead's characteristics in order to make the full extent of the mystery clear.

Detailed research was carried out independently of one another by two different institutes. John Mackay, Director of Australia's "Creation Science Foundation", analyzed the hammer thoroughly during his visit to the United States.

A number of Australian metallurgists, as well as those working at the respected metallurgic Institute "Batelle Memorial Laboratory" in Columbus, Ohio (USA), took part in these analyses.

Sophisticated electron microscopes served to examine the structure and composition of the steel the hammerhead was made of.

The results of the examinations were as mysterious as they were bewildering. The hammerhead, chemically speaking, consisted of 96.6 % iron, 2.6 % chlorine, and 0.74 sulphur. Incredibly, this material is almost entirely solid iron!

Other additives or impurities were not detectable. Non-destructive testing methods of steel quality comprise x-ray examination, magnetic testing as well as ultrasonic detection. X-rays showed no evidence of inclusions or irregularities in the hammerhead steel. This means, it was tempered and hardened in some way.

In general, chemically genuine and unworked steel is rather soft. The even structure determined, however, suggests that this hard steel that was manufactured by some sophisticated technology. The results of the examination are as sensational as they are unbelievable. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of steel manufacturing knows that every modern steel-making process, inevitably leads to carbon or silicon impurities! I emphasize the word inevitably. Steel production without these impurities is simply unthinkable!

No other known ingredients used for refinement such as copper, titanium, manganese, cobalt, or molybdenum, vanadium, wolfram or nickel could be traced. We employ these and other elements in steel manufacturing to achieve different properties needed for different fields of application.

The high quantity of the chlorine in the fossil hammerhead is remarkable, as well. Chlorine plays no part in modern steel manufacturing. It is not used at all today, so it is impossible to produce the high steel quality of the type found here by today's manufacturing methods.

This leads us to the question; who manufactured this hammer and when? Based on the standpoint of accepted research and science, it is impossible for this hammer to exist, much less to have ever been manufactured. For the reasons given, it is thus out of the question that we are dealing with a "hoax" hammerhead.

Much the same has been shown concerning the hammer handle. Two forgery-proof materials for which we have no scientific explanation, combined in one tool.

This is extraordinary evidence of a very different history of earth and humankind! If our school teachings are correct, there is no other conclusion than that an alien visiting earth must have lost the hammer.

Still, I have one other more logical explanation to offer and I will present it in the further course of this book: My explanation, however, is not in accordance with traditional scientific theory. The fossil hammer shows still more peculiar features. In breaking open the hammer's original stone enclosure in 1934, the upper edge of the metal head was damaged, leaving a small notch. The inside of the notch revealed a shiny silvery surface.

Until today, more than 60 years later, the color of the notch has not changed. No traces of rust are perceptible. The relatively high concentration of chlorine combined with a total absence of carbon, which would cause corrosion by reacting with oxygen, may be responsible for this phenomenon...." Hans Zillner from his book: Darwin's Mistake

"20,000 to 100,000" Year Old Metal "Screws"

Thousands of spiral, screwlike objects sized as small as 1/10,000th of an inch have been found beginning in the early-nineties and are still being found by gold miners in the Ural mountains in Russia.

These metal items found in depths from 3 to 40 feet are thought to be 20 thousand plus years old.

Dr Matveyeva who has studied the objects: “The layer which contains the spiral shaped objects is characterised as gravel and detritus deposits … From their orientation these layers can be dated to 100,000 years and correspond to lower regions of the Mikulinsk horizon of the upper Pleistocene.”

In plain language the Pleistocene is the previous geological epoch, which began about 2 million years ago and ended around 10,000 years ago.

Contrary to what some commentators believe however, we don't think that these objects are extraterrestrial in origin. Rather we think their origin is very terrestrial, the vestiges of a former hi tech civilisation, the evidence of which will become increasing apparent over the coming years.

Ancient Metal Pipes in Chinese Lake and Mountain

The widespread news of mysterious iron pipes at the foot of Mount Baigong, located in the depths of the Qaidam Basin, Qinghai Province, has roused concern from related departments.

What is astonishing is inside for there is a half-pipe about 40 centimeters in diameter tilting from the top to the inner end of the cave. Another pipe of the same diameter goes into the earth with only its top visible above the ground.

At the opening of the cave there are a dozen pipes at the diameter between 10 and 40 centimeters run into the mount straightly, showing high fixing technique.

About 80 meters away from the caves is the shimmering Toson Lake, on whose beach 40 meters away, many iron pipes can be found scattered on sands and rocks. They run in the east-west direction with a diameter between 2 and 4.5 centimeters. They are of various strange shapes and the thinnest is like a toothpick, but not blocked inside after years of sand movement.

More strange is that there are also some pipes in the lake, some reaching above water surface and some buried below, with similar shapes and thickness with those on the beach.

DELINGHA (QINGHAI), -- A group of nine Chinese scientists will go to west China's Qinghai Province this month to closely examine the relics....

..According to Qin Jianwen, head of the publicity department of the Delingha government, the scraps were once taken to a local smeltery for analysis. The result shows that they are made up of 30 percent ferric oxide with a large amount of silicon dioxide and calcium oxide. Eight percent of the content could not be identified.

"The large content of silicon dioxide and calcium oxide is a result of long interaction between iron and sandstone, which means the pipes must be very old," said Liu Shaolin, the engineer who did the analysis.

"This result has made the site even more mysterious," Qin said."Nature is harsh here. There are no residents let alone modern industry in the area, only a few migrant herdsmen to the north of the mountain."

Parts of two Stories originally published by:

Map of the "Creator"

Astounding Oopart?! Russian scientist find or claim to find "120 million year old" (Evol years)3D Aerial Relief Map.

"This seems to be impossible. Scientists of Bashkir State University have found indisputable proofs of an ancient highly developed civilization’s existence. The question is about a great plate found in 1999, with picture of the region done according to an unknown technology. This is a real relief map. Today’s military has almost similar maps.

The map contains civil engineering

works: a system of channels with a length of about 12,000 km, weirs, powerful dams. Not far from the channels, diamond-shaped grounds are shown, whose destination is unknown. The map also contains some inscriptions. Even numerous inscriptions.

At first, the scientists thought that was Old Chinese language. Though, it turned out that the subscriptions were done in a hieroglyphic-syllabic language of unknown origin. The scientists never managed to read it…

“The more I learn the more I understand that I know nothing,” – the doctor of physical and mathematical science, professor of Bashkir State University, Alexandr Chuvyrov admits.

The geological structure of the stab was determined: it consists of three levels. The base is 14 cm thick, made of the firmest dolomite. The second level is probably the most interesting, “made” of diopside glass.

The longer the slab was studied, the more mysteries appeared. On the map, a giant irrigative system could be seen: in addition to the rivers, there are two 500-metre-wide channel systems, 12 dams, 300-500 metres wide, approximately 10 km long and 3 km deep each.

The dams most likely helped in turning water in either side, while to create them over 1 quadrillion cubic metres of earth was shifted.

In comparison with that irrigative system, Volga-Don Channel looks like a scratch on the today’s relief. As a physicist, Alexander Chuvyrov supposes that now mankind can build only a small part of what is pictured on the map. According to the map, initially, Belaya River had an artificial river-bad.

It was difficult to determine even an approximate age of the slab. At first, radiocarbonic analysis was carried out, afterwards levels of stab were scanned with uranium chronometer, though the investigations showed different results and the age of the slab remained unclear.

While examining the stone, two shells were found on its surface. The age of one of them " Navicopsina munitus of Gyrodeidae family - is about 500 million years, while of the second one " Ecculiomphalus princeps of Ecculiomphalinae subfamily - is about 120 million years (mythical evol years).

The Mysterious Olmecs

3000+ Year Old Giant head found buried 20 ft. deep with the use of magnetic mapping.

What was an Advanced, Black, (or possibly Asian)non-Egyptian, pre-Hispanic civilization doing in Mexico--in the America's prior to and more advanced than the Maya and the Aztec's?

No one knows where they came from, where they went or how they moved those huge stone sculptures from distant quarries. Traditional archeology doesn't have the answers--but if you believe that man has always been advanced you can see where they may have come from.

The problem is uniformism again. Materialists want so much to show a steady and inevitable progression from cave man to advancing man but..

Bible believers understand that man began building cities right from the beginning. Man lived in caves as a result of catastrophies like the flood..that's why for example you can find art in the caves of Lascaux technically and artistically on par with art of today --where scaffolding was built to reach the higher walls and why technologically inferior civilizations can be found on top of older civilizations with superior technology--like the Olmecs.

“Readers of my books, and especially of The Lost Realms, as well as of a previous article on this website titled "The Case of the Missing Elephant," know by now that beginning with the discovery of a colossal stone head in 1869, an advanced civilization that preceded the Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico came to light.

Its leaders and bearers were unmistakably black Africans. They were arbitrarily named by archaeologists "Olmecs"; and their embarrassing enigma -- of who they were, and how they had come across the ocean, and why, was compounded by the timing of their arrival in the New World.

Once it was conceded (very grudgingly!) that the 'Olmecs' did indeed represent the earliest or even Mother Civilization of Mesoamerica, the date of their arrival was at first set at about 250 B.C.; then at about 500 B.C.; then farther back and back, until 1500 B.C. was acknowledged.

3000 years is now accepted…..." Sitchin

Tools in Rock

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. 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. As was the case with 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, 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 mystery 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)

Superfine Holes in Precious Stones & Superfine Thread

These ancient objects and more besides present at least a three fold problem. How was this super fine thread created in the first place? How were these superfine holes created through extremely hard precious stones without damaging the stones. How were the jewelers able to see these virtually microscopic threads and holes without a microscope or similar instrument?

These extremely minute bead balls (top)are the remainder of a necklace which is excavated from an Incan ancient tomb which is located in Lima Peru.

The fact that such a minute hole is bored through this brittle shell material of 3 mm thickness is not possible even with infinitesimal workmanship technology of today.

Originally it means that the super superfine thread was passing as many as 6 to the groove. The problem is what method was used to produce that much micro-thin thread? A thinness of 140 counts (the thinness which with 1 g reaches approximately 283 m) is possible with cotton spinning technology of today, but as for this super superfine thread, it reaches at the highest as many as 250 counts.

The first problem was drilling superfine holes in a brittle material without damage--the second object (bottom) presents a different problem: the mummy which is excavated from a Peruvian graveyard.The mystery is the means utilized for boring the superfine holes through emerald.

Diamonds are designated as hardness 10, the emerald is hardness 7. Only the ruby and the sapphire and the diamond of hardness 10 are harder than emerald. Neither the diamond, the ruby or the sapphire were known to the Andean ancient civilizations. Today, high frequency induction heating could be used or a method such as laser beam, but as for the ancient Andean to whom these artifacts are assumed to belong, no means of accomplishing the high tech, microscopic drilling or manufactoring the thread is known.--Translated

ANOMALIES IN COAL AND ROCK

Human bones, foot and handprints and artifacts have been found in rock and coal deposits which evolutionists claim is millions and even billions of years old. If that were true, there would be no way to account for these oddities, since man is supposed to have evolved in the recent past. The geological time frame is very obviously wrong.

A fossilized handprint in rock was found near Glen Rose Texas.

A fossilized human skull was found in coal that was sold in Germany (mid-1800s). A jawbone of a child was found in coal in Tuscany (1958). Two giant human molars were found in Montana (1926). A human leg was found by a West Virginia coal miner. It had changed into coal.—pp. 34-35.

A woman, in Illinois, reportedly found a gold chain in a chunk of coal which broke open (1891). A small steel cube was found in a block of coal in Austria (1885). An iron pot was found in coal in Oklahoma (1912). A woman found a child's spoon in coal (1937).—p. 35.

In 1944 Newton Anderson claimed to have found this bell inside a lump of coal that was mined near his house in West Virginia. When Newton dropped the lump it broke, revealing a bell encased inside.

What is a brass bell with an iron clapper doing in coal that is supposed to be hundreds of millions of years old? According to Norm Scharbough's book Ammunition (which includes a compilation of many such "coal anecdotes") the bell was extensively analyzed at the University of Oklahoma and it was found to contain an unusual mixture of metals, different from any modern usage. Photo and text from Genesis Park.

Man-made objects in rock.

An iron nail was found in a Cretaceous block from the Mesozoic era (mid-1800s). A gold thread was found in stone in England (1844). An iron nail was found in quartz in California (1851). A silver vessel was found in solid rock in Massachusetts (1851).

The mold of a metal screw was found in a chunk of feldspar (1851). An intricately carved and inlaid metal bowl was found in solid rock (1852). An iron nail was found in rock in a Peruvian mine by Spanish conquistadores (1572).—pp. 35-36.

At Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois, in August of 1870, three men were drilling an artesian well, when - from a depth of over a hundred feet - the pump brought up a small metal medallion to the surface.

One of the workmen, Jacob W. Moffit, from Chillicothe, was the first to discover it in the drill residue. A noted scholar of the time, Professor Alexander Winchell, reported in his book Sparks From a Geologist's Hammer, that he received from another eye-witness, W.H. Wilmot, a detailed statement, dated December 4, 1871, of the deposits and depths of materials made during the boring, and the position where the metal "coin" was uncovered.

The strange "coin-medallion" was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of a U.S. quarter of that period. It was remarkably uniform in thickness, round, and the edges appeared to have been cut. Researcher William E. Dubois, who presented his investigation of the medallion to the American Philosophical Society, was convinced that the object had in fact passed through a rolling mill, the edges showed "further evidence of the machine shop."

Despite its "modern characteristics", however, Dubois plainly saw that, upon the object, "the tooth of time is plainly visible."

(sketch of coin left)

Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs, but these had not been metal-engraved or stamped. Rather, the figures had somehow been etched in acid, to a remarkable degree of intricacy. One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or headdress; her left arm is raised as if in benediction, and her right arm holds a small child, also crowned. The woman appears to be speaking.

On the opposite side is another central figure, that looks like a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail frayed at the very end.

Below and to the left of it is another animal, which bears a strong resemblance to a horse. Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are undecipherable glyphs - they are of very definite character, and show all the signs of a form of alphabetic writing.

Man-made objects found in the ground.

A doll was found near Nampa, Idaho (1889). A bronze coin was found 114 feet below the surface near Chillicothe, Illinois (1871). This means there were coins in ancient times in America! A paving tile was found in a "25 million-year-old" Miocene formation in Plauteau City, Colorado (1936).

Several discoveries were made during the California gold rush (1849-1850s). A prehistoric mining shaft, 210 feet below the surface in solid rock was found.

A mortar for grinding gold ore was found at a depth of 300 feet [914 dm] in a mining tunnel. A human skull was also found at a depth of 130 feet under five beds of lava and tufa.

Bones of camels, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, horses, and other animals were also found in California. The findings are almost always in gold-bearing rock or gravel.

Man-made markings on petrified wood.

Evolutionists declare that petrified wood is millions of year old, yet humans have worked with it.

Hand-worked petrified wood was found in India. It was shaped prior to fossilization.

Prior to mineralization, several petrified pieces of wood had been hacked with a cutting tool. The wood was dated to the Pliocene Epoch, before humans were supposed to have lived.—p. 36.

Man-made markings on bones.

At a site near Paris, France, fossilized rhinoceros bones had human cutting marks on them. No rhinos have been in Europe in recorded history. Another rhino bone, cut by a sharp tool, was found in Ireland. … Ancient Man

A letter to Nature in 1873 reported the discovery in Miocene strata of a fragment of bone probably belonging to a dinotherium and engraved with a picture of a horned quadruped and traces of several other figures.

This discovery implies the existence of an intelligent creature capable of art work some 25 million years ago.

According to the American Encyclopedia, some rocks in Tennessee bear impressions of tracks of various animals and tracks of human beings as visible and perfect as if they were made in snow or sand. The American Journal of Science of 1833 noted that a Mr Schoolcraft and a Mr Benton had observed prints of human feet in Mississippi limestone. An eminent geologist of the time stated they were certain evidence that man existed at the epoch of the deposition of that limestone.

The American Anthropologist reported in 1896 that the Ohio State Academy of Science had exhibited a large stone containing the print of a human foot 14 inches long.

In 1975 Dr Stanley Rhine of the University of New Mexico announced the discovery of footprints human in appearance in strata estimated to be 40 million years old. Similar discoveries were made in Kenton, Oklahoma and in Wisconsin.

Steiger, author of Worlds Before Our Own, relates yet another instance, an engineer called Johnson found footprints in an ancient sandstone near Tulsa. Johnson had had to remove earth and roots to uncover the fossils which evidently were human-like, and which were impressed in a block of sandstone weighing about 15 tons.

The largest and clearest tracks yet discovered were found in 1973. The footprints were described as 21 inches long, eight inches wide. and five inches across the instep. The creature's stride was seven feet. The impressions are in the same layer of rock as tracks of the anatosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur. Steiger comments:

If the tracks are accepted as human, then scientists will be forced either to place man back in time to the Cretaceous period or to bring the dinosaurs forward to the Pleistocene period.

In 1897, the Los Angeles Herald revealed that laborers had discovered a fossil shoe print in solid rock. The imprint was that of a shoe with a high narrow heel and a broad flat sole. It was so clear, in the fine grained shale in which it was found, that it looked as though the owner had unwittingly put his right foot into soft mud but a day or two ago.

Sandal or moccasin prints have also been seen in the gypsum of the White Sands in New Mexico. Ellis Wright in 1932 found tracks of human form but 22 inches long.

Some later tracks were accompanied by marks suggestive of the use of some sort of support like a walking stick by one of the antediluvian beings. The White Sands were laid down as an ancient inland sea gradually dried up around the time of the demise of the dinosaurs.

Oil workers have recovered carved bones and decorated coins from deep rocks brought up during well drilling. A gold necklace was found in a piece of coal. What appeared to be an iron tool was found in a Scottish coal seam.

In June, 1851, Scientific American reprinted a report from the Boston Transcript about how a metallic vase, found in two parts, was dynamited out of solid rock 15 feet below the surface in Dorchester, Mass.

The bell-shaped vase (see photo), measuring 4-1/2 inches high and 6-1/2 inches at the base, was composed of a zinc and silver alloy. On the sides were figures of flowers in bouquet arrangements, inlaid with pure silver. The estimated age of the rock out of which it came: 100,000 years.

Two workmen signed affidavits to their amazing discovery in 1912 of an iron pot inside a large piece of coal that they were breaking up to be used in the furnace of a power plant. The pot left a clear fossil impression in the remaining pieces of coal.

Coalminers noticed a curious slab in an Iowa coal mine in 1897. Found 130 feet below ground just below the sandstone which capped the seam, it was approximately two feet long by one foot wide and was four inches deep. Its surface was inscribed with diamond shapes having the face of what seemed to be an old man in the middle of each.

Steiger relates the story of a man whose grandfather in 1928 came across a concrete wall buried in a coal mine two miles below ground. While shot blasting a seam, the miner found, among the dislodged coal, blocks of concrete about a foot across. Although the broken edges showed that they were made of what passed as an ordinary sand and cement mixture, the faces of the blocks were highly polished. The remainder of the wall disappeared into the coal seam.

Another miner working a coal face about 100 yards away struck what seemed to be the same wall. Mysteriously the coal owners pulled the men out of the coal faces and ordered them to keep quiet about their discoveries. What is more, before he joined that gang, a few years earlier, they had found a similar wall in a nearby pit.

Another coal miner in West Virginia claimed miners had found a well constructed concrete building, and, astonishingly, a perfectly formed human leg that had been changed into coal.

The New York Times, in November 1926, reported that a Dr Siegfriedt who collected fossils for the University of Iowa, had found a human molar in coal deposits laid down in the Eocene epoch. Although the enamel had carbonized and the roots had mineralized into an iron compound, local dentists felt sure it was a human second lower molar.

Dr Siegfriedt described the stratum as yielding many fossils for dinosaur research as well as sharks' teeth and fish scales.

In 1971 bulldozers moving earth for mine exploration revealed traces of human remains in soft sandstone said to be 100 million years old. The remains were underneath about 15 feet of material including five or six feet of solid rock and yet there appeared to be no caves or crevices in the overlying strata.

Bits of bone and teeth were first found but then the excavators noted a more significant bone embedded in the rock. Local experts from the University of Utah were brought in and under their direction parts of two skeletons and a mixture of teeth and bone shards were uncovered. They described the skeletons as Homo sapiens. One of the bodies seemed to conform with the burial pattern of some Indian tribes.

Oddly, the academic experts seemed to lose interest, moved on to other establishments and apparently never wrote up the find formally. But the bones were, on the face of it, the same age as the rock matrix.

If the remains really had fossilized and were of an age comparable with the surrounding rocks, as some reports claimed, then this find would have been highly valuable in placing man-like beings in distant geological times.

No fabric is supposed to have been found until Egypt produced cloth material 5000 years ago. How, then, can we deal with the Russian site which provides spindle whorls and patterned fabric designs more than 80,000 years old?

Not only did the ancient Babylonians appear to use sulfur matches, but they had a technology sophisticated enough to employ complex electrochemical battery cells with wiring. There is also evidence of electric batteries and electrolysis in ancient Egypt, India, and Swahililand.

Although a temperature of over 1780 degrees is required to melt platinum, some pre-Incan peoples in Peru were making objects of the metal.

Even today the process of extracting aluminum from bauxite is a complicated procedure, but Chou Chu, famous general of the Tsin era (265-316 A.D.), was interred with aluminum belt fasteners on his burial costume.

Tiahuanacu, Ancient "Seaport" 2.5 Miles Above Sea Level--Oldest City On Earth?

(Photo: Gateway of the Sun)Tiahuanacu is in the Bolivian Andes lying 12,500 feet (over 2 miles) above sea-level. It is located some 15 miles from the shores of Lake Titicaca. Archeology in general dates the city at c. 200 A.D., but it was not always so.

Its first investigator, Arthur Posnansky, a german engineer who dedicated fifty years to its study, dated its origins to 15,000 B.C. ...

THE PORT OF PUMA PUNKU

Strangely, Tiahuanacu is a port, although the nearest body of water is Lake Titicaca, some 15 miles away. The theories about how this happens to be are several....

On the rock cliffs near the piers and wharfs of the port area of the ruins are yellow-white calcareous deposits forming long, straight lines indicating pre-historic water levels. These ancient shorelines are strangely tilted, although once they must have been level.

The surrounding area is covered with millions of fossilized sea-shells. It appears, from the tilting of the ancient shoreline striations and the abundant presence of fossilized oceanic flora and fauna, that a tremendous uplift of land has taken place sometime in the ancient past. Geologists estimate that this happened roughly around "100 million years ago". AtlantisQuest.com

More on Tiahuanacu

As an amateur mesoamerican history buff, I have always wanted to see Tiahuanacu, an ancient city perched high in the Andes above La Paz, Bolivia -- the remains of a civilization predating the Incas which may be over 17,000 years old.

Although I have traveled to Bolivia on three separate occasions as the Brush Rotary Club's representative for the Bolivia Insulin Project, time constraints and the important work we were doing always took precedence over any "sightseeing" ventures -- until a couple of weeks ago. Carlos Baudoin, my soft-spoken Rotarian host in La Paz for my last two trips, insisted we take a few hours to see the ruins...

Although today the nearest body of water, Lake Titicaca, is some 15 miles away, numerous archaeological studies indicate Tiahunacu was once a large thriving seaport where literally hundreds of ships may have docked.

Historians think the original city was built when the shore was only 600 feet away. Built before the Great Flood of the Old Testament, the city is one of the oldest on the planet -- if not the oldest.

The highland Andes have been known through myth and legend as one of the access points for vast subterranean cities, the domain of inner-earth beings who emerge from their lower worlds into the upper atmosphere from time to time. These ancient legends speak of vast networks of tunnels criss-crossing the entire length and breadth of the planet.

Traditions of vaults, labyrinths and buried treasures are found in Crete, Egypt, Tibet, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Tiahuanacu is considered one of the gateways to these realms, along with the famous sacred site of Sacayhuaman in the Peruvian Andes. The Jesuit chronicler, Agnelio Oliva, recorded the words of an old Inca quipu reader to the effect that "the real Tiahuancu was a subterranean city, far exceeding the one above ground in vastness."

(Photo:From Crystal Links.com) Evidence that Lake Titicaca was once a part of an ocean exists even today in the abundance of oceanic creatures still living in the salty lake, although it is over two miles above current sea level.

The 10-ton Gateway to the Sun is monolithic, carved from a single block of Andesite granite. It is broken through the center, leading investigators to wonder what sort of tremendous forces could have achieved this feat.

The upper portions of the gate are carved with beautiful and intricate designs, including a human figure, condors, toxodons, elephants and some symbols. Directly in the center is the so-called Sun God with rays shooting from its face in all directions. The god is holding a stylized staff in each hand which may represent thunder and lightning. It is sometimes referred to as the "weeping god" because tears are carved on its cheeks.

The figures flanking the centerpiece are unfinished, causing viewers to wonder what could have interrupted the craftsmen. Of the animals represented on the gate, two have been extinct for thousands of years. Jaguars and condors are still with us, but toxodons and elephants can no longer be found in the area.

History shows that an elephant-like creature thrived in the area during the Pleistocene era, some 11,000-12,000 years ago. By JOHN STAFFORD

"2.8 Billion" Year Old Sphere's

Over the past several decades, South African miners have found hundreds of metallic spheres, at least one of which has three parallel grooves running around its equator.

The spheres are of two types--"one of solid bluish metal with white flecks, and another which is a hollow ball filled with a white spongy center" (Jimison 1982).

Roelf Marx, curator of the museum of Klerksdorp, South Africa, where some of the spheres are housed, said: "The spheres are a complete mystery. They look man-made, yet at the time in Earth's history when they came to rest in this rock no intelligent life existed. They're nothing like I have ever seen before" (Jimison 1982).

We wrote to Roelf Marx for further information about the spheres. He replied in a letter dated September 12, 1984: "There is nothing scientific published about the globes, but the facts are: They are found in pyrophyllite, which is mined near the little town of Ottosdal in the Western Transvaal. This pyrophyllite (Al2Si4O10(OH)2) is a quite soft secondary mineral with a count of only 3 on the Mohs' scale and was formed by sedimentation about 2.8 billion years ago. On the other hand the globes, which have a fibrous structure on the inside with a shell around it, are very hard and cannot be scratched, even by steel." The Mohs' scale of hardness is named after Friedrich Mohs, who chose ten minerals as references points for comparative hardness, with talc the softest and diamond the hardest ...Forbidden Archaeology

Mystery Spheres Stump California Space Institute?

Stones, which are found in rock scientists say are billions of years old- and which rotate on their axes, captured the attention of Mr. John Hund of Pietersburg fifteen years ago....

While playing with the stone on a very flat surface at a restaurant one day, Hund realized it was very well balanced. He took it to the California Space Institute at the University of California to have tests done to determine just how well balanced it was. "It turned out that the balance is so fine, it exceeded the limit of their measuring technology and these are the guys who make gyrocompasses for NASA.

The stone is balanced to within one-hundred thousandths of an inch from absolute perfection," explains Hund. Nobody knows what these stones are.

One NASA scientist reportedly told Hund that they do not have the technology to create anything as finely balanced as this. He said the only way that either nature or human technology could create something so finely balanced would be in zero gravity.

Marcahuasi, Megaliths of Peru

"Perhaps now one of the most puzzling of these (ancient advanced civilization mysteries),is the incredible find at Marcahuasi, only 80 kilometers northeast of this city, can be solved....

unanswered questions regarding the pre-Incan civilizations which built the great structures at Machu Picchu, Cuzco, Ollantaytambo, and Sasahuaman.

Were these the remains of a civilization made extinct by a previous capsizing of the earth? The remains were a continuing enigma to archaeologists, and undoubtedly one of the most bizarrely jarring was a spectacular discovery made in 1952 at an altitude of over 13,000 feet in the Andes.

The discovery, made in 1952 by Dr. Daniel Ruzo, is a great amphitheater of rock in which are magnificent sculptures--but sculptures which, according to all we know, are wholly anachronistic.

Here, for example, among carvings of familiar South American animals and people, can also be seen unmistakable carvings in white dioritic porphyry stone of camels and cows, lions and elephants, and other animals which have never lived here, along with finely carved heads, in the same material, of Semites, Caucasians, and Negroes, all of whom came to this continent less than 500 years ago.

There is even a perfect rendering of the turtle's long-extinct ancestor the amphichelydia; yet in all recorded history, the amphichelydia is known only from its fossilized remains.

It lived during the Upper Triassic Period and became extinct about 180 million years ago.

Where, then, could the sculptor have gotten his model? There is also a rendering of a horse, but horses became extinct here 9,000 years ago and did not reappear until brought by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century.

Dr. Ruzo's great discovery too long has been ignored. It is now time for science to take a fresh look at the mysteries of the past which titillate and haunt the imaginations of all knowledgeable Peruvians.

MARCAHUASI: A MYSTERY IN STONE

"In her newsletter of October 1, J. Hunt publishes a letter from B. Cote that tells briefly of an eerie Peruvian site: "In June of 1989, a group of us traveled to Peru and visited a 12,500 foot plateau called Marcahuasi. We spent only one night there, but what we saw was so exciting that we decided to go back and make a film of it.

The entire plateau seems to be populated with hundreds of figures carved out ot stone, some of them 90 feet tall. Yet this unique spot is relatively unknown to the outside world.

"What little is written about Marcahuasi indicates a certain reluctance on the part of archaeologists to say that the figures are man-made. Indeed, many of them are subtle and not always obvious to the viewer. But that is precisely what contributes to the mystery. There are so many recognizable forms there, that one is tempted to say they must be man-made, or else nature is having a great joke on us.

"Daniel Ruzo, a 90-year-old archaeologist who lives near Mexico City, aided us. The figures we saw and filmed in 1989 were both strange and fascinating.

We were first greeted by a 60-foot rock called by Ruzo "The Monument to Humanity" because several different races are recognizable on it. They overlap each other in a unique way, but one can clearly discern a Caucasian youth, a Semitic man, a skull-like face that could be Negroid, and several others.

"There are many other faces on the plateau, as well as animals. Some of the animals depicted never existed on the continent, such as the rhino, lion, camel, and a turtle-like creature."

(Cote, Bill; "Marcahuasi--A Mystery in Stone," Louisiana Mounds Society News letter, no. 42, p. 1, October 1, 1991.) Science Frontiers On line

"The Monument to Humanity,” surrounded by hundreds of sculptures on the Marcahuasi plateau at a towering twenty-five meters high with fourteen anthropomorphic figures of four different races, is the most important sculptured work that exists on the earth today!” - Dr. Daniel Ruzo. Source:Remnants of an Advanced Civilization

Lanzhou Morning News: "Stone from Outer Space" Found in Lanzhou

Prehistoric or Extraterrestrial Civilization?

Clearwisdom.net) Lanzhou Morning News of June 26, 2002 - -

(dispatched by reporters Bao Feng and HaiZhu Tian) Coinciding with our recent inspiring series reports on a visit to the "E.T. relics," an uncommon stone from a collector in Lanzhou drew enormous attention from many experts and collectors. The stone is imbedded with a screw-threaded metal bar and is suspected of being from outer space.

An uncommon stone imbedded with screw-threaded metal bar from a collector in Lanzhou

Mr. Zhilin Wang found this stone on a field research trip to the Mazong Mountain area located on the border of Gansu and Xijiang provinces. The pear-shaped stone is extremely hard and has a mysterious black color. It is about 8 x 7 cm and weighs 466 grams.

The most surprising part of the stone is the imbedded 6 cm cone-shaped metal bar which bears clear screw threads. This mysterious stone attracted enormous attention from many geologists and collectors. More than 10 geologists and global physicists from the National Land Resources Bureau of Gansu Province, Colored Metal Survey Bureau of Gansu Province, the Institute of Geology and Minerals Research of China Academy, Lanzhou Branch, and the School of Resources and Environment of Lanzhou College gathered to study the origin of this mysterious stone.

After a discussion about its possibility of being man-made and the possible reasons for its formation, the scientists unanimously labeled the stone as one of the most valuable in China and in the world for collection, research, and archaeology studies.

During the discussion, the scientists proposed many hypotheses about the formation of this stone, but found all incredible. The screw-threaded metal bar is tightly enclosed in the black lithical material. Neither the bar's entrance to the stone nor the exposed bar tip appear to be man-made.

Moreover, the screw thread width remains consistent from the thick end to the thin end, instead of varying due to the growth of organisms. One of the hypotheses says that this stone could be a relic from a prehistoric civilization, since a civilization equivalent to ours existed on earth before our current one.

Another one states that it could be a stony meteorite and it could have brought the information of an extraterrestrial civilization.

At the end of the conference, all scientists agreed that further research is needed to address questions such as how the stone was formed and whether the "metal bar" is truly metal, before the "visitor-from-outer-space" mystery can be solved.

Ancient Ground Optical Lenses

FORBIDDEN TECHNOLOGY

I have discovered an avalanche of evidence proving the existence of a very remarkable ancient technology, one which is well and truly forbidden because it indicates that our ancestors were not idiots, and as we all know very well, if we ever admitted that, the illusion of progress would be seriously imperiled.

The technology I have discovered is optical. I have found in museums all over the world, more than 450 ancient optical artifacts, most of them lenses, but in any case, magnifying aids.

These ancient lenses generally magnify about 1.5 or 2 times. Heinrich Schliemann, the 19th century discoverer of Troy, excavated 48 rock crystal lenses at Troy. This is one of the largest hoards of ancient lenses ever found. These were unfortunately lost for many decades because they were with the missing Trojan gold hoard which disappeared from the Berlin Museum at the end of the Second World War. In recent years the Russians have admitted that the Red Army stole the gold and it is all in Moscow today. The 48 lenses are with these gold artifacts.

Another large number of crystal lenses exist in Crete, mostly found at Knossos. And yet another hoard exists at Ephesus, in Turkey, though those ones are very unusual because they are concave lenses used to correct for myopia (shortsightedness), some shrinking images by as much as 75%.

Most ancient lenses are convex and were used to magnify. At Carthage there are 14 glass lenses and two of rock crystal stored in a drawer in the museum; they have apparently never been displayed.

Egypt too has examples one pair of glass lenses was excavated from the wrappings of a mummy and obviously were used as spectacles except that loops around the ears for modern style spectacles seem not to have been invented in ancient times. So these may have had some kind of nose loop or may have been held as a lorgnette.

The oldest evidence of a sophisticated optical capability which I have found goes back as far as 3300 BC. An ivory knife handle was excavated in the 1990s from a predynastic grave of that date at Abydos in Egypt. It belonged to a king. It bears microscopic carvings which could only have been made with, and can only be seen with, a magnifying glass.

(Click and drag Image to Resize)
The oldest actual lenses which I have found are from the 4th and 5th Dynasties of ancient Egypt and date to perhaps 2500 BC. These are perfectly ground and polished convex crystal lenses which are used as eyes in statues of that date. One such statue is in the Louvre, in Paris, but the rest are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. There are many ancient classical texts which specifically describe both magnification and works produced under magnification by craftsmen. For instance, the Roman author Seneca speaks of magnification, and Cicero, Pliny and others described microscopic works of art. I have gathered together all of these texts in my book, The Crystal Sun.

It is from Cicero's description of a miniature version of the Iliad so small that it could fit inside a walnut shell that our modern expression, 'in a nutshell', came into use, passed on by Shakespeare's Hamlet into modern usage.

I even own an ancient lens myself which I was able to purchase. From a friend who collected ancient objects. He had no idea that it was a lens, but he bought it because it had an archaic Greek carving of a flying figure on it. In fact, that wonderful carving in no way interferes with the magnifying properties of the lens, since it is transparent. It was probably added to the lens at a later date in its history, but it offers a convenient way to provide a minimum date for the object.

I took it along to the Greek and Roman Antiquities Department of the British Museum for a dating of the carving. I was told there that the object was a `fake' because it was made of glass. After much prodding, I got the, expert’ to say that if the object had been crystal, the carving would date from the 6th or 7th century BC. Of course, I didn't believe for a minute that the object was glass, so I took it to the Natural History Museum for an X-ray diffraction analysis.

This proved that the object was rock crystal, and hence genuine. The interesting part of the comment by the British Museum expert who insisted my lens was a fake was: `they didn't make these then, it can't be real'.

No, none of this can be real.

...What is the answer to this? I call it consensus blindness. People agree not to see what they are convinced cannot exist. 'Everyone knows' that there was no optical technology in antiquity, so consequently when you come across its, staring you in the face, you go blind. End of conflict.

In fact, optical technology in antiquity sometimes reached extraordinary heights. The Layard Lens in the British Museum dates to the 8th century BC and was excavated in the throne room of the Assyrian King Sargon II's palace in what is today called Iraq. I have carried out a full technical analysis of this lens. I have been able to demonstrate that this rock crystal lens, now cracked and considerably damaged, was originally a perfect convex lens with a flat ('plane') base, which was ground in a special way known to opticians as 'toroidal', - a technique only available for the public since about 1900.

Such grinding produces lenses to correct for individual cases of astigmatism. It would be possible to go out into the street today and find someone whose astigmatism was perfectly corrected by the Layard Lens. It was clearly used as a monocle. It perfectly fits the eye aperture, as we can see in the illustration.

It is most extraordinary that such a high technology existed in the 8th century BC. And not a single Assyriologist has acknowledged the publication of my study of this important object except for the one who encouraged me in the first place; he was curious as to what the results would be. So it appears that the community of Assyriologists find it convenient not to 'see' my book.

Another example of optical technology being taken to extraordinary lengths I found in Sweden. The Eastern Vikings had a very extensive crystal lens industry. More than a hundred lenses survive in Sweden and the surrounding countries. None, however, are known from Norway; the Western Vikings were apparently not let in on the secret.

The Scandinavian archaeologists were delighted at my findings, and they have translated some of my work into Swedish and published it already in a leading archaeological journal there. They had no reason to be blind' because they loved the' fact that I could show that their Vikings were even more interesting than they already thought.

I discovered that the Vikings had a microscopic optical industry: they were grinding and polishing lenses the size of rain drops which could magnify three times. This is an astonishing feat and one would marvel at it even today.

There are many old British lenses as well. I found two collections of them stored in geology collections. Some of them are extraordinarily clever, and have projecting points at the back which I termed resting points', to enable them to be use by craftsmen for magnifying while keeping both hands free; the point does not interfere with the magnifying properties.

A similarly ingenious design was produced at Troy, where one crystal lens was perforated with a central hole, through which the craftsman could insert his carving tool, while the magnification all around was undisturbed.

Ancient telescopes were not a difficult invention once they had the lenses. All you have to do is to hold up a lens in each hand and look through them both at once: thus you have a rudimentary telescope. Even though the image is inverted - it takes a third lens to flip it right way up - this makes no difference if you are, for instance, studying the surface of the moon or looking at the stars. No one can tell if a star is right way up or upside down - it all looks the same.

In The Crystal Sun I suggest that primitive telescopes were used in ancient Britain and that Stonehenge was an observatory. I suggest that the outer trilithons may have acted as a base for a perishable dome of wood or wattle, and that the inner trilithons, which are higher, were to serve as the base for a perishable wooden observation platform facing east, for the observation of lunar risings.

Or are such thoughts forbidden?

The Solar System: The Ultimate Oopart ; Astronomical Enigma

One of the most confounding enigma’s that we have encountered and examined thus far has been recognized for more than 300 years although it is largely unknown even among astronomers.

This enigma involves the orbits of the planets of our solar system. Like DNA, it is more diificult perhaps to see that an enigma or mystery exists at all but once understood, it is the most astounding oopart to be found on these pages or anywhere else.

It takes a little bit of concentration to understand, but once understood, the implications are clear. Basically, the orbits of the planets in our solar system are non-random.

The basic prevailing “scientific” theory for the formation of of the universe is the big bang theory. That matter was once compacted in a very dense small particle that exploded and eventually coalesced into the stars and planets that we see today.

With respect to the planets orbiting the sun, including earth, the assumption is that these newly formed planets were captured by the sun and that having been captured, they occupy random elliptical orbits around that sun.

However, such is not the case. Before we examine this enigma, let’s set it up. Non-randomness can imply design. It very often does. For instance, if a group of huge boulders are found at the bottom of a mountain, in an arbitrary dispersion, one might suppose that they may have been carried there by some process of nature—but what if they were all exactly 1 mile apart—to the millimeter?

It’s certainly possible that two of those huge stones could co-incidentally be exactly 1 mile apart but what if three of the stones were exactly that distance apart?

This is the problem (for materialists, evolutionists etc.) that not just two—but all the planets of this solar system and as far as we can determine--even other solar systems seem to adhere to a mathematical formula which predicts exactly where they will be in relation to the sun. A relationship that no one has ever been able to solve from the viewpoint of a natural phenomenon. The odds of this kind of astronomical relationship being pure coincidence are of course---astronomical :0).

The Titius-Bode Law:

Johann Titius, a German astronomer, discovered a numerical relationship describing the relative distances of the then-known planets from the sun. Another German astronomer, Johann Bode, popularized the relationship and, as is often the way of science, became associated with it. It is often called Bode's law; occasionally, Titius-Bode law.

The semimajor axes of the orbits of the planets follow the relationship: a = 0.4 + 0.3 x 2n where a is the semimajor axis is astronomical units (AU) and the exponent, n, takes values minus infinity, 1,2,3, ...

This was strictly a numerological relationship and, to this day, has resisted a compelling physical rationale. The value for n=3, 2.8 AU, corresponds to the location of the asteroid belt, and gives mild support for the hypothesis that the asteroids come from a failed or exploded planet.

The first test of the law occurred a few years later (1781) when William Herschel discovered Uranus --- at the distance predicted by the relationship. Neptune, the next planet to be discovered, is much closer to the Sun than predicted by the law. Pluto occupies the n=8 position instead. Another oddity is that the first term in the relationship is minus infinity rather than, say, zero.

This suggests that the underlying physical law is somewhat different than the current form.

Recently, the first planets outside our Solar System have been discovered orbiting pulsars (the central stars of which are neutron stars). It appears that these planets also obey the Titius-Bode law. Some other solar systems don't seem to follow this "law", but only some of the planets in these systems have been discovered. It is interesting that this simple relationship has been known for over 300 years but still defies physical proof (or disproof.

G.E. Curtis' Contribution to the Enigma

Mr. G.E. Curtis has recently rediscovered the phenomena and his adjustments to the formula indicate how closely it predicts the orbits of the planets of our system.

Conclusions reached by Mr. G. E. S. Curtis in regard to the Equation: Summary

1) The major orbits of the Solar System are contained within, and interrelated by, the main equation.

2) The ratio b/a and of course B/A is equal to the orbit of Venus but is also determined by the orbit of Venus. This is not simply an approximation, it is accurate to five decimal places, and unique.

This ratio pervades the whole Solar System.

3) The equations are bi-directional, an inner orbit could be calculated from an outer orbit.

4) The orbits can be calculated from Pythagoras.

5) The orbits can be calculated with the use of trigonometry.

6) The implied triangles are all similar, and similar to a triangle constructed from Venus/Earth mean orbits.

7) Orbits can be calculated by adding and subtracting constants.

8) Equations allow orbital distances to be interchanged with orbital periods.

9) Any orbit can be calculated from any other, and all the orbits can be calculated from any two.

10) The orbits can be calculated by a number of different routes from any datum orbits. Deviations from Nortons data will vary very slightly depending on the route taken.

Taking all the above facts into consideration, it is difficult to maintain the notion that the Solar System originated solely by the action of gravity on a random distribution of dust particles.

The percentage variation column indicates that the prediction of the planets orbits versus the actual orbits are virtually identical. This should not be the case if the big bang theory is correct and there is no physical law or gravity related theory which would explain this non-random planetary alignment.

Table demonstrating how closely the real orbits conform to the mathematical pattern described in text.
PLANET	Actual Orbit in AU	Calculated Orbit in AU	Percentage Deviation
MERCURY	0.3870987	Datum	Zero
VENUS	0.7233322	0.723331002	-0.00017
EARTH	Unity	Unity	Zero
MARS	1.5236915	1.5239159	+0.0147
JUPITER	5.2028039	5.195539524	-0.14
SATURN	9.5388437	9.3020245	2.5
URANUS	19.181871	19.18321601	+0.007
NEPTUNE	30.057924	30.02787608	-0.1
PLUTO	39.439	39.41830763	-0.0525

One scientist who had examined Mr. Curtis’ work wrote the following letter seeking help from another Astronomer at a well know university. Here is an excerpt from that letter:

Peter, I hope you can help me with this problem:

SOME RELATIONSHIPS CONNECTING THE SEMI-MAJOR AXES OF PLANETARY ORBITS.

Introduction

Although I have attempted to simplify the mathematical treatment of the analysis that follows, this work appears to be entirely attributable to Mr G. Curtis, who first discussed the matter with me a few months ago. He claims to have limited mathematical background but, he has been able to obtain a number of unexpected relationships between the lengths of the semi-major axes of the planets' elliptical orbits.

As far as I am able to judge, the relationships do not derive from any fundamental mathematical theory (eg Kepler's laws) and yet, in the main, they so closely reflect the truth that I am reluctant to dismiss the results as a consequence of pure chance. Unfortunately, my own knowledge of astronomy is so sparse that I am not able to judge the merits of these findings, so I am seeking the views of a more authoritative and reliable source.

…. Comment

Some aspects of the above investigation are not completely precise but, even allowing for such deficiencies, I find many of the results so surprising and apparently without any mathematical explanation. If there is some 'well-known' theory which accounts for such strange results, I would be grateful to receive details of it but, in any case, an informed second opinion would be welcomed by both Eric and myself.

Many thanks for your help,

Regards..

Ooparts List

Here we list many ooparts not already mentioned which have been accumulated and listed in a number of sources including in Michael Cremo's Book: Forbidden Archeology. Ages given are of course, mythological, materialist years.

1572 From the Archives of Madrid a letter dated 1572, comes the account of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artifact, which came into his possession. A perfect six-inch nail was later presented to the Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it thoroughly examined, and verified it was found in rock dated to 75,000 to 100,000 years in age.

• 1820 From The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1820 comes the account of an ancient tool discovery. At a quarry near Aixen-Provence, France, in 1788, 40 or 50 feet below ground in a layer of limestone were found coins, petrified wooden handles of hammers, pieces of other petrified wooden tools, and a quarrymen's board. The limestone was 300 million years old.

• 1822 The American Journal of Science from 1822, north of Pittsburgh an unusually flat rectangular surface, 3 feet long and varying from 5 to 6 inches wide was found. On this flat surface were row after row of evenly spaced, perfect diamond shapes, each with an oblique, raised band across its center. The pattern is too precise to be natural, the diamond shapes too square to be designed by anything but an intelligent hand. In fragments of the impressed rock, were found fossils of primitive jointed plants, dating the find to the Devonian era, 400 million years ago.

• 1822 The American Journal of Science, 1822 reported a number of man track impressions on an outcrop of grayish-blue crinoidal limestone along the west bank of the Mississippi for 3 miles just south of St. Louis. The foot lengths were 10 1/2 inches wide.

• 1826 In a well dug near the Ohio River in north Cincinnati at a level 94 feet down, a buried tree stump was found which showed the marks of an ax. The marks were deep and well cut, indicating the use of a sharp and durable blade. The ax used was confirmed to have been made of metal when, embedded in the top of the stump, an advanced oxidized wedge of iron was found. The layer in which the stump was found was dated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years old nearly 10 times the accepted age of the supposed first metal usage.

• 1829 From the American Journal of Science, an account sent by a correspondent, to Prof. Silliman, of something that was found in a block of marble, taken November 1829, from a quarry, near Philadelphia. The block was cut into slabs. By this process, it is said, was exposed an indentation in the stone, about one and a half inches by five-eighths of an inch. A geometric indentation: in it were two definite-looking raised letters, like 'I U': only difference is that the corners of the 'U' are not rounded, but are right angles. We are told that this block of stone came from a depth of seventy or eighty feet---or that, if acceptable, this lettering was done long ago.

• 1844 On June 22, 1844, this curious report appeared in the London Times: "A few days ago, as some workmen were employed in quarrying a rock close to the Tweed about a quarter of a mile below Rutherford-mill, a gold thread was discovered embedded in the stone at a depth of eight feet." Dr. A. W. Medd of the British Geological Survey wrote in 1985 that this stone is of Early Carboniferous age between 320 and 360 million years old. Who dropped this gold thread in the ancient fern forests in a distant time when the most advanced life forms on the planet were supposedly amphibians and insects?

• 1845 From a communication by Sir David Brewster, 1845, a nail had been found in a block of stone from Kingoodie Quarry, North Britain. The block in which the nail was found was nine inches thick. The quarry had been worked about twenty years. It consisted of alternate layers of hard stone and a substance called ‘till,’ The point of the nail, quite eaten with rust, projected into some 'till,' upon the surface of the block of stone. The rest of the nail lay upon the surface of the stone to within an inch of the head---that inch of it was embedded in the stone.

• 1851 In Whiteside County, Illinois two copper artifacts, a hook, and a ring were brought up during the drilling of a well from a sand stratum 120 feet deep. The stratum was dated at 150,000 years old.

• 1851 The London Times, December 1851: Hiram De Witt, of Springfield, Mass. dropped a piece of auriferous quartz about the size of a man's fist. It split open and there was found inside a cut-iron nail, slightly corroded and the size of a six-penny nail. It was entirely straight and had a perfect head.'"

• 1852 Scientific American, June 1852. 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 within a bed of formerly solid rock. The vase, about 4 1/2 inches high, was made of an unknown metal and embellished with floral inlays of silver - the art of some cunning craftsman.

• 1853 A horned lizard was found inside a block of stone, in New Mexico, in 1853. The stone was "so solid as to preclude the entrance of the smallest insect". The lizard was sent to the Smithsonian Institute, where it died 2 days later.

• 1856 The last of the pterodactyls (flying reptiles with leathery wings and long, toothy beaks) died about 100 million years ago, according to established scientific opinion. But in the experience of a number of startled French workmen, the last one died in the winter of 1856 in a partially complete railway tunnel between the St. Dizier and Nancy lines. In the half-light of the tunnel, something monstrous stumbled toward them out of a great boulder of Jurassic limestone they had just split open. It fluttered its wings, croaked, and died at their feet. The creature, whose wingspan was 10 feet 7 inches, had four legs joined by a membrane, like a bat. What should have been feet were long talons, and the mouth was arrayed with sharp teeth. The skin was like black leather, thick and oily. At the nearby town of Gray, the creature was immediately identified by a local student of paleontology as a pterodactyl. The rock stratum in which it had been found was consistent with the period when pterodactyls lived, and the limestone boulder that had imprisoned the winged reptile for millions of years was found to contain a cavity in the form of an exact mold of the creature's body.

• 1857 Between 1857 and 1866 in gold mines on Table Mountain, northwest of Needles, California were found bones of extinct mastodons, mammoths, bison, tapirs, horses, rhinos, hippos, and camels, all dating from the Pliocene period. Also found among the fossils was a stone disc used for grinding, a large stone bowl, part of a human crania, a stone mortar a complete human skull. It was determined that the items were 12 million years old.

• 1865 A two-inch metal screw was discovered in a piece of feldspar unearthed from the Abbey Mine in Treasure City, Nevada. The screw had long ago oxidized, but its form, particularly the shape of its threads, could be clearly seen in the feldspar. The stone was calculated to be 21 million years in age.

• 1865 Excavating for the Hartlepool waterworks in Durham England, in 1865, workmen accidentally freed a living toad from a block of magnesian limestone 25 feet down.

• 1867 At the Rocky Point Mine, in Gilman, Colorado, at a depth of 400 feet excavators found human bones embedded in a silver vein and a well-tempered copper arrowhead. The vein was dated at 135 million years old.

• 1867 It is reported that James Parsons, and his two sons, exhumed a slate wall in a coal mine at Hammondville, Ohio, in 1868. It was a large smooth wall, disclosed when a great mass of coal fell away from it, and on its surface, carved in bold relief, were several lines of hieroglyphics.

• 1869 The Los Angeles News of December 17, 1869 reported a smooth slate wall covered with strange alphabetic writing had been discovered in a coalmine at a depth of 100 feet. The letters were raised and well defined. The coal that had covered the wall bore their distinct impression, which means the letters date to a time when the coal was in a vegetable state and had molded itself against the wall. Each sign was three-quarters of an inch in size, and arranged in rows precisely spaced 3 inches apart. The coal was from the Carboniferous era, well over 200 million years old.

• 1870 At Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois, in August of 1870, as a well was being drilled the pump brought up a small metal medallion to the surface. The strange coin / medallion were composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of a U.S. quarter of that period. It was remarkably uniform in thickness, round, and the edges appeared to have been cut. Researcher William E. Dubois, who presented his investigation of the medallion to the American Philosophical Society, was convinced that the object had in fact passed through a rolling mill, the edges showed clear evidence of the machining. Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs that had somehow been etched in acid, to a remarkable degree of intricacy. One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or headdress; her left arm is raised as if in benediction, and her right arm holds a small child, also crowned. The woman appears to be speaking. On the opposite side is another central figure, a crouching animal with long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail frayed at the very end. Below and to the left of it is another animal, which bears a strong resemblance to a horse. Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are undecipherable glyphs - they are of very definite character, and show all the signs of a form of alphabetic writing. The stratum from which the coin was extracted was dated between 100,000 and 150,000 years.

• 1877 Prospectors near Eureka, Nevada found a human leg bone and kneecap sticking out of solid rock. Doctors examined the remains and determined they were from a very modern-looking human being, and one that stood over 12 feet tall. The rock in which the bones were found was dated geologically to the Jurassic Period, over 185 million years old.

• 1880 Workmen drilling a well discovered a doll-like figure sometime before 1880 near Marlboro in Stark County, Ohio. The image made of black variegated marble and standing 6 inches tall was unearthed from a depth of 120 feet. The layer in which the doll was found was dated at over 300,000 years.

• 1880 Near Loch Maree and Victoria Falls, Scotland, the hollow impression that would be left by double bars of iron placed closely together was reported. The observation was corroborated years later when micro-specks of iron oxide were taken from the impression cavities. The bands occur high above the falls in an almost totally inaccessible place, where a "structure" would serve little purpose. The sandstone in the impressions show tiny striations, which are really the preserved grain marks of the iron, indicated the metal had been impressed in the primordial sand, before solidification took place. The sandstone in which the bands occur is Cambrian dating to 600 million years old.

• 1884 The London Times, June 22, 1884: Workmen quarrying rock, close to Tweed, about a quarter of a mile below Rutherford Mills, discovered a gold thread embedded in the stone as a depth of 8 feet.

• 1884 Fossilized human tracks were discovered in a rock quarry near Managua, Nicaragua, in a layer containing 16 to 24 feet below the surface, geologically dated as being over 200,000 years of age.

• 1885 The American Antiquarian reported a find east of the town of Berea, Kentucky. Preserved in the layer were the fossilized impressions of several creatures, including two well-preserved prints of a human being. They were described as "good-sized, toes well spread, and very distinctly marked." In 1930 geologists discovered a total of twelve 9 1/2-inch human tracks and portions of others, and confirmed that they had indeed been impressed upon gray Pottsville sandstone dating from the Upper Pennsylvanian period dating them at over 300 million years old. One track had a distance from heel to heel of 18 inches, a giant by any standards.

• 1885 The American Antiquarian, 1885 gave the account of another find associated with the St. Louis footprints. "A particular set of tracks was described in detail. Directly before the prints of these feet, within a few inches, is a well-impressed and deep mark, having some resemblance to a scroll, or roll of parchment, two feet long by a foot in width." The squared impression was not a natural shape; neither were scratch marks that would have indicated the patch had been carved. Rather, the evidence points to the parchment impression having been made when the rock was still in a plastic state, made at the same time as the footprints. What such a find suggests is that the prints' owners were not only men, but were men with the intelligence to produce some form of paper sheet - and perhaps write upon it. The limestone, in which prints and paper appear, is dated to the Mississippian age dated 345 million years ago.

• 1885 A well driller discovered a little clay doll that had come from below a 15-foot layer of lava rock, 100 feet of sand, 6 inches of clay, 40 feet of more sand, then 165 feet composed of clay, sand, clay nodules mixed with sand, and coarse sand layers for a total of 320 feet. The small "doll" is composed of half clay and half quartz, and though badly battered by time, the doll's appearance is still distinct. It had a bulbous head, with barely discernible mouth and eyes; broad shoulders; short, thick arms, and long legs, the right leg broken off. There are also faint geometric markings on the figure, which represent either clothing patterns or jewelry. The doll is the image of a person of a high civilization, artistically attired. The layer in which the doll was found was dated at over 300,000 years.

• On August 2, 1890, J. H. Neale signed the following statement about discoveries made by him: "In 1877 Mr. J. H. Neale was superintendent of the Montezuma Tunnel Company, and ran the Montezuma tunnel into the gravel underlying the lava of Table Mountain, Tuolumne County. . . .

At a distance of between 1400 and 1500 feet from the mouth of the tunnel, or of between 200 and 300 feet beyond the edge of the solid lava, Mr. Neale saw several spear-heads, of some dark rock and nearly one foot in length. On exploring further, he himself found a small mortar three or four inches in diameter and of irregular shape.

This was discovered within a foot or two of the spear-heads. He then found a large well-formed pestle, now the property of Dr. R. I. Bromley, and near by a large and very regular mortar, also at present the property of Dr. Bromley." This last mortar and pestle appear on your right.

Neale's affidavit continued: "All of these relics were found the same afternoon, and were all within a few feet of one another and close to the bed-rock, perhaps within a foot of it. Mr. Neale declares that it is utterly impossible that these relics can have reached the position in which they were found excepting at the time the gravel was deposited, and before the lava cap formed.

There was not the slightest trace of any disturbance of the mass or of any natural fissure into it by which access could have been obtained either there or in the neighborhood" (Sinclair 1908, pp. 117–118). The position of the artifacts in gravel "close to the bed-rock" at Tuolumne Table Mountain indicates they were 33–55 million years old.

• 1891 Near Cleveland, Tennessee a length of wall was discovered which was traced for a thousand feet, on the average 2 feet thick and 8 feet high, with numerous projections spaced along the top every 25 to 30 feet. The wall ran roughly at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees east. The structure continues on beyond the section exposed, in both directions, following the crest of a ridge that extends from the Hiawassee River north of Chattanooga southward, where it dips beneath the Tennessee River. Its position dates it geologically to near the beginning of the Quaternary Period, well over a million years old. The wall is composed of red sandstone blocks constructed in three courses, cemented together with dark red clay mixed with salt, and in numerous places is plastered over with red, slate and yellow clays. Along one stretch of wall, near the northern end a distance of 16 feet, a number of the sandstone block surfaces were covered with the hieroglyphs of a lost language. The letters were arranged in wavy, parallel and diagonal lines, interspersed with small pictures of strange animals, many unidentifiable. There were other symbols, of the sun and crescent moon, which appear to have some astronomical significance. All together, 872 individual characters were discovered.

• 1896 From the American Anthropologist, 1896 comes the finding of a perfect human imprint in stone near Parkersburg, on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River. The track was 14 1/2 inches long, and was found embedded in stone dated at 150 million years old.

• 1897 The April 2,1897 edition of the Daily News of Omaha, Nebraska, carried an article titled "Carved Stone Buried in a Mine," which described an object from a mine near Webster City, Iowa. The article stated: "While mining coal today in the Lehigh coal mine, at a depth of 130 feet, one of the miners came upon a piece of rock which puzzles him and he was unable to account for its presence at the bottom of the coal mine. The stone is of a dark grey color and about two feet long, one foot wide and four inches in thickness. Over the surface of the stone, which is very hard, lines are drawn at angles forming perfect diamonds. The center of each diamond is a fairly good face of an old man having a peculiar indentation in the forehead that appears in each of the pictures, all of them being remarkably alike. Of the faces, all but two are looking to the right. Was this stone carved and left behind by a traveler from earth's future?

• 1921 In Arkansas, north of Finch a large rock-sculptured head of a man was discovered. It stood about 4 feet high, and the figure had a squared, protruding chin, small, tight-lipped mouth, a short nose, and a furrowed brow and stare accented by two flat "buttons" of inlaid gold for eyes. Two more gold discs ornamented the figure's ears, and a heart-shaped plug of copper was embedded in the chest. A carved hood that draped down the nape, and attached around the neck covered the top of the head. Near the head, and in the same layer, a number of smaller objects; a gold ring, a small coffer made of volcanic pumice (which does not exist in this region), and tiny carvings of men, animals, moons and stars were found. The stone sculpture was discovered in the ten-foot layer of gravel. geologically dated at 175,000 years.

• 1926 In a mineshaft southwest of Billings, Montana, a human tooth was found in an Eocene deposit dated at 30 million years old.

• 1927 In Fisher Canyon, Pershing County, Nevada, in January, 1927, an imprint from the heel of a shoe which had been pulled up from the balance of the heel by suction, from the mud when the rock was still in a plastic state at the time. The shoe print was in a layer of Triassic limestone dated at 225 million years old. The rock was later examined at the Rockefeller Foundation, and confirmed to indeed be a shoe heel. Microphotographs revealed that the leather had been stitched by a double row of stitches with the twists of the threads being very discernable.

• 1927 W. W. McCormick of Abilene, Texas, reported his grandfather's account of a stone block wall that was found deep within a coal mine: "In the year 1928, I, Atlas Almon Mathis, was working in coal mine No. 5., located two miles north of Heavener, Oklahoma. This was a shaft mine, and they told us it was two miles deep. The mine was so deep that they let us down into it on an elevator.... They pumped air down to us, it was so deep." One evening, Mathis was blasting coal loose by explosives in "room 24" of this mine. "The next morning," said Mathis, "there were several concrete blocks laying in the room. These blocks were 12-inch cubes and were so smooth and polished on the outside that all six sides could serve as mirrors. Yet they were full of gravel, because I chipped one of them open with my pick, and it was plain concrete inside." Mathis added: "As I started to timber the room up, it caved in; and I barely escaped. When I came back after the cave-in, a solid wall of these polished blocks was left exposed. About 100 to 150 yards farther down our air core, another miner struck this same wall, or one very similar." The coal in the mine was Carboniferous, which would mean the wall was at least 286 million years old. According to Mathis, the mining company officers immediately pulled the men out of the mine and forbade them to speak about what they had seen. Mathis said the Wilburton miners also told of finding "a solid block of silver in the shape of a barrel... with the prints of the staves on it," in an area of coal dating between 280 and 320 million years ago. What advance civilization built this wall?

• 1936 In Plateau Valley, Colorado, during the excavation for a winter cellar to store vegetables, at a depth of 10 feet a pavement made of tiles, each man-made and five inches square was discovered. The tiles were laid in mortar, the chemical composition of which was different from all materials found in the surrounding area. The pavement was found in the same layer containing the three-toed Miocene horse, dated to 30 million years old.

• 1948 A fossilized shoe impression was discovered near Lake Windermere, England and reported in the natural history journal, The Field. The print displayed signs of craft and artistry. Around the edge of both the heel and the foreshoe were circular impressions, which resemble tacking, while in the center of the sole and heel are faint decorations of linear and flower-like designs.

• 1958 In Tuscany, Italy a human jawbone was found at a depth of 600 feet, in a coal mine encased in a Miocene stratum, geologically dated at 20 million years.

• 1959 In the Gobi Desert of central Asia in 1959 a fossilized print of a shoe with a ribbed sole was found, in sandstone dated at 15 million years.

• 1968 At Saint-Jean de Livetin, France a quarry revealed unusual metal nodules entombed in an Aptian chalk bed. The nodules were reddish brown, wafer-shaped, and hollowed at the ends, measuring from 3 to 9 centimeters long and 1 to four centimeters wide. Chemical analysis showed a carbon content consistent with modern forging and casting techniques. The beds dated to the Cretaceous Period making them over 120 million years old.

• 1969 On June 27,1969, workmen cutting into a rock shelf situated on the Broadway Extension of 122nd Street, between Edmond and Oklahoma City, found an inlaid tile floor, found 3 feet below the surface, and covering several thousand square feet. A form of mortar was found between the tiles that were dated at 200,000 years old.

• 1969 In Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1969 sandstone strata filled with fossil tracks of now extinct creatures and many human tracks, which dated back between 3 and 5 million years.

• 1973 Southwest of Moab, Utah, two human skeletons were found in formations over 100 million years of age.

The Great Pyramid, Egypt

Giza pyramids soaring above the
city of Cairo, Egypt, Martin Gray

The Great Pyramid is the most substantial ancient structure in the world - and the most mysterious. According to prevailing archaeological theory - and there is absolutely no evidence to confirm this idea - the three pyramids on the Giza plateau are funerary structures of three kings of the fourth dynasty (2575 to 2465 BC).

The Great Pyramid, attributed to Khufu (Cheops) is on the right of the photograph, the pyramid attributed to Khafra (Chephren) next to it, and that of Menkaura (Mycerinus) the smallest of the three.

The Great Pyramid was originally 481 feet, five inches tall (146.7 meters) and measured 755 feet (230 meters) along its sides. Covering an area of 13 acres, or 53,000 square meters, it is large enough to contain the European cathedrals of Florence, Milan, St. Peters, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's.

Constructed from approximately 2.5 million limestone blocks weighing on average 2.6 tons each, its total mass is more than 6.3 million tons (representing more building material than is to be found in all the churches and cathedrals built in England since the time of Christ).

The Great Pyramid was originally encased in highly polished, smooth white limestone and capped, according to legend, by a perfect pyramid of black stone, probably onyx. Covering an area of 22 acres the white limestone casing was removed by an Arab sultan in AD 1356 in order to build mosques and fortresses in nearby Cairo.

Herodotus, the great Greek geographer, visited in the fifth century BC. Strabo, a Greco / Roman historian, came in the first century AD. Abdullah Al Mamun, son of the Caliph of Baghdad, forced the first historically recorded entrance in AD 820, and Napoleon was spellbound when he beheld the fantastic structure in 1798.

According to our present knowledge the Great Pyramid is mostly solid mass, its only known interior spaces being the Descending passage (the original entrance), the Ascending passage, the Grand Gallery, a mysterious grotto, an equally mysterious subterranean chamber, and the two main chambers. These two chambers, called the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber, have unfortunately retained the misleading names given to them by early Arab visitors to the pyramid.

It is an Arab custom to bury men in tombs with a flat roof and women in rooms with a gabled roof; therefore, in the Great Pyramid, the flat-roofed granite chamber became the King's Chamber, while the gabled, limestone chamber below became the Queen's.

Even those archaeologists who still stubbornly subscribe to the tomb theory of the pyramid do not believe that a queen or anyone else was ever buried in the limestone chamber. The King's Chamber is 10.46 meters east to west by 5.23 meters north to south by 5.81 meters high (a series of measurements that precisely expresses the mathematical proportion known as the Golden Mean, or Phi).

It is built of enormous blocks of solid red granite (weighing as much as 50 tons) that were transported by a still-unknown means from the quarries of Aswan 600 miles to the south. Within the chamber, in the western end, sits a large, lidless coffer (7.5 feet by 3.25 feet, with sides averaging 6.5 inches thick) of dark black granite estimated to weigh more than three tons.

When the Arab Abdullah Al Mamoun finally forced his entry into the chamber in AD 820 - the first entry since the chamber was sealed in some long ago time - he found the coffer entirely empty. Egyptologists assume that this was the final resting place of Khufu, yet not the slightest evidence suggests that a corpse had ever been in this coffer or chamber. Nor have any embalming materials, any fragments of any article, or any clues whatsoever been found in the chamber or anywhere else in the entire pyramid that in any way indicates that Khufu (or anyone else) was ever buried there.

Furthermore, the passageway leading from the Grand Gallery to the main chamber is too narrow to admit the movement of the coffer; the coffer must have been placed in the chamber as the pyramid was being built, contrary to the normal burial custom practiced by the Egyptians for three thousand years.

The foolishness of the common assumption, that the Giza plateau pyramids were built and utilized by fourth Dynasty kings as funerary structures, cannot be overstated. It is a matter of archaeological fact that none of the fourth Dynasty kings put their names on the pyramids supposedly constructed in their times, yet from the fifth Dynasty onwards, the other pyramids had hundreds of official inscriptions, leaving us no doubt about which kings built them.

The mathematical complexity, engineering requirements, and sheer size of the Giza plateau pyramids represent an enormous, seemingly impossible leap in abilities over the third dynasty buildings. Contemporary Egyptological explanation cannot account for this leap, nor can they account for the clear decline in mathematics, engineering and size of the constructions of the fifth dynasty. Textbooks speak of "religious upheaval" and "civil wars," but there is no evidence whatsoever of these having occurred.

The attribution to Khufu of the Great Pyramid is founded solely upon three very circumstantial pieces of "evidence":

the legends told to and reported by Herodotus who visited the pyramids in 443 BC

the funerary complex near the Great Pyramid with inscriptions citing Cheops/Khufu as the reigning pharaoh

in the pyramid itself, on a granite slab above the ceiling of the main chamber, some small, roughly scribbled chalk marks that have a slight resemblance to a hieroglyphic symbol for the name of Khufu.

Pharaoh Khufu himself left no indication whatsoever that he built the Great Pyramid. He did, however, claim to have done repair work on the structure. On the nearby "Inventory" Stele (dating to about 1500 BC, but showing evidence of having been copied from a far older stele contemporaneous with the fourth dynasty), Khufu tells of discoveries made while clearing away the sands from the pyramid, of his dedication of the monument to Isis, and of his building of the three small pyramids for himself, his wife, and his daughters next to the Great Pyramid.

Regarding the chalk marks found within the pyramid, most hieroglyph experts now believe these to be forgeries left by their "discoverer" Richard Howard-Vyse, rather than being quarry inscriptions left by the original builders.

Howard-Vyse was under pressure to equal the discoveries of his rival, the Italian explorer Caviglia, who had found inscriptions in some of the tombs around the Great Pyramid.

Modern researchers now suspect that, in the battle for one-upmanship, Howard-Vyse sought to overshadow his rival and gain renewed support for his own projects with a similar but more spectacular "discovery", by forging quarry inscriptions inside the Great Pyramid. In other words, no firm evidence in any way connects the pyramids of the Giza plateau to the dynastic Egyptians.

Let us briefly consider a few matters concerning the construction of the Great Pyramid; matters which clearly indicate that the builders of fourth dynasty Egypt did not have the engineering capacity to erect the Great Pyramid (we do not have the capacity even today) and that this structure was used for a purpose altogether different from mere burial.

(Photo:Building Blocks of the Great Pyramid)

The Great Pyramid is constructed with approximately 2,300,000 limestone and granite blocks. Weighing between 2.5 and 50 tons each, these stone blocks had to be quarried from the earth. Herein lies our first unsolved problem.

In the Cairo museum one can see several examples of simple copper and bronze saws, which Egyptologists claim are like those utilized in the cutting and shaping of the pyramid blocks. These tools present a problem. On the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, copper and bronze have a hardness of 3.5 to 4, while limestone has a hardness of 4 to 5 and granite of 5 to 6.

The known tools would only barely cut through limestone and would be useless with granite. No archaeological examples of iron tools are found in early dynastic Egypt, yet even if they were, the best steels today have a hardness of only 5.5 and thus are inefficient for cutting granite.

Some years ago Sir Flinders Petrie, one of the "fathers" of Egyptology proposed that the pyramid blocks had been cut with long saw blades studded with diamonds or corundum. But this idea presents problems too. The cutting of millions of blocks would require millions of rare and expensive diamonds and corundum, which constantly wear out and require replacement.

It has been suggested that the limestone blocks were somehow cut with solutions of citric acid or vinegar, yet these very slow-acting agents leave the surface of the limestone pitted and rough, unlike the beautifully smooth surface found on the casing stones, and these agents are completely useless for the cutting of granite. The truth is, we have no idea how the blocks were actually quarried.

The unsolved problem of how the 2,300,000 very heavy blocks were transported to the building site of the pyramid is even more mystifying. How were the blocks taken to the nearly 500- foot height of the pryamids' summit?

A Danish civil engineer, P. Garde-Hanson, has calculated that a ramp built all the way to the top of the pyramid would require 17.5 million cubic meters of material, this representing more than seven times the amount of material used for the pyramid itself, and a work force of 240,000 to build it in the time allotted by Cheops' reign.

But if this enormous ramp were built, it would then require a force of more than 300,000 laborers as much as eight years to dismantle. Where would all the ramp material have been placed, since it is not to be found anywhere near the Great Pyramid? And what of manuevering the precisely carved blocks into place without damaging the corners?

Various lifting devices and levers have been proposed by modern engineers (remember, no existing dynastic records, paintings, or friezes give any clue to this mystery), but none solve the problem of how the 50-ton blocks of the main chamber were lifted and positioned using an area where only four to six workers could stand, when the strength of at least 2000 would be needed.

Next we come to perhaps the most extraordinary problem, that of the fashioning and placement of the highly polished limestone casing stones that covered the entire pyramid. The finished pyramid contained approximately 115,000 of these stones, each weighing ten tons or more.

These stones were dressed on all six of their sides, not just the side exposed to the visible surface, to tolerances of .01 inch. They are set together so closely that a thin razor blade cannot be inserted between the stones.

Egyptologist Petrie expressed his astonishment of this feat by writing, "Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians' work on the scale of acres."

Herodotus, visiting in the fifth century BC, reported that inscriptions of strange characters were to be found on the pyramid's casing stones.

In AD 1179 the Arab historian Abd el Latif recorded that these inscriptions were so numerous that they could have filled "more than ten thousand written pages."

William of Baldensal, a European visitor of the early fourteenth century, tells how the stones were covered with strange symbols arranged in careful rows.

Sadly, in 1356, following an earthquake that leveled Cairo, the Arabs robbed the pyramid of its beautiful casing of stones to rebuild mosques and fortresses in the city. As the stones were cut into smaller pieces and reshaped, all traces of the ancient inscriptions were removed from them. A great library of ageless wisdom was forever lost.

Still further evidence that the dynastic Egyptians did not construct the Great Pyramid may be found in sediments surrounding the base of the monument, in legends regarding watermarks on the stones halfway up its sides, and in salt incrustations found within. Silt sediments rising to fourteen feet around the base of the pyramid contain many seashells and fossils that have been radiocarbon-dated to be nearly twelve thousand years old.

These sediments could have been deposited in such great quantities only by major sea flooding, an event the dynastic Egyptians could never have recorded because they were not living in the area until eight thousand years after the flood. This evidence alone suggests that the three main Giza pyramids are at least twelve thousand years old.

In support of this ancient flood scenario, mysterious legends and records tell of watermarks that were clearly visible on the limestone casing stones of the Great Pyramid before those stones were removed by the Arabs. These watermarks were halfway up the sides of the pyramid, or about 400 feet above the present level of the Nile River.

Further, when the Great Pyramid was first opened, incrustations of salt an inch thick were found inside. While much of this salt is known to be natural exudation from the stones of the pyramid, chemical analysis has shown that some of the salt has a mineral content consistent with salt from the sea. These salt incrustations, found at a height corresponding to the water level marks left on the exterior, are further evidence that at some time in the distant past the pyramid was submerged halfway up its height.

Let us turn our attention briefly to the matter of the purpose or multiple purposes of the Great Pyramid, drawing for our discussion on both the exact measurements made by modern scientists and the mythic legends of the remote past. A few facts:

The sides of the pyramid are lined up almost exactly with the cardinal points of the compass. The accuracy of this alignment is extraordinary, with an average discrepancy of only about three minutes of arc in any direction or a variation of less than 0.06 percent.

The Great Pyramid functioned as an enormous sundial. Its shadow to the north, and its reflected sunlight to the south, accurately marked the annual dates of both the solstices and the equinoxes. The basic dimensions of the Great Pyramid incorporate measurements from which the earth's size and shape can be calculated.

The pyramid is a scale model of the hemisphere, incorporating the geographical degrees of latitude and longitude. The latitude and longitude lines that intersect at the Great Pyramid (30 degrees north and 31 degrees east) cross more of the earth's land surface than any other lines, thus the pyramid is located at the center of the land mass of the earth (the pyramid is built on the closest suitable site to this intersection).

The original perimeter of the pyramid equals exactly one-half minute of latitude at the equator, indicating that its builders measured the earth with extreme precision and recorded this information in the dimensions of the structure. Altogether these measurements show that the builders knew the exact dimensions of the planet as precisely as they have been recently determined by satellite surveys.

The foundation of the Great Pyramid is amazingly level., No corner of its base is more than one-half inch higher or lower than the others. Considering that the pyramid's base covers more than thirteen acres, this near-perfect leveling far exceeds even the finest architectural standards of the present day.

Measurements throughout the pyramid show that its constructors knew of the proportions of pi (3.14...), phi or the Golden Mean (1.618), and the "Pythagorean" triangles thousands of years before Pythagoras, the so-called father of geometry, lived.

Measurements show that the builders knew the precise spherical shape and size of the earth and had accurately charted such complex astronomical events as the precession of the equinoxes and the lunar standstill dates. The minute discrepancies of the lengths of the base of the pyramid (several inches over the 230 meter length of its base) reveal not an error on the part of the builders but an ingenious means of incorporating into the pyramid the "discrepancies" of the earth itself, in this case the flattening of the earth's globe at the poles.

Shafts leading upward from the two main chambers, previously thought to be air shafts for ventilation, have been shown to have another purpose. A miniature electronic robot mechanically crawled sixty-five meters up the shafts and confirmed that the south and north shafts in the Kings Chamber are pointed to Al Nitak (Zeta Orionis) and Alpha Draconis respectively, while the south and north shafts of the Queens Chamber point to Sirius and Orion.

The scientists conducting this research have shown that the layout of the three pyramids on the Giza plateau precisely mirror the position of the three main stars in the Orion constellation. (While crawling along one of the shafts in the Queens chamber, the robot's cameras photographed a previously unknown closed door that may lead to some hidden chamber.)

Readers interested in these new findings should consult The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert.

What does all this mean? Why did the ancient builders of the Giza pyramids, whoever they may have been, encode so much precise mathematical, geographic, and astronomical information into their structures? What was the purpose of the Great Pyramid?

While no authoritative answer can presently be given to this question, two intriguing matters suggest a direction for further inquiry and research. The first has to do with the persistent legends that the Great Pyramid, and especially the main chamber, were used as some sort of sacred initiation center.

According to one legend, students who had first undergone long years of preparation, meditation and metaphysical instruction in an esoteric school (the mythic "Hall of Records" hidden deep beneath the desert sands somewhere near the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx) were placed in the granite coffer of the main chamber and left alone throughout an entire night.

The coffer was the focal point of the energies gathered, concentrated, aimed, and directed at the main chamber by virtue of the precise mathematical location, alignment, and construction of the pyramid.

These energies, considered to be especially potent at certain precisely calculated periods when the earth was in a particular geometric alignment with solar, lunar, and stellar objects, were conducive to the awakening, stimulation, and acceleration of spiritual consciousness in the suitably prepared adept.

While it is now nearly impossible to spend an evening alone in the coffer of the main chamber, it is interesting to read the reports of those persons who have done so in the past. Mention will be made of experiences both terribly frightening (perhaps because of the lack of any appropriate training on the part of the experimenter) and also deeply peaceful, even spiritually illuminating.

Napoleon himself spent a night alone in the chamber. Emerging pale and dazed, he would not speak of his powerful experiences, only saying, "You would not believe me if I told you."

A second matter needing further inquiry from the scientific community studying the Great Pyramid - and one that might help explain the subject just discussed - concerns the matter of unexplained energetic anomalies frequently noticed and recorded in the main chamber.

In the 1920s, a Frenchman named Antoine Bovis made the surprising discovery that, despite the heat and high humidity of the main chamber, the dead bodies of animals left in the chamber did not decay but completely dehydrated.

Thinking that there might be some relationship between this phenomena and the position of the main chamber in the pyramid, Bovis constructed a small-scale model of the pyramid, oriented it to the same direction as the Great Pyramid, and placed the body of a dead cat at the approximate level of the main chamber.

The result was the same. As he had observed in the Great Pyramid, the cat's body did not decay.

In the 1960s, researchers in Czechoslovakia and the U.S., conducting limited studies of the geometry of the pyramid, repeated this experiment with the same results. They also found that the form of the pyramid somehow mysteriously kept foods preserved without spoiling, sharpened dull razor blades, induced plants to germinate and grow more quickly, and hastened the healing of animals' wounds.

Other scientists, in consideration of the high quartz content of the granite blocks in the main chamber and the incredible pressures those blocks are subjected to, theorized that the main chamber may have been the focal point of a powerful piezoelectric field; magnetometer measurements inside the chamber indeed showed higher levels than the normal background geomagnetic field.

Although much research remains to be done in these areas, legend, archaeology, mathematics, and earth sciences seem to indicate that the Great Pyramid was a monumental device for gathering, amplifying, and focusing a mysterious energy field for the spiritual benefit of human beings.

We do not know exactly how the pyramid and its main chamber were used, and the geometric structure of the pyramid has been subtley altered by the removal of the casing stones and the cap-stone. None-the-less, the Great Pyramid of the Giza plateau still emanates great power as a transformational power place. It has done so for uncounted thousands of years and seems destined to continue for ages to come.

Places of Peace and Power: The Sacred Site Photography of Martin Gray.

"This extensive web site features the photographs and writings of anthropologist Martin Gray, who visited and documented more than 1000 holy and magical places in 80 countries.

This comprehensive and award winning site also features comprehensive bibliographies, a rich collection of maps showing global pilgrimage places, a stunning collection of relevant links, and details regarding Martin's slide show presentations around the world."

Mysteries of lost civilizations

STONEHENGE

There are numerous examples of fascinating knowledge of ancient scientists in various fields that continue to mesmerize present day researchers.

Photo:Machu Picchu: Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

History reveals many instances when some discoveries surpassed their times. Such, for instance, was the case with a scientist named Schwerter (1636) who provided a detailed account of the main principle of telegraphy in his book "Mathematical and Technical Fun".

He wrote "such is the method which enables communication between two distant parties by means of a magnetized needle." The first telegraph was created only 200 years later.

There are numerous examples of fascinating knowledge of ancient scientists in various fields that continue to mesmerize present day researchers. One of the most bewildering puzzles that scientists face nowadays deals with construction of Egyptian pyramids.

Each block of the famous Egyptian pyramid of Cheops weighs 15-100 tons. The ceiling of the king's bedroom is made of a monolithic layer of red granite, which weighs 70 tons. Each one of those granite blocks is matched with extreme accuracy.

The Egyptian level of precision of dealing with such heavyweight stones exceeded that of modern day construction workers who work with blocs 300 times lighter by 10 times.

French historians claim that transportation of a tombstone from a sanctuary in Luxor to Paris took about two months. The transportation began in 1835. Numerous amount of people participated in the process and a chief engineer had tons of issues to deal with. This stone however was much lighter than those massive blocks which make up the pyramid.

Photo below: Another view of Machu Picchu: The City is an an altitude of 8000 feet. Most of the structures are built of granite blocks cut with bronze or stone tools, and smoothed with sand.

The blocks fit together perfectly without mortar, although none of the blocks are the same size and have many faces; some have as many as 30 corners. The joints are so tight that even the thinnest of knife blades can't be forced between the stones.

Another unique thing about Machu Picchu is the integration of the architecture into the landscape. Existing stone formations were used in the construction of structures, sculptures are carved into the rock, water flows through cisterns and stone channels, and temples hang on steep precipices.

No one knows how the stones were fitted with such precision or how they were carried up the narrow passages to such a high altitude. Source: www.mnsu.com Click and drag photo to resize.

Just as this tombstone appears tiny in comparison with monoliths comprising the pyramids, so do these monoliths appear diminutive when compared to the stone blocks utilized in Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuaman in Peru. Each one of those stone giants is six meters (20 feet) long and three meters (10 feet) wide. Each one of them is ideally placed next to each other.

The level of precision is so stunning that according to American scientist Siegfried Hunter one can hardly believe it was created by humans 500 years ago.

These Peruvian stone blocks do not appear huge if compared to the gigantic slabs used in the construction of a temple in Baalbek, on the territory of modern Lebanon. Some of the monoliths in its foundation weigh up to 750 tons. According to various historical and archaeological accounts, people who constructed those buildings were completely unaware of concrete and wheelbarrows. Therefore, it remains a mystery as to how those people managed to transport those massive stone blocs from quarries and then to neatly place them next to each other. Noone can provide a logical explanation of such phenomenon..... ......There also exist other gigantic constructions in various parts of the world. First of all, is Stonehenge in England. It is nearly 4000 year old. According to the recent analysis, this megalithic monument, comprised of several hundreds of stone blocks of various sizes represents a unique astrological observatory.

The stone blocks weigh almost 30 tons. Some of them had to be transported from a distance of 400 kilometers. Afterwards, each bloc had to be neatly trimmed and erected in a precise location.

Scientists are perfectly aware of the people who used to inhabit the area in the past. They are also aware of the fact that neither one of those peoples was capable enough to construct something of this complexity.

Besides, the level of their overall development was not advanced. People did not need an observatory. So who did build it. What for? Using what kind of technology?

Photo: Easter Island Statues: Click and drag to resize.

Here is another mystery that continues to puzzle people. In 1772 Dutch seafarer Jacob Roggewen discovered a small island at the Eastern part of the Pacific Ocean, which he had later named Easter island.

In the distant past, the overall population of the island could not have exceeded 2-3,000 people. Easter Island consists mainly of badlands and based on several examinations, it appears as though not a single tree has ever grown in the region.

Therefore, it remains unclear how islanders could transport the massive stone blocks for their famous monuments known as "moai". They surely could not have used any wooden rollers or bearings for "moai" transportation. So how were they transported?.....

.....There is also a significant amount of publications dedicated to Nazca paintings located in the south-western part of Peru and visible only from above. Famous scientist Masson is certain that one must have been given precise directions from above in order to do those paintings.....

....Here is another puzzle. In the late 50s of past century, Soviet, American and Indian scientists arrived at the conclusion that about 10,000 years ago ancestors of today"s Eskimos had inhabited the territory of modern-day mid Asia, Mongolia and Ceylon.

They did not migrate to Greenland until much later. It also appears that their migration was rather sudden. Why? What caused those people to abandon their settlements and pursue the "end of the world?"

Not a single scientist is capable of providing a logical explanation to such mystery so far. Eskimo folklore is rich with legends. Some of those legends talk about iron birds which transported their ancestors to the North.

These puzzles represent just a small part of existing mysteries. Scientists continue unveiling the greatest mysteries.

The WILLIAMS PETRADOX" or "The WILLIAMS ENIGMALITH"

The circumstances of my discovery: I found my Rock in a rural area, at least 25 feet from the nearest trail (which was dirt and faint), not near any urban areas, industrial complexes, electrical or electronic establishments, nuclear facilities, airports, or military operations (that I was aware of).

The immediate ground was undisturbed. I was hiking in shorts. One of my instruments indicated on the other side of a pair of dense bushes.

I rashly thought that the best way of reaching that area was to pass between the bushes.

However, when I tried, the bushes began to painfully poke and scratch my legs. To get through, I vigorously shuffled my feet and stumbled out onto the other side. Once on the other side, I looked down at my ankles to inspect the damage, and then noticed my Rock a few inches from my heel.

The only thing visible of the component was the tip of its three pins. I immediately recognized the pattern as being similar to that used in electrical connectors, and picked it up.

Click and drag photo to resize.

It was definitely a Rock that I had just kicked up because it had a layer of moist loose dirt and some pliable root strands sticking out of it - evidence that it had been completely buried between or very near the bushes.

I don't know how deep it was buried or the type of soil - perhaps as much as a couple of inches - or exactly where it had laid.

The bushes were fairly large, and of a species that I believe lives for many decades. Once I cleared away the loose dirt and roots, I found that my Rock was encased in a hard layer of dried mud or clay.

I later spent hours scraping, brushing, probing and washing away the mud/clay to get a clear view of my Rock and its component.

For fear of ridicule and Government and skeptics harassment and possible persecution of my family and I to rip-off or destroy my Rock and discredit me, and also to give me the time to try to find some manmade explanation for it, I quietly and secretly held on to it for several years.

Only last year, after I had exhausted my efforts to find a modern manmade duplicate of my Rock or its component, did I decide to get it professionally and objectively evaluated, and took the risks of exposing it to the public for that purpose.

OBSERVED PROPERTIES & DIMENSIONS

My Rock appears as in the photo images above. My Rock's material is solid natural quartz and feldspar granite (very little observed mica; I am not a Geologist) - not an accretion, concretion or pumice - does not contain any resins, cements, glues, limestone, mortar, or other non-granite binding agents - is very hard, is estimated to be at least 100,000 years old, and has embedded in it an electrical-like component (I assume to be a connector of some sort).

Within an error of about 0.2 mm for all dimensions, my Rock is 61 mm long, 38 mm wide (at its widest), and 22 mm high (excluding the pins/rods/prongs).

It's embedded component's rods/pins/prongs ("pins") are made of some kind of electrically conductive material (I assume to be metal) and are of steel-like appearance. The component base/matrix ("base") is a whitish ceramic or rock-like material, and is definitely not a plastic, rubber, wood, or metal type material (relatively rare for most types of modern manmade electrical components, ceramic-based components are normally limited to high temperature, high radiation, high voltage, high power, and-or ultra-longterm uses).

The component itself is 8 mm diameter; its pins are 3 mm high, spacing between the pins is 2.5 mm, and pin thickness is 1 mm. Rounding at the ends of the pins indicate some long-term wear, so 3 mm may not be their original lengths.

All pins appear to be about the same size (wide-angle lens on digital camera distorts relative size of nearer objects to more distant ones).

While there is no indication that there ever was a fourth pin or any type of keying, the Component's base is raggedly chipped where a fourth pin might have been located if there was one, and scoring on my Stone itself leading up to the chipped area indicates that at some time my Rock and its component received a forceful glancing blow.

While the chipped side appears to be flat, it is not flat - the chip is deep. Ohmmeter readings (no matter what the connection polarity) indicate either open-circuit or very high impedance between the pins (FET-type or tube-type technology? Broken circuitry inside?).

I have also injected various electronic signals through the pins without any response or reaction being detected.

Some have speculated that the component is an XLR connector. I have done much research component searching on this, and it is NOT a XLR connector - or any other connector I know of.

X-RAYS: Several people have suggested that I get my Rock x-rayed - say from a dentist or local lab. This is not as easy of a process as some make it out to be. Most would not even listen to me.

Of the several that did listen, only a few would even consider it, and all of these insisted that I would have to leave my Rock in their possession and come back later to pick it up (yeah, sure!) - something I definitely will not do.

There is no indication of any cement or glue whatsoever on or near the Component. Using an ammo reloading scale, my Rock weighs close to 2.5 ounces. There is slight magnetic attraction (using a 10-lb pull rare earth magnet), to the Component, and to the bottom of my Rock underneath the Component.

Using a Spec-Tec Blacklight Unit (Model HD-1, Spectrum Technologies), "L" setting (longwave), there is some fluorescence along the rim of the Component.

Neither my Rock nor its Component appears to glow in the dark, change colors, emit sound, light or radio wave, or feel unusually warm or cold, or have anything that rattles around inside of it (radiological properties are untested and unknown at this time).

Some have speculated that my Rock is a thermal "rock" used with small animals, but extensive searching has not produced a single commercially made heat Rock that would verify this speculation, and no such match has ever been reported to me; and if it were a heat Rock, pin-to-pin resistances would be relatively low - not at or near open-circuit.

My Rock is NOT a heat rock.

Ancient Civilizations, Giants, Tunnels Beneath Southern California?

Sure, this should have been on at least two pages but...Here we allegedly have;Giants, ancient civilizations, tunnels under Southern California, Smithsonian Suppression, general archeological supression etc. all from the same items. Here at s8int.com, we couldn't even figure out where to put this article.

It's often difficult to do anything to substantiate these items. What you will often get on the internet are simply endless copies of the same article you're investigating. We did find this, however; Jesse Nusbaum was sort of the gatekeeper archeologist of that time. His information is in the right column. If this item was real, perhaps he would have heard something about it or been asked to investigate. As it happens, among his papers held by the government is a file on "Amazing Explorations, Inc." which you will read about below. The reference was in Nusbaum's "Nut" file.

Ancient Civilization Beneath Death Valley?
EXPEDITION REPORTS NINE-FOOT SKELETONS
August 4, 1947 edition of the San Diego Union.

Photo: Newspaper clipping from San Diego Union. Click and drag photo to resize. Script from

According to the clipping, explorers had unearthed, near the Arizona-Nevada-California line, the mummified remains of strangely costumed giants which the discoverers dated to around 80,000 years ago.

The Union reported that a Howard E. Hill of Los Angeles was recounting the work of Dr. F. Bruce Russell, a retired Cincinnati physician who had originally located the first of several tunnels near Death Valley in 1931, but had not been able to return to the area until 1947.

With the help of Dr. Daniel S. Bovee, who with Hill's father had once helped open up New Mexico's cliff dwellings, Russell had recovered the remains of several men of 8 to 9 feet in height.

"These giants," said Hill, "are clothed in garments consisting of a medium length jacket and trouser extending slightly below the knees. The texture of the material is said to resemble gray dyed sheepskin, but obviously it was taken from an animal unknown today."

Hill also said, according to the Union, that in another cavern was found the ritual hall of the ancient people, together with devices and markings similar to those now used by the Masonic order. In a long tunnel were well-preserved remains of animals, including elephants and tigers. So far, Hill added, no women have been found.

He said the explorers believe that what they found was the burial place of the tribe's hierarchy. Hieroglyphics, he added, bear a resemblance to what is known of those from the lost continent of Atlantis. They are chiseled, he added, on carefully polished granite.

Text of the Article:

TRACE OF GIANTS FOUND IN DESERT

LOS ANGELES, Aug 4. (AP)-- A retired Ohio doctor has discovered relics of an ancient civilization, whose men were 8 or 9 feet tall in the Colorado desert near the Arizona-Nevada-California line, an associate said today.

Howard E. Hill. of Los Angeles speaking before the Transportation Club, disclosed that several well-preserved mummies were taken yesterday from caverns in an area roughly 180 miles square, extending through much of southern Nevada from Death Valley, Calif. across the Colorado River into Arizona.

Hill said the discoverer is Dr. F. Bruce Russell, retired Cincinnati physician, who stumbled on the first of several tunnels in 1931, soon after coming West and deciding to try mining for his health.

MUMMIES FOUND

Not until this year, however, did Dr. Russell go into the situation thoroughly, Hill told the luncheon. With Dr. Daniel S. Bovee, of Los Angeles -- who with his father helped open up New Mexico's cliff dwellings -- Dr. Russell has found mummified remains together with implements of the civilization, which Dr. Bovee had tentatively placed at about 80,000 years old.

"These giants are clothed in garments consisting of a medium length jacket and trouser extending slightly below the knees." said Hill. "The texture of the material is said to resemble gray dyed sheepskin, but obviously it was taken from an animal unknown today."

MARKINGS DISCOVERED Hill said that in another cavern was found the ritual hall of the ancient people, together with devices and markings similar to those now used by the Masonic order. In a long tunnel were well-preserved remains of animals including elephants and tigers. So far, Hill added, no women have been found.

He said the explorers believe that what they found was the burial place of the tribe's hierarchy. Hieroglyphics, he added, bear a resemblance to what is known of those from the lost continent of Atlantis. They are chiseled, he added, on carefully-polished granite.

He said Dr. Viola V. Pettit, of London, who made excavations around Petra, on the Arabian desert, soon will begin an inspection of the remains.

EXPEDITION REPORTS NINE-FOOT SKELETONS
"Hot Citizen" Nevada Paper, August 5, 1947.

Death Valley: Click and drag photo to resize.

A band of amateur archaeologists announced today they have discovered a lost civilization of men nine feet tall in Californian caverns. Howard E. Hill, spokesman for the expedition, said the civilization may be "the fabled lost continent of Atlantis".

The caves contain mummies of men and animals and implements of a culture 80,000 years old but "in some respects more advanced than ours," Hill said. He said the 32 caves covered a 180-square-mile area in California's Death Valley and southern Nevada.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS SKEPTICAL

"This discovery may be more important than the unveiling of King Tut's tomb," he said. Professional archaeologists were skeptical of Hill's story. Los Angeles County Museum scientists pointed out that dinosaurs and tigers which Hill said lay side by side in the caves appeared on Earth 10,000,000 to 13,000,000 years apart.

Hill said the caves were discovered in 1931 by Dr F. Bruce Russell, Beverly Hills physician, who literally fell in while sinking a shaft for a mining claim.

"He tried for years to interest people in them," Hill said, "but nobody believed him." Russell and several hobbyists incorporated after the war as Amazing Explorations, Inc. and started digging. Several caverns contained mummified remains of "a race of men eight to nine feet tall," Hill said.

"They apparently wore a prehistoric zoot suit--a hair garment of medium length, jacket and knee-length trousers."

CAVERN TEMPLE FOUND Another cavern contained their ritual hall with devices and markings similar to the Masonic order, he said. "A long tunnel from this temple took the party into a room where," Hill said, "well-preserved remains of dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, imperial elephants and other extinct beasts were paired off in niches as if on display.

"Some catastrophe apparently drove the people into the caves," he said. "All of the implements of their civilization were found," he said, "including household utensils and stoves which apparently cooked by radio waves."

"I know," he said, "that you won't believe that."

Article Concerning Same Cave Discovery by Different Men 10 to 15 Years Earlier
Ancient Civilization Beneath Death Valley?
Author unknown

Bourke Lee, in his book 'DEATH VALLEY MEN' (MacMillan Co., N.Y. 1932), chapter: "Old Gold", describes a conversation which he had several years ago with a small group of Death valley residents.

The conversation had eventually turned to the subject of Paihute Indian legends. At one point two of the men, Jack and Bill, described their experience with an 'underground city' which they claimed to have discovered after one of them had fallen through the bottom of an old mine shaft near Wingate Pass.

They found themselves in a natural underground cavern which they claimed to have followed about 20 miles north into the heart of the Panamint Mountains. To their amazement, they allegedly found themselves in an huge, ancient, underground cavern city.

They claimed that they discovered within the city several perfectly preserved 'mummies', which wore thick arm bands, wielded gold spears, etc. The city had apparently been abandoned for ages, except for the mummies, and the entire underground system looked very ancient.

It was formerly lit, they found out by accident, by an ingenious system of lights fed by subterranean gases. They claimed to have seen a large, polished round table which looked as if it may have been part of an ancient council chamber, giant statues of solid gold, stone vaults and drawers full of gold bars and gemstones of all kinds, heavy stone wheelbarrows which were perfectly balanced and scientifically-constructed so that a child could use them, huge stone doors which were almost perfectly balanced by counter-weights, and other incredible sights.

They also claimed to have followed the caverns upwards to a higher level which ultimately opened out onto the face of the Panamints, about half-way up the eastern slope, in the form of a few ancient tunnel-like quays.

They realized that the valley below was once under water and they eventually came to the conclusion that the arched openings were ancient 'docks' for sea vessels. They could allegedly see Furnace Creek Ranch and Wash far below them.

They told Bourke Lee that they had brought some of the treasure out of the caverns and tried to set up a deal with certain people, including scientists associated with the Smithsonian Institute, in order to gain help to explore and publicize the city as one of the 'wonders of the world'.

Furnace Creek and Wash

These efforts ended in disappointment however when a 'friend' of theirs stole the treasure (which was also the evidence) and they were scoffed at and rejected by the scientists when they went to show them the 'mine' entrance and could not find it.

A recent cloud-burst, they claimed, had altered and rearranged the entire countryside and the landscape did not look like it had been before.

When Lee last heard from the two men, Bill and Jack, they were preparing to climb the east face of the Panamints to locate the ancient tunnel openings or quays high up the side of the steep slope. Bourke Lee never did see or hear from his friends ever again.

In 1946 a man calling himself Dr. F. Bruce Russell, and claiming to be a retired physician, told a similar story about finding strange underground rooms in the Death Valley area in 1931.

He told of a large room with several tunnels leading off in different directions. One of these tunnels led to another large room that contained three mummies.

Artifacts found in the room appeared to be a combination of Egyptian and American Indian design. The most amazing thing about the mummies though was the fact that they were more than eight feet tall.

Dr. Russell and a group of investors formed "Amazing Explorations, Inc" to handle the release, and profit, from this remarkable find. But, as stories of this type usually go, Russell disappeared, and the investigators were never able to find the caverns and tunnels again, even though Russell had personally taken them there.

The desert can be very deceiving to anyone not used to traveling it. Month's later, Russell's car was found abandoned, with a burst radiator, in a remote area of Death Valley. His suitcase was still in the car.

The old TV series Death Valley Days once ran a short story about western pioneers also finding mummies in the desert. Since one of the script writers stated that "there had never been a script without a solid basis in fact", it would be interesting to find out what their source had been.

For now, these stories will have to be shrouded in mystery, along with the 21,000 year old bones found in California's Imperial Valley, also rumored to have been spirited off by the Smithsonian.

San Bernardino Caves

Kokoweef Caverns
SWORN STATEMENT OF E. P. DORR.

Below you will find a transcription of the sworn statement made by Earl Dorr as it pertained to Kokoweef Caverns. This was published in the California Mining Journal, November 1940, though written in 1934.

It is speculated that Earl was attempting to get capital at the time for his projects in the area.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

This is to certify that there is located in San Bernardino County, California, about two hundred and fifty miles from Los Angeles, a certain cave.

Traveling over state highways by automobile, the cave is reached in about ten hours.

A Civil Engineer, Mr. Morton, and I spent four days exploring the cave for more than eight miles. We carried with us Altimeters, Pedometers, and a Theodolite, with which to observe and record actual directions, take elevations and measurements by triangulation. Our exploration revealed the following facts:

1. From the mouth of the cave we descended as shown by the Altimeters to be about 2000 feet, where we encountered a canyon, which from the Altimeters and by calculations we found to be from 3000 to 3500 feet deeper; making total depth of 5400 feet from the mouth where we entered the caves to the floor of the canyon.

2. We found the cave divided into many caverns or chambers, of various sizes, all filled and embellished with Stalactites and Stalagmites, besides many grotesque and fantastic shapes that make these caves one of the wonders of the world.

.....Photo showing the interior of Kokoweef Caverns. Courtesy of Jack Russ.

3. The largest chamber we explored is about 300 ft. wide, 400 feet long and from 50 to 110 feet high. It is encrusted with crystals, fashioned into festoons of innumerable Stalactites, that hang from the ceiling, some of which are extremely large.

One, the largest seen, is 27 feet in diameter and hangs 1510 feet down into a 3000 ft. canyon. This great Stalactite is perpetually washed by water flowing down over it and falling into the dark canyon depths. The huge glistening white crystal is 500 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower, and challenged us with amazement and wonder.

4. There is a flowing river on the floor of the canyon, which rises and falls with tidal regularity. All measurements and estimates of the river, including its tides and beach sands were reckoned by triangulation, taken with the Theodolite, and while we did not reach the river, nevertheless, taking observations with our theodolite and its telescope, we reckoned the river to be about 300 feet wide at high tide and 10 feet wide at low tide. It rises and falls from 7 ½ to 8 feet. The Peysert brothers confirm our reckoning.

5. When the tide is out, there is exposed on both sides of the river from 100 to 159 feet of black sand, which the Peysert brothers report is very rich in placer gold. They report the sands on the river shore to be from 4 to 11 feet deep; and on an average about 8 feet deep.

6. There are numerous ledges above the canyon that are from 10 to 40 feet wide and covered with sand. We personally explored the ledge sands for a distance of more than eight miles, finding little variation in the depth and width of these ledge sands. And wherever examined,the ledge sands are found to be fabulously rich in placergold.

7. I have known intimately Oliver, Buck and George Peysert From my boyhood. I have discussed these caves with them repeatedly and thoroughly. They have reported to me in detail, their experience in exploring the caves.

One of them, George, lost his life in the cave. Buck and Oliver say George was killed by diving in the river on the floor of the canyon.

He struck an unseen rock, which killed him instantly. They have reported to me repeatedly their mining experiences and say they mined on the beach sands of the river a total in all of six weeks.

They carried lumber down to the river and constructed a sluice box and, using a pump, the three mined for six weeks, during which time they recovered more than %57,000 in gold, (gold at $20.00 per ounce); they sent their gold directly to the U.S. Mint and banked the returns in a bank in Needles, California, and another bank in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I last talked to them in my home about November 10th 1934, at which time they repeated their former statements, giving information as to how they discovered the river, and more of their experiences in gold mining. They recovered several of the largest nuggets of gold ever found in California.

Both Mr. Morton and myself filled our pockets with the sands from the ledges, carried it out and had it assayed. Just what Mr. Morton's sand assayed, I do not know, but it was approximately $2000. per ton.

I carried out ten pounds and two ounces of the ledge sand, and panned seven pounds, recovering more than $7.00 in gold, with gold at $20.00 an ounce. I sold the gold for $18.00 per ounce.

The balance of my ten pounds of sand I sent to John Herman, a Los Angeles Assayer. His assay certificate shows a value of $2,144.47 per yard - gold at $20.67 per ounce.

I, E. P. DORR residing at 300 Aldena Street, Pasadena California make the foregoing statements for the purpose of inducing investors to invest in the work of mining the gold in these caves, and solemnly swear that all statements made hereinabove are true and that all persons will find the physical conditions in the cave as above stated.

Redating the Sphinx

The following is a re-edited version of my report to the World History Association on the Sphinx controversy that was published in the World History Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 1994), pp. 1-4.

The Sphinx Controversy

A research team has discovered physical evidence that the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt, may date from 5000 and 7000 BCE and possibly earlier. In response, archaeologists have thrown mud at geologists, historians have been caught in the middle, and the Sphinx, having revealed one secret, challenges us to unravel even greater ones.

The Great Sphinx. Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

The discovery originated half a century ago in the work of a neglected French scholar, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1891-1962). Between 1937 and 1952, Schwaller undertook a survey of the Egyptian Temple of Luxor. His measurements of the floorplan and other detailed observations of the ruins disclosed geometrical relationships not previously suspected. These were confirmed by French archaeologists.

Schwaller found similar relationships at other sites. He reported his findings in 1949 and gave a fuller account in 1957. A reviewer for the Journal of Near Eastern Studies urged his colleagues to pay serious attention to Schwaller's work, which challenged the notion of Egypt's mathematical inferiority and suggested a new dimension to Egyptian religious belief.

But Schwaller stirred up opposition by the speculative meanings that he assigned to Egyptian architecture and inscriptions, and other scholars dismissed his findings.

Schwaller observed a curious physical anomaly in the pyramid complex at Giza. The erosion on the Sphinx, he noted, was quite different from the erosion observable on other structures. Schwaller suggested that the cause of erosion on the Sphinx was water rather than wind-borne sand.

At the time, nobody understood the implications of this observation and it went largely unnoticed until the 1970s, when the independent Egyptologist John Anthony West took up the question.

What is now the Sphinx head was probably at one time an outcrop of rock. The 240-foot body of the monument, in the shape of a recumbent lion facing east, was excavated from the limestone bedrock of the Giza plateau, forming an open enclosure around it.

A small temple, the "Sphinx Temple," stands in front of the monument. This and an adjacent temple to the south, known as the "Khafra Valley Temple," originally stood close to the Nile river.

The Valley Temple is at one end of a long 1600 foot causeway that leads to the Mortuary Temple in front of the Pyramid of Khafra (Chephren). The Sphinx and Valley Temples consist of huge limestone blocks quarried from the enclosure and refaced with Aswan granite.

To the northeast of Khafra's pyramid lies the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) and to the southwest lies the Pyramid of Menkaura (Mycerinus). Causeways also link the Khufu and Menkaura pyramids to valley temples along the ancient Nile. Archaeologists attribute the Sphinx to the Old Kingdom fourth dynasty ruler Khafra, who reigned from 2520-2494 BCE.

(John Anthony) West compared the erosion on the Sphinx, on its temples, and on the enclosure walls to the erosion of other structures on the Giza plateau. On the Sphinx and its nearby walls, the rock was worn badly, giving it a sagging appearance. Edges were rounded and deep fissures were prominent.

On structures elsewhere on the plateau, the surfaces showed only the sharper abrasion of wind and sand. Egypt experienced periods of heavy rainfall in the millennia that marked the post-glacial northward shift of the temperate zone.

This period lasted from about 10,000 to 5000 BCE and by its end the Sahara had turned from green savanna into a desert. A shorter but more intense period of rainfall lasted from about 4000 to 3000 BCE, tapering off by the middle of the third millennium.

West thought that flooding from the post-glacial transition caused the distinctive weathering on the Sphinx complex, which meant that the Sphinx must have been carved during or before the transition.

        Schoch                         West

Orthodox archaeologists refused even to consider West's hypothesis. But in 1990 West persuaded Robert M. Schoch, a geologist at Boston University, to examine the question. Curious, Schoch agreed and the two visited Giza in June 1990.

Archaeologists agreed that the Sphinx complex stood close to earlier flood levels and that flooding probably reached the base of the Sphinx on occasion. However, flood levels have declined since Old Kingdom times.

Schoch observed that erosion was heaviest on the upper parts of the Sphinx and enclosure walls, not around the base, where flooding should have undercut the monument.

This upper surface weathering was typical of damage by rainfall, as were the undulating impaction pattern and fissures on the Sphinx and nearby walls. Schoch noticed that the limestone blocks on the Sphinx and Khafra Valley Temples were similarly eroded and that some of the refacing stones appeared to have been form-fitted to the eroded blocks behind them.

Inscriptions suggest that the refacing stones dated from the Old Kingdom, which suggested that the original walls eroded long before.

On a second trip to Giza in April 1991, West and Schoch brought Thomas Dobecki, a geophysicist from Houston, Texas, to carry out a seismic survey of the enclosure foundations to determine whether the underlying rock showed evidence of precipitation damage.

The degree of subsurface weathering could be measured by bouncing sound waves off of deeper layers of rock. With the permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, the team carried out sound-wave tests through the floor of the enclosure.

Schoch and Dobecki discovered that the enclosure floor in front and alongside of the Sphinx had weathered to a depth of six to eight feet. They also discovered that the back of the enclosure had weathered only half as far. Schoch agreed that the floor behind the Sphinx had been excavated during the Old Kingdom but he concluded that the sides and front of the monument were twice as old.

Assuming a linear rate of weathering, Schoch estimated the date of the Sphinx and most of the enclosure to between 5000 and 7000 BCE, far earlier than the date of 2500 assumed by archaeology.

Schoch noted that weathering could have been non-linear, slowing as it got deeper because of the increasing mass of rock overhead. On this assumption, the Sphinx could have been significantly older than 7000 BCE.

Egyptologists dated the Sphinx to Khafra from several kinds of evidence. A stela from the New Kingdom reign of Thutmose IV (1401-1391 BCE) stands in front of the monument, and an inscription that has since flaked off contained the first syllable of Khafra's name.

Statues of Khafra found in his Valley Temple also seemed to associate the complex with Khafra, and the Sphinx head was assumed to be his as well. Finally, the causeway from Khafra's pyramid was built into the Khafra Valley Temple.

There was some uncertainty about the date even before West opened the question. Egyptologists agree that repair work to fill in fissures or to protect corroded areas on the monument took place in the New Kingdom no later than about 1400 BCE.

This gave little over a millennium for the erosion on the Sphinx to have reached such proportions as to require protective mortaring and partial covering. During much of this time, the main body of the Sphinx was probably buried in sand. The other evidence linking Khafra to the complex was circumstantial. The syllable khaf, for example, could have had other meanings.

West disproved one piece of supposed evidence. With the help of a New York City police artist, Detective Sgt. Frank Domingo, West compared the head of the Sphinx with a known head of Khafra. Sergeant Domingo generated profiles of the two heads by computer and by hand and found a very different facial structure in the profile of the Sphinx compared to the profile of Khafra. The difference is easily seen in photographs of the two heads.

West and Schoch presented their evidence with considerable trepidation before the Geological Society of America meeting in San Diego on October 23, 1991. Instead of finding some obvious flaw in their results, a number of geologists offered their support.

In newspaper interviews and private correspondence, however, other geologists raised two objections. One asked if the seismic refraction data coincided with a natural fluctuation in the rock layer itself. In fact, the seismic profile did not follow the natural dip of the rock.

Another geologist proposed that the entire Sphinx , and not just the head, was a natural outcrop of rock. Such an outcrop, known in geology as a "yardang," could have eroded for millennia before being carved.

But the Sphinx body and nearby temple blocks matched the stratification pattern of the excavated bedrock. They had clearly been carved out of the plateau along with the enclosure floor. Only the head could have been an outcrop.

Schoch believed that the head, which was too small in proportion to the body, had probably been recarved in historic times from an earlier lion's head.

As publicity for the findings began to appear, some archaeologists denied the possibility of an earlier date. "There's just no way that could be true," countered one scholar, who pointed to the absence of known government and civilization from the earlier period. "There are no big surprises in store for us," declared another scholar.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science scheduled a session to debate the issue at its annual meeting in Chicago on February 7, 1992. A leading authority on the Sphinx, Mark Lehner, director of the American Research Center in Cairo, defended an Old Kingdom date for the Sphinx.

He was joined by a geologist, K. Lal Gauri of the University of Louisville, who had studied the Sphinx for a decade. Robert Schoch and Thomas Dobecki defended their results suggesting an earlier date.

After reviewing the standard reasons for dating the Sphinx to Khafra, Lehner asked the basic question raised by his colleagues in archaeology: where was the civilization that had to have existed to carve the Sphinx and build the temples so many millennia before the Old Kingdom?

Archaeology had found no evidence of civilization in Egypt that far back. The Egyptians of the post-glacial transition were primitive "hunters and gatherers" who could not have built such a monument.

Gauri circulated a short paper that attributed the erosion on the Sphinx primarily to geochemical effects associated with either an upward seepage of groundwater or with atmospheric condensation and evaporation, which occurred even in the dry climate of the area. But in his own paper, Schoch addressed this objection.

Until recently, the water table lay too far below the enclosure floor to be a serious factor. There was evidence of condensation damage to the Sphinx and its temples, but such damage was common to all of the structures on the Giza plateau and was in his view the least serious kind of weathering. It could not account for the nature and severity of the impaction patterns on the Sphinx and its temples.

To the problem of archaeological context for an earlier Sphinx, Schoch replied that urban centers had existed in the eastern Mediterranean at Catal Huyuk from the seventh millennium and at Jericho from the ninth millennium BCE.

At Jericho there were large stone walls and a thirty foot tower. No such settlement had been found in Egypt itself but clearly there was civilization in the region. More evidence could be under millennia of Nile river silt. An advanced civilization may not have been necessary. A Neolithic culture was able to erect Stonehenge in Britain.

The AAAS meeting broke up in words that, according to The New York Times, "skated on the icy edge of scientific politeness." A writer for the AAAS magazine Science wrote that Schoch "hadn't convinced many archaeologists or geologists" of his findings.

In fact, Schoch had received offers of support from geologists after the October and February meetings. Even some archaeologists accepted his geological findings without conceding the conclusion to which they pointed. West spent the next eighteen months producing a documentary for television that attracted thirty million viewers when it aired in the United States on November 10, 1993.

The Giza monuments have long been a subject of mystery and speculation. Arabs called the Great Sphinx the "Father of Terrors," while many Western writers have seen in the Pyramids everything from tombs to secret wisdom. John Anthony West has suggested that an ice age date for the Sphinx raises anew the question of a lost ice age civilization, possibly the Atlantis of ancient legend.

The evidence dating the Sphinx to an earlier time does not prove such legends. But if the hypothesis of rainfall erosion is true, it does call the known chronology of African and indeed world civilization into question.

The evidence for an earlier Sphinx raises additional questions: If the Sphinx complex is so much older, who built it and why? Should we be more tentative in what we assume about the first half of the last ten thousand years?

If so, how should that affect what we know about the second half? Some answers may be forthcoming in the next few years as the new findings are examined and tested. Until then, the Sphinx challenges us to rethink our history and keep an open mind.

Out of Place Artifacts

Mysterious Finds, Million-of Years-Old

This story began in the summer of 1977, in a freezing compartment of the Research Institute of Arctic and Antarctic in then-Leningrad.

At that time, the Institute was situated in an old palace, in the quay of the Fantanka River. We worked for the Hydrometeorology Institute at a project site. The laboratory freezer was not empty: there were some deep-water ice examples mined through boring the Antarctic ice floes.

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That unforgettable day, there was a dispute about the age of the mined ice. One of our specialists was persuaded that the age of the of ice core was 20,000 years, while another said it was 13,000 years old, because he believed that at that time a global catastrophe took place which annihilated Atlantis and caused global glaciation.

His colleague insisted on his position based on the scientific data: 20,000 years was the age of the wooden chip from a baobab tree found in one of the ice samples. The age of the chip was ascertained utilizing the radio-carbon method.

Still, the supporter of the Atlantis theory did not give up: in earlier times, there was no ice in the Antarctic. There was probably some baobab growing there for 7,000 years, then glaciation started, and a piece of wood got to ice. So, you get 20,000 years!

This dispute made me search for some other organic material in the mined ice, though, after superficial investigation of several specimens, I did not find anything.

At that very moment, a group of visitors came to the laboratory to see the many-thousand-year-old ice. A young visitor even wanted to lick the piece of ancient ice. I forbid it pretexting some microorganisms which could have remained in ice including agents of some unknown diseases.

Apropos, the institute administration ignored this possible danger. So, I decided to take an initiative and to carry out at least the simplest research: to look at the samples through microscope.

I managed to find an ally that was a friend, a microbiologist, candidate of science. This woman wanted to write her thesis for a Doctor’s Degree. If we found some microbes in ice, that could provide her with some excellent material to add a chapter to her thesis.

Among the samples we chose for our research there was one, which we found most interesting: within it, astonishingly, there were some threads. The piece of ice melted soon, and we could see several golden wires about 2-cm-long and as thick as a human hair.

We could see through the microscope that the “hairs” were pieces of some metal wire of a goldish colour. All the wires had the same length and were cut off very accurately. While pressing upon the wire, some dents appeared, as if the wires were created of a soft metal.

Later we made a chemical test, using hydrochloric, sulphuric, nitric and acetic acids. The golden hair stood the test, and thus we had no doubt: the wires were made of gold.

Several years passed, and in the State Hydrometeorology Committee, a commission on anomalous phenomena launched its work. At one of its meetings, I told the assemblage about my find. The chairman of the committee, academician Fiodorov became interested in the find and handed it over to his friend, who was the head of Crystallography Institute of the Soviet Academy of Science.

The Institute carried out a test of the gold “wires” and concluded the material was an alloy of gold and silver. It should be noticed that in 1984, a report appeared in the press, that US researchers had also independently found golden wires in Antarctic ice.

Though, if the stories were accurate, this was not a singular sensation. Already in 1844, the British newspaper Times reported about some golden thread found in a stone, at a depth of 2.5 m in Berwickshire.

50 years later, a piece of golden wire was found in Australian limestone, while in 1957 in Africa, they were found in a piece of granite. Curiously, the age of these finds is millions of years. Apropos, even odder things are sometimes found in stones: from nails to small gold chains and vessels of some complex metal which seem to have been deposited there tens of millions of years ago.....Pravda (Edited to improve clarity)

Bronze Age Solar Observatory Found in Eastern Germany

The Nebra Sky Disk

In September of 2002, German archaeologists revealed a Bronze Age find with the potential to change modern-day thought about how the ancients viewed their relationship to the stars, moon, and sun, and how they may have used solar observatories to predict the cycle of life.

Based on its association with other Bronze Age artifacts found near Nebra, a site located about 110 miles southwest of Berlin in eastern Germany, archaeologists believe that the bronze Sangerhausen Star Disk may be 3,600 years old.

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Despite having been discovered about four years ago by metal detectorists illegally working the site, it was not until July of 2002 that authorities seized the artifact, along with two swords, two axes, a chisel, and a set of arm-rings, and arrested the people who had plundered the site. Only then were archaeologists able to pinpoint exactly where the looters had unearthed the plate-like disk and begin excavating the site.

Thus far, archaeologists have uncovered a circular earthen embankment some 200 yards in diameter, which encloses the entire site and includes a series of ramparts and ditches that were used continually from 1,600 to 700 BC.

Valued at about $10 million, the disk’s images were embossed with gold leaf. They display the sun (or a full moon), a crescent moon, the horizon, and 32 stars, several of which may represent the Pleiades, the star cluster used by Bronze Age peoples to predict the timing of autumn and the fall harvest.

If determined to be authentic, the Star Disk could be the earliest astronomical map in existence, and the forested site where it was found—Mittelberg hill—might be the home to the oldest surviving solar observatory.

Speculating that the structure was a celestial observatory, astronomer Wolfhard Schlosser from the University of Bochum, said, “The site’s special aspect can be seen in the correct determination of at least two important dates. On June 21, the sun can be seen from here to set exactly behind the Brocken, the most important mountain in the Harz, and on May 1, the sun sets behind the Kulpenberg, the highest hill of the Kyffhäuser.”

Superficially, then, the Nebra site has similarities to other henge sites in Europe, including Stonehenge and Avebury, both of which were enclosed with earthen banks and ditches. However, since the German site was constructed with timber logs rather than stone slabs, it is more similar to Woodhenge, an ancient site in England where timber uprights were erected instead of stone.

The Purpose of the Disk

While scholars have wrestled with the possibility that such megalithic sites functioned as some sort of celestial observatory, they have been unable to offer concrete physical proof to bolster their theories. So the association of the Star Disk with the henge-like structure at Nebra may be just the breakthrough they have been seeking. The images on the Star Disk may even correlate with the view of the night sky as seen from Mittelberg hill during the Bronze Age.

Besides identifying several astronomical bodies on the bronze disk, scholars have offered a variety of interpretations about the two curved shapes depicted opposite each other on the object. According to Professor Schlosser, the two gold bands represent an angle of 82.5°.

This represents the circle of the daily period passing from the summer solstice on June 21 to the winter solstice on December 21 in central Germany. A third more curved gold band lies between the two horizon arcs, and may represent either the Milky Way or a ship sailing between the horizons across the nocturnal celestial ocean.

Archaeologist Harald Meller, director of State Museum for Prehistory in Halle, Germany, believes that both the circular building and the Star Disk were used by the ancients to track the sun’s movement from winter to summer solstices, providing information on when to sow and harvest their crops.

Findings from the Nebra excavations will be published in early 2003, and a conference on the subject is planned for 2004 in Halle, Germany, where the Star Disk is currently being studied.

Future plans for the site near Nebra include reconstructing the solar observatory and turning the hilltop into a tourist attraction so that visitors will be able to experience how the structure may have functioned during prehistoric times.

Perhaps by then, sufficient evidence will exist to determine whether the bronze plate is authentic and confirm both its original purpose and that the henge site was used by the ancients as a solar observatory. Its broader implications may change the way archaeoastronomers understand the prehistoric world, how megalithic monuments were used, and whether or not the ancients had an intellectual sophistication that modern humans have yet to define.

More Ancient Stoneworking Technology

Hard Facts - Lathe Turned Stone Housewares

Lathe, machine tool that shapes metal, wood, or other material by rapidly turning it against a stationary cutting device. The material to be shaped on a lathe is called the workpiece.

Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

Lathes are one of the oldest and most important of machine tools. Lathes can shape, drill, bore, grind, and perform other operations. Woodworking lathes were used as early as the Middle Ages (from about the 5th century to the 15th century). These lathes were usually powered by using a treadle, a foot-powered lever that, when pushed down, drove a mechanism that turned the lathe.

By the 16th century lathes were powered continuously by hand cranks or waterpower, and were equipped with a cutting-tool holder that enabled more precise shaping of the workpiece.

As the Industrial Revolution began in England during the 17th century, The 18th-century lathes were developed that could shape a metal workpiece. development of the heavy industrial metal-cutting lathe made possible precision manufacture, interchangeability of parts, and mass production…Encarta

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"In the Cairo museum and in other museums around the world there are examples of stone ware that were found in and around the step pyramid at Saqqarra. Petrie also found pieces of similar stoneware at Giza.There are several special things about these bowls, vases and plates.

They show the unmistakable tool marks of a lathe manufactured item. This can easily be seen in the center of the open bowls or plates where the angle of the cut changes rapidly - leaving a clean, narrow and perfectly circular line made by the tip of the cutting tool.

These bowls and stone dishes/platters are some of the finest ever found, and they are from the earliest period of ancient Egyptian civilization. They are made from a variety of materials - from soft, such as alabaster, all the way up the hardness scale to very hard, such as granite.

Working with soft stone such as alabaster is relatively simple, compared to granite. Alabaster can be worked with primitive tools and abrasives. The elegant workings in granite are a different matter and indicate not only a consummate level of skill, but a different and perhaps more advanced technology.

Here is a quote from Petrie:

"...the lathe appears to have been as familiar an instrument in the fourth dynasty, as it is in the modern workshops."

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Stoneware such as this has not been found from any later era in Egyptian history - it seems that the skills necessary were lost.

Some delicate vases are made of very brittle stone such as schist (like a flint) and yet are finished, turned and polished, to a flawless paper thin edge - an extraordinary feat of craftsmanship.

At least one piece is so flawlessly turned that the entire bowl (about 9" in diameter, fully hollowed out including an undercut of the 3in opening in the top) balances perfectly (the top rests horizontally when the bowl is placed on a glass shelf) on a round tipped bottom no bigger than the size and shape of the tip of a hen's egg !

This requires that the entire bowl have a symmetrical wall thickness without any substantial error! (With a base area so tiny - less than .15 " sq - any asymmetry in a material as dense as granite would produce a lean in the balance of the finished piece.)

This kind of skill will raise the eyebrows of any machinist. To produce such a piece in clay would be very impressive. In granite it is incredible."

Colossus of Ramesses II

The Colossus of Ramesses is an enormous statue carved in limestone. It is about 10m (33.8 ft) long, even though it has no feet, and is located near the village of Mit Rahina. A small museum has been built to house this magnificent piece. The fallen colossus was found near the south gate of the temple of Ptah, located about 30m from the huge limestone statue of Ramesses. Some of the original colors are still partly preserved.

This piece was found in 1820 by an Italian traveler Giovanni Caviglia. Mohammad Ali donated the statue to the British Museum, but the task of moving the piece prevented the British from taking it to England. It is located in the archaeological zone of Memphis in the museum built to protect it.

The colossus is an incredible piece of work. Ramesses is portrayed in the prone position, but the piece is unfinished. How the piece was made often eludes most guests who visit the statue. One sculptor, Stuart M. Edelson, has worked with stone for over 20 years. He has made the following comment that helps detail what had to be done to make such a sculpture:

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"Anyone who has never carved stone might marvel most the quarrying of the many-ton block, and then at the task of roughly hewing it into shape, tasks which must have been gargantuan. Of course, this impressed me, but the drudgery of rough carving spoke to me of an effort that could have been achieved by any gang of workers sufficiently numerous, supervised, and driven. Persistence on this grand scale is not uncommon. The distinction of the Ramesses colossus lay elsewhere.

The essence of this great statue lies in the many square yards of carved surface. Faced with a task of such magnitude, a cold sweat would form on the brow of any modern worker in stone. I scrutinized a ten-foot-long portion of the royal leg. Along its entire length no flaw distracted from the grace and power of the sinewy, kingly stride, and I knew something of the difficulty with which such perfect surfaces could only be achieved.

Among the many problems presented by this stone, it likes to chip unpredictably to the terror of the sculptor who would shape it. The stone was familiar to me. I had worked on a small piece of similar but softer material the year before, and the twenty years' experience that went into my small sculpture provided an insight into the true greatness of the colossus before me.

I had spent countless hours vainly trying to grind out by machine the countless ripples that had formed in the carving process - on a much smaller expanse of softer stone. Only after much experimentation with various abrasives and finally with different rhythms of sanding was I able to produce the smooth surfaces essential to the overall impact of the work. Even on the small scale the effort involved was enormous.

When modern, mechanized marble yards cut, smooth and polish stone the size of the Ramesses, the shapes are either flat or they are featureless columns. It is done with power tools the size of houses and even then the work is painstaking, time-consuming and risky. Here, the ancients achieved perfection with hand-held stones and crushed abrasives applied to sticks. And the shapes wrought were the complex, subtle forms of the human anatomy.

How these master carvers achieved perfect surfaces on this scale with simple tools was beyond my comprehension. My own twenty years' experience provided no clue. But clearly this was not the work of slaves. This forty-foot length of stone could only have been brought to life through the sensitive hand and watchful eye of a master sculptor, and with a great deal of loving care.

Unlike so many works on a herculean scale, this Ramesses allowed for no imprecision in areas the sculptors knew could not be seen. The hidden places were equally finely finished. There were no technical concessions to the many near-insuperable problems that had to be faced. Looking at the supreme craftsmanship that went into the body's hidden recesses as well as its conspicuous visible areas, it was clear to me that all involved in making this image had the integrity and wisdom worthy of the god the great king was meant to represent."

Kansas "Mystery Stone" and Enormous Underground Irish Temple

Enormous Irish Temple Discovered Underground

An enormous temple that was once surrounded by 300 towering oak posts lies directly underneath the Hill of Tara in County Meath, Irish archaeologists recently announced.

Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source

While the site is home to many known archaeological treasures, this latest discovery reveals that even more exist underneath the sacred hill.

Conor Newman, an archaeology lecturer at the National University of Ireland at Galway, located the temple, which he believes dates from 2500 to 2300 B.C. Since 1992, Newman has been preparing a survey of the area for the state-funded Discovery Programme. He found the Tara monument using an underground radar device.

According to a report last week in The Irish Examiner, the egg-shaped temple at its greatest width measures 186 yards. While the oak posts that probably once comprised an entire forest have long since disappeared, the existing post holes indicate each tree was approximately 6.6 feet wide.

The exact use of the monument remains unclear, but Newman and Aoife Kane of the Discovery Programme speculate that it held some ritualistic meaning.

"For thousands of years the region has been home to some of Ireland's richest farming land," Kane told Discovery News. "It is likely that farmers had the time and means to build such a monument for ritualistic purposes."

Breandán Mac Suibhne, program coordinator for the Keough Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, said that such rituals were probably related to fertility.

In fact, one of Tara's most famous monuments is the phallic-shaped Lia Fáil, or Stone of Destiny. It likely played a role in early fertility rituals, and was later probably used to initiate the area's earliest kings.

Mac Suibhne explained, "The fertility idea merged into politics, as kings were believed to marry the land."

An overwhelming 142 kings were said to have reigned at Tara during prehistoric and historic times. Like the Stone of Destiny, the newly discovered temple may have evolved in meaning over time.

Newman told the Examiner, "(It) still had a big physical presence even after the posts were taken out or rotted." He added, "It fills a very important place in the jigsaw because it allows us to make sense of the distribution of other monuments all around it."

In addition to the temple and the Stone of Destiny, the Hill of Tara houses the remains of a number of large ring forts and tombs. Several other standing stones are at the site as well. Legend has it that would-be kings had to race their chariots towards two such stones.

According to Mac Suibhne, the site lost political importance around the 10th century as Dublin grew in prominence.

But, he added, "The Hill of Tara's sacred past and symbolic importance — representing Irish nationhood — remain with us today."

The Mystery Stone Of Beverly, Kansas

Mystery Stone's Writing Predates Columbus' Trip

LEOTI -- Nearly every school kid learns the name of the first European explorer to visit the state -- none other than Spanish conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, who explored Kansas in 1541, according to most history books.

Or was he?

Mystery Stone. Click and drag photo to resize.

After seven years of research, Leoti amateur historian Dean Jeffries has suggested a different theory -- one that puts Europeans in Kansas more than 1,000 years before Coronado's landmark journey.

Jeffries contends that ancient European sun-worshippers who crossed the states in about A.D. 500 inscribed an old stone tablet reportedly dug up in a Lincoln County field nearly 80 years ago.

If accurate, Jeffries' theory would send historians scrambling to rewrite history books, whose conventional wisdom maintains Europeans didn't begin exploring the New World until Italian-born Christopher Columbus's epic journey resulted in the so-called "discovery" of America in 1492.

"I know what they teach is that nobody was here before Columbus," Jeffries said last week. "But that can't be the case. I have a little problem with hidebound historical orthodoxy."

Earlier this month, the 64-year-old Jeffries released a translation of the 16-symbol inscription on the tablet, which he claims is engraved in an ancient language once common in the Iberian peninsula and known as Gaelic Punic. Jeffries contends the tablet marks the grave of a fallen comrade.

"It's a death chant, and that's not uncommon in ancient cultures," said Jeffries, an electrician by trade. "I think it was a Norse who used a drum to raise the dead, and in the Bible we had Gabriel's horn. And then the Romans under Julius Caesar would sing a loud song when they went into battle."

Known as the Beverly mystery stone, the tablet allegedly was unearthed by a farmer in the Beverly community as late as 1920, although Jeffries acknowledges the date of the artifact's discovery could be in dispute, as is the exact location of the discovery of the unusual piece of antiquity, measuring 11 by 9 inches.

"One thing I don't do is dig," Jeffries said. "I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a person who deals with old languages."

At some point after 1920, the stone was donated to the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, where the artifact remained undisplayed as the unauthenticated curiosity in the archeology department for more than seven decades, said retired state archaeologist Tom Witty.

"This thing comes to life on a cyclical bases," Witty said. "It sat on a shelf back there, and I think it was the freshness of the engraving and the cleanness of the stone that made it look too fresh."

Witty said the stone, which he first examined in 1960, also lacked any weathering or oxidation characteristics, which would be evident on any similar stone exposed to the elements for 1,500 years.

"The fact that the inscription looked strange to me could be my own ignorance about ancient languages," Witty said last week. "But based on the visual evidence of the stone, I would say this piece lacks the antiquity suggested by Jeffries."

Since 1993, the stone has been on loan to the Lincoln County Historical Society for display in the Kyne House Museum in Lincoln, the county seat.

On April 9, Jeffries spoke publicly for the first time regarding his interpretation of the stone's history at the ceremony marking the grand opening of a museum annex.

More Curiously Advanced Ancient Maps (with Monsters)

Satellite Imaging Techniques are Shedding New Light on an Ancient Map of the Northeast Atlantic

Click and drag photo to resize.The 1539 Carta marina by Olaus Magnus is on display at Carolina Rediviva, the library of the University of Uppsala, Sweden.

The ornate map, seemingly crude by today’s standards, depicts sea monsters off the coast of Scotland, sinking galleons, sea snakes, and wolves urinating against trees.

When oceanographers from Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the University of Rhode Island compared a large group of swirls, shown on the chart off the east coast of Iceland, with thermal images from an Earth observation satellite they found the swirls corresponded almost perfectly with the Iceland-Faroes Front - where the Gulf Stream meets cold waters coming down from the arctic.

The cartographer, Olaus Magnus, an exiled Swedish priest living in Italy, had a dislike of blank canvases and covered every available space with ink. But Professor Tom Rossby, from the University of Rhode Island, believes not every elaborate quill stroke was artistic licence.

’Their location, size and spacing seem too deliberate to be purely artistic expression. Nowhere else on the chart do these whorls appear in such a systematic fashion, ’

’They are the earliest known description of large scale eddies in the ocean - these are huge bodies of water, 100km in diameter, that turn slowly. It seems the lines were deliberately drawn to aid navigation.’

’We know mariners were aware of these fronts but they would not have the tools to quantify them nor the means to express them,’ he said.

The work, part funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, came about while Tom was discussing the Iceland-Faroes Front at a workshop in Bergen, Norway. Shortly afterwards Tom was reading ’Cod’, the international bestseller by Mark Kurlansky. The book contains an illustration of the Carta Marina.

’When I turned the page and saw the map I said, ’holy ---! These are identical to our satellite images!’ I don’t think I would ever have registered this had I not been in Bergen.’

Tom explained that in 1539 people did not understand the importance of some of the details in the map.

’The whorls in the map quickly lost significance. When the map was reissued in 1572 everything, including sea monsters, was faithfully reproduced, but the huge eddies had disappeared.’

The Carta Marina took 12 years to complete and contains an extraordinary amount of information. The list of towns’, lakes and regions is far more comprehensive than any map preceding it or following until well into the seventeenth century.

It is one of the first maps to give Finland and parts of Russia roughly correct proportions and it is the first map to fully portray the Baltic Sea, the Finnish Gulf and the Gulf of Bothnia in the north.

Northern Scotland, the Hebrides, Orkneys, Faroes and Greenland are described in detail, but so oddly is a non-existent island, Tile. This island may be related to the mythical northern community Thule. To the ancient Greeks, Thule was the northernmost habitable region of the world. Curiously, its location on the map puts it near St. Kilda in the Hebrides.

The oceans contain a similar richness of information. The map reveals details of shipping routes at the time and warns sailors of drift ice in the north - illustrated by a stranded polar bear on a floe. Whales, sea lions, walruses, crabs and lobsters are also depicted.

The giant sea snakes and other monsters are taken directly from the imagination of fishermen and sailors, though some researchers suggest these monsters may reflect commercial tensions at the time between the Hanseatic League* and England. It has also been noted that the monsters are only attacking vessels from countries that had joined the reformation.

Dr Peter Millar from the Remote Sensing Group at Plymouth Marine Laboratory became involved in the project when Tom needed accurate thermal information on the water temperatures in the region.

’There is always a great deal of cloud over the northeast Atlantic so it is difficult to get a clear image of the whole region. I merged images over the course of a month to get a complete picture. Things got exciting when I was able to provide Tom with an image of the eddy field. The data confirmed Tom’s theory that the swirls on the map were not artistic licence,’ said Peter.

Peter explained that the waters coming up from the south can be as much as five degrees warmer than the cold currents from the north. At the point they meet these huge eddies form. Sailors would have been aware of these large rotations of water as they affected navigation. When a heavy, slow moving craft sailed through the front its course would be affected by as much three points on the 32 point compass used at the time.

Peter said, ’They would notice a change in colour of the water too. Warm water from the south is a darker blue than cold water. The temperature difference means marine life will vary across the front and, right at the front, deep nutrient rich waters move up to the surface supporting phytoplankton and grazing zooplankton. This ready food supply brings pilot whales and other marine creatures to the area to feed.’

Tom has started a new investigation of these fronts working collaboratively with the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen.

’We want to know more about the currents and movements of these waters. We are laying down subsurface drifters that will be tracked acoustically. This is to see how waters get drawn into the region and organise themselves into the front. These floats will tell us how these waters spread out into the Greenland Sea and Norwegian Sea.’

Ancient Map of Africa Poses Questions

The unveiling in South Africa's parliament on Monday of a replica of an ancient Chinese map of the then known world which includes a recognisable outline of Africa is raising intriguing questions of which foreigners first explored the continent.

"The idea is to take us beyond what we have been ... brainwashed into believing" declared Speaker Frene Ginwala at the opening of the exhibition, which includes other maps and rock art.

The "Da Ming Hun Yi Tu", the Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, dates back to 1389, decades before the first European voyages to Africa.

Click and drag photo to resize.

Among recognisable features are the Nile River and South Africas Drakensberg mountain range.

The map also shows a great lake, covering almost half the continents land mass. Researchers suggest it may have been drawn on the basis of an Arab legend that stated "farther south from the Sahara Desert is a great lake, far greater than the Caspian Sea".

(The biggest lake in Africa, Lake Victoria, is in fact only a fifth of the size of the Caspian Sea.)

"We have the worlds best researchers working on it," said parliaments senior researcher Heindri Bailey, who was hesitant about drawing conclusions from it.

"Until we are able to gain the knowledge we wont speculate on it."

The original of the map is housed in Beijing where it has remained wrapped up, sealed and stowed behind a locked door since the fall of Chinas last emperor in 1924. Fewer than 20 people have had access to it since then.

The digitised reproduction of the map on silk is almost four metres (around 12 feet) high and more than four metres across.

Place names are written mostly in Manchu, a now virtually extinct language, and still in need to be translated.

Karen Harris of the historical and heritage studies department at the University of Pretoria said that as early as the 1st century AD records had been found in China mentioning places in Africa.

"They had the capability, definitely," she said. "Theres not so much evidence to prove it, but it isnt a closed book yet."

A picture dated 11 November 2002 shows a detail on the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu (the Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire) dating back to 1389 which is arguably the oldest world map in existence that accurately reflects the African continent.

Harris said that at the time the Chinese were seeking tribute and not trade for the emperor and therefore would not have set up bases or left behind significant markings as was the case with Europeans.

This, she said, would make it difficult to uncover evidence in support of Chinese having been there, adding: "You wouldn't find human remains because the Chinese took their bodies back to their ancestral lands."

But Bailey said some circumstantial evidence existed in South Africa to suggest the Chinese had navigated around Africa long before Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.

"Chinese pottery has been found in (South Africas northern) Limpopo Province dating back to around the 13th century and there's rock art in the Eastern Cape depicting Chinese-looking characters," Bailey said.

British amateur researcher Gavin Menzies, a submarine engineer, argues in "1421", a book which came out this month, that Chinese admiral Zheng He circumnavigated the globe between 1421 and 1423, 100 years before the crew of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who was killed en route.

Zheng He, a eunuch who never travelled with fewer than 300 ships, the biggest carrying 1000 people, is long known to have visited Asia, India, Gulf countries, and Somalia, from where he took back giraffes and lions.

The official history also mentions "Franca" (France and Portugal) and Holland, with the Hollanders described as tall people with red hair and beards.

To meet them in their homeland, Zheng He would have had to sail round the southern tip of Africa.

This is the first time that a copy of the map has been shown outside China. The original is a derivative of an even earlier one dated 1320, which was believed to have been destroyed.

That was before Zheng He's birth (he lived from 1371 to 1435), which deepens the mystery.

Some of the later European maps on show in parliament illustrate dragons, snakes and one-eyed monsters in the inland regions.

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROCK WALL

Immense Rock Wall Gave Rockwall, Texas Its' name

Back in the mid-1850’s an immense, mostly buried rock wall encompassing an area of up to 20 square miles was discovered at Rockwall, Texas—or so it was named after the discovery. People of that time up and up to today thought it was the remnants of some ancient, long lost civilization. Current day geologists, generally believe that it is simply a geological feature though they are short on a theory or mechanism for its creation. Scientists in a knee-jerk fashion often label these types of phenomena “natural”.

Others, in a knee-jerk fashion label these types of phenomena “remnants of ancient civilizations”. This feature has been known about for longer than 150 years and there hasn’t been much scientific interest for some reason.

Here at s8int.com. we don’t know if its manmade, natural or some combination—but it is interesting. There are certainly some features of the wall which in our unexpert opinion leads us to believe somebody at the very least modified it in ancient times.

Click and drag photo to resize.

The rock wall is a rectangular structure approximately 3.5 miles wide by 5.6 miles long encompassing almost 20 square miles.

This fascinating and unusual structure after which Rockwall, Texas was named poses some significant questions:

Is this wall natural or artificial?
Is there an exciting archeological site buried right here in our own state?
Could this be the wall of an ancient city?
Or, has nature given us a natural wonder, unlike any other found in North America?

“Let us consider Rockwall, Texas, a small town named for a strange wall, mostly buried, that exists in the area. We have had inquiries about this structure but have little in the way of substantial data.

Just arrived is a facetious newspaper item that relates how, some 50 years ago, R.F. Canup excavated part of this wall. He dug 8 feet down and eventually unearthed about 100 feet of the wall. That was enough to convince him that it was the masonry wall of an ancient city.

Geologists, on the other hand, ridicule this idea, saying it is only a natural rock formation.

(Streater, Don; "Geologists Burst Rockwall's Bubble," Beaumont Enterprise, September 8, 1986. Cr. S. Parker via L. Farish.)

Comment. What we really need are some authoritative geological and archeological reports. Have any professionals ever visited the site? It seems incredible that Canup could have mistaken a natural rock wall for an artificial one! “

The Discovery of the "Rock Wall"

The picture shows two metal rings that were discovered during the walls excavation. These rings are approximately 10" in diameter and 6" respectively. The rings were embedded within the stones that make up the wall. The rings composition has been analyzed. Their material makeup is (SN "Tin"), (Ti "Titanium") and (Fe "Iron").
These were previously held pictures and only now are coming to public view. How do you think they (the metal spheres) got there?

Of the early settlers, there were three Newcomers, T.U. Wade, B.F. Boydston and a Mr. Stevenson that had arrived to establish a farming community. In 1852, T.U. Wade and his family began building their house on the east side of the east fork of the Trinity River valley near the western edge of the present townsite of Rockwall which is just north of today's Highway 66.

In the process of digging the homestead well, Mr. Wade hit a stone formation. Further digging and investigation discovered a "rock wall" below the surface which ran at an extended length.

At the time, Stevenson, Boydston and Wade were at odds with each other, each wanting to name the town after themselves. On the discovery of the "rock wall" they decided to name the town Rockwall and resolve their differences. (J.Glenn, 1950)

Even though the "rock wall" at that time had outcroppings around the area that stood two to three feet tall with their capstones in place, no connection had been made to the extent and scope of this fence-like appearance much less at being an actual wall.

The following is information gathered from Mary Pattie (Wade) Gibson, granddaughter of T.U. Wade, founder of the wall at the Rockwall County Historical Foundation. She described the additional digging her grandfather and other men did at the homesite.

In this description were cubicles or rooms constructed of stone which you could walk through and would reach a corridor which seemed to run in a direction into the hill that the town square sits above.

She told of an incident in 1906 of two unidentified men digging out the corridor which had apparently been filled with erosion. Their intent was to reach a room or cavity under the town which would be full of gold, apparently derived in part from Indian legend.

The ceiling of the corridor had steep slopes (describing a Gothic type arched ceiling, much like the Mayans built), and the further into the corridor the two men excavated the steeper the slope of the ceiling became, consequently, the men fearful of a structural failure abandoned their search for gold.

Mary Pattie Gibson also spoke that her grandfather's exploration of the wall, discovered on the outside, the wall went straight down. On the inside she described the wall going down to about forty feet, curves inward and becomes much thicker.

This sounded like a buttress effect that has been used to support high standing structures and implies direction and transfer of liveloads.

Additional information provided by the daughter of the late Mr. Deweese, an early settler of Rockwall, who described a doorway with a diagonal shaped stone in the wall at the Wade residence on Highway 66. This portion of the wall was open to visitors from 1936 until the late 1940's, and was consequently back filled because of dangerous structural conditions.

Artists conception of a part of the wall-from photos. Click and drag photo to resize. Mr. Henry Squires, a native of Rockwall and an accomplished historian to the area identified an outcropping of the wall on a county road in the northeast portion of Rockwall County. Here a well had been dug in 1897 by Mr. Deweese, assisted by Mr. T.H. Meredith. The well was dug on the outside of the wall (the east side of the east perimeter wall).

Before digging the well, they dug a shaft through a cross section of this larger wall, but the stones were wet and so heavy, after about thirty feet, they abandoned the work of drawing the stones out of the shaft.

They directed the remainder of the shaft to the outside of the wall to complete a well. At about thirty- five feet down they discovered an almost perfect square opening through the wall, which has been referred to as a "window."

The opening was two feet square, in a two foot section of the wall. The total depth of the shaft was forty-two feet, but they did not find the bottom of the structure. (J.Glenn, 1950).

Click and drag photo to resize.

In 1949, a Mr. Sanders of Fort Worth, Texas, did an excavation of the wall. From this excavation four large stones were brought up with the largest weighing approximately two tons. On these stones were found inscriptions with what appear to be pictographs.

These extremely dense stones have been underground, therefore erosion has not been the cause of the designs on them, Moreover, there are no other stones or portions of the wall with inscriptions or diagrams that have been discovered to date. (J. Glenn, 1950)

There are other reports of doorways or windows found in the wall through the past 100 years such as reported in the Dallas Morning News, 5 November 1967 by Frank X. Tolbert, "Back in the 1920's, T.H. Meredith said a well was dug on his farm just east of the town of Rockwall, and Mr. Meredith declared that the digging went along side a masonry wall which seemed to have an arch over a doorway or window."

Quotes from scientists who are presently involved with or have inspected the excavation and research to date of effort to expose the "Rockwall":

"The exposed wall is quite spectacular to see first hand and determining its origin, genesis and age invokes a number of exciting research opportunities that can certainly advance our understanding of this type of phenomena.

The most important fact, however, is the point that geologists actually do not know the precise processes that created this feature; and, therefore, a systematic and detailed study of a section of the wall has the potential to expand our knowledge and reveal new data not considered heretofore"
Randall Moir Ph.D Archaeologist - Dallas, Texas

"It is good when examples like Rockwall appear that test our abilities and cause us to question basic Newtonian Mechanistic assumptions that have not been modified for over 150 years. Physics had to abandon this approach at the turn of this century, opting instead for relativity and quantum mechanics in order to further their understanding of matter and the universe.

These two theories are currently undergoing radical revision behind the scenes because of new discoveries that do not fit that paradigm. We would do well to embrace the new physics to help us explain things that we have swept beneath the rug for too long before we lose all credibility."
.

ADDENDA

Even the town's website www.Rockwall.com had only a short passing mention of this wall after which the town was named.

Upon arriving in town, we asked 3 or 4 people that we met about the wall. One did not seem to know what I was talking about. The other three appeared to know something about it, but when I asked them where I could see this wall, none really knew for sure.

They gave me some suggestions, but I never saw a piece of the orignial wall. It was so frustrating!

All we ended up seeing was about a 10 X 3 ft section that had been dug up and relocated to the town square. If it was reproduced in much the same arangement that it was found, it does not take a genius to determine that it was not there "naturally".

I can not believe that the town of Rockwall sits on what could be one of the most important archeologial sites in the country, and they don't even seem to care, when a few days or weeks of careful digging would probably reveal whether or not this wall was man-made or natural.

It would also generate an incredible amount of tourism to the area either way. I suspect the fact that there are several high dollar homes built over a good portion of the wall is a factor, but c'mon. I'm praying someone will endeavor to explore what is there.

I'm sure the stones have an interesting story to tell. If you know of anyone from that area that can show me where I can view a part of the original wall, I'd sure appreciate it.

Chinese Pyramid Complex Rivals/Mirrors Giza Complex

Chinese Pyramid Complex Near Taiyuan Space Center

1. It is apparent from Chapter IV; Section II of the Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, that the “tower” being constructed in Shinar was in fact a means of surviving another world inundation from God; therefore a global system of refuge from another flood was required…at least so says Nimrod. Hence the need for Nimrod’s cities of refuge.....at least I term it this way. Nimrod City Far West (Central America)…Mexico’s pyramids (towers) will be included later.

Left, Giza Complex, Right, Pyramid Complex near Taiyuan Space Center in Shanxi Province.
There are nearly 70 pyramids shown here at the Chinese site. Click and drag photo to resize.

2. These cities were constructed in nearly the same general time frame, and for the same reasons as outlined in Josephus. Nimrod wasn’t a complete idiot. He wasn’t attempting to reach Heaven…merely to survive another one of the Lord’s bad days…so to speak.

Nimrod maintained that God was really a nice person…at least most of the time. Folks down here (Earth) must however always be ready when He became somewhat out of sorts concerning Man. In other words although He said He wouldn’t flood the world again, are you willing to bet your life of this crucial element of faith? Best build and be safe.

4. What never really occurred to Nimrod in the midst of all this building is that all this energy is really wasted if God did in fact mean what He said concerning His decision never to flood the world again.

5. On a more serious note: the history of the world and mankind on this earth is in complete error.

6. (Hope Nimrod’s global pyramid refuge system is also fire-proof).
Cliff Paiva BSM Associates

Pyramids Previously Reported by American Pilot

Following the end of World War II, one of the first newspapers to break the story in the United States was the Rocky Mountain News. In a news item published March 31, 1947, it carried a close-up picture of a large pyramid photographed by aviator Maurice Sheahan, Far Eastern director of Trans-world Airlines, with accompanying text:

Chinese Pyramid. Click and drag photo to resize.

The giant pyramid reported discovered by an American aviator flying over Shensi Province in China is in a land of pyramids, the heart of ancient Chinese civilization.

If the pyramid is located by exploring parties on the ground, it probably will never rival the famous pyramids of Egypt as a tourist sight. The Chinese pyramids of that region are built of mud and dirt and are more like mounds than the pyramids of Egypt, and the region is little traveled.

American scientists who have been in the area suggest that the height of 1000 feet, more than twice as high as any of the Egyptian pyramids, may have been exaggerated, because most of the Chinese mounds of that area are built relatively low.

The location, reported 40 miles southwest of Sian, is in an area of great archaeological importance, but few of the pyramids have ever been explored.

Scientists who have sought to excavate in the region have had difficulties with the local authorities. Like the pyramids of Egypt, it is expected that the mounds of this area have been looted for centuries by the natives. Pyramids, such as the one reported by the American flier, are the tombs of ancient peoples, with the biggest pyramids containing numerous artefacts.

In the same area but east of the tombs of the kings or em- Sian, ancient capital of several Chinese dynasties, is the pyramid believed to be the tomb of Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, the emperor who built the Great Wall of China some 2200 years ago.

Best estimates are that the newly "discovered" pyramid is at least 2000 years old.

Anomalous Rock Formations

Original Mineral Daily News-Tribune Article Headline:
Mystery rock from earth or alien spaceship?

Everyone enjoys a good mystery and the gigantic boulder- its belly laced like an over-sized waffle grill - continues to baffle visitors who come to the West Virginia side of Jennings Randolph Lake.

Waffle Rock, Jennings Randolph Lake. Click and drag photo to resize.

Some say the underside clearly shows a massive radiation burn left by the grid of a space ship which may have touched down eons ago or even more recently, say, 1,000 years ago.

Others, mainly among the professional community, will explain it as a natural geological formation. They do admit such formations are quite rare. Actually, the only other similar patterned rock was found on the east side of Tea Creek Mountain in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

Dr. Jack B. Epstein of the Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior, writes that the rock comes from part of the Conemaugh geologic series that was deposited about 300 million years ago during the Pennsylvanian Period. He surmises it fell from a parent outcrop somewhere higher up the slope, much higher.

Geologists believe sand was deposited by ancient streams and later consolidated into hard rock or sandstone. Such sandstone and layers of rock, both above and below, were thrown into large folds during earth's period of mountain building, known as the Appalachian Orogeny.

During this massive upheaval, the rock was fractured into a regular pattern, which is referred to as joints. Thus formed the precise geometric, waffle-like pattern or grid on the rock. Geologists theorize that after the rock was fractured, iron oxide was leached from the surrounding rock by percolating water and then deposited into the joints where it filled the voids between the sand grains, cementing them together extra strongly.

Think of it as a massive mix that formed its grids through the resulting dark red sandstone near the joints, which was more resistant to erosion and weathering than the surrounding pieces.

Was the so-called "waffle rock" really mixed, blended and baked by Mother Nature for the puzzlement of the observer? Or, is the boulder actually evidence of alien visitors who came to this planet millions of years ago, on shall we say, a seeding expedition?

Write and tell us what you think.

Two Additional Views. Click and drag photo to resize.

Is it a natural geological phenomenon, evidence of alien visitors, or a mysterious government project?

E-mail jstubbel@alleganyinternet.net or Mineral Daily News-Tribune, P.O. Box 879, Keyser, W.Va. 26726, or humans may just drop a note by our offices at 24 Armstrong Street.

Jennings Randolph Lake Tourist Piece on Waffle Rock

"This is a boulder on display at Jennings Randolph Lake in Mineral County, West Virginia. There have been numerous theories and speculations as to its origin, ranging from a pictograph made by prehistoric man, an indian carving, the impression of the skin pattern of a giant lizard, or evidence of a visit to earth by an early travelers from outer space.

After examination of the phenomenon, Corps of Engineers geologists and those of other agencies have concluded that it is a natural geological formation. Although such formations are not common, similar patterned boulders were found on the east side of Tea Creek Mountain in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Dr. Jack B. Epstein of the Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the interior, explained that the waffle rock is part of the Conemaugh geologic series that was deposited about 300 million years ago during the Pennsylvanian period.

It is surmised that the waffle rock is a large loose boulder that fell from a parent outcrop somewhere higher up the slope, many decades ago, before the present trees grew.

Mystery Rocks Near Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills
Interprovincial Park, Canada.

Location: A 45 minute hike from Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. This is private land and permission is required from the owner (ask at Fort Walsh).

This is a strange place. The view from above shows unusual rock formations. The obvious question is "how did they get there"? Undoubtably, people have been attracted to, and inspired by, this unusual geological formation for hundreds or thousands of years.

A few petroglyphs can be found if you look carefully. Academics and visitors have debated the origin of these rocks without resolution.

Take a look for yourself and maybe you can solve the mystery. You will need to travel to Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park to see these yourself...then hike from Fort Walsh. And, you will be on privately-owned land.

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The Fossil Faced Man: Man Somehow Frozen in "Cretaceous Period"

Christer, Discoverer

Fossilized Head found by Christer in Sweden. Click and drag photo to resize.