Metal Objects

Historians tend to point to the ancient Middle East as the home of the first metal production (and so everything else).

There, man melted and shaped copper, gold, and silver 8,000 years ago. But here is a different story.

In 1826, a well dug near the Ohio River in north Cincinnati produced the unexpected.

From a level 94 feet down, a buried tree stump was brought to the surface showing the marks of an axe. The marks were well cut, indicating the use of a sharp blade.

The axe had been made of metal, as, in the top of the stump, a wedge of iron was found.

The stump came was estimated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years old.

___________

Archives in Madrid dated 1572, records the account of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artefact which came into his possession.

That year, Indian miners removed from a layer of gravel, a large boulder, and broke it into pieces for disposal.

As it shattered, out of the center fell a perfect six-inch nail?

The nail was later given to the Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it examined, and verified it's finding.

The first mystery is that iron was unknown to the Peruvian Indian, the second is that the rock the nail was 75,000 to 100,000 years old.

___________

In the June 1851 issue of Scientific American (volume 7, pages 298-299), a report from the Boston Transcript about two parts of a metallic vase dynamited out of solid rock on Meeting House Hill, Dorchester, Massachusetts.

When the two parts were put together, they formed a bell-shaped vase, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top and an eighth of an inch thick.

The metal of the vase was composed of an alloy of zinc and a considerable portion of silver.

On the sides were six figures of a flower in bouquet arrangements, inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver.

The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some unknown craftsman.

This curiosity was blown out of solid pudding stone from 15 feet below the surface. Estimated age - 100,000 years.

Unfortunately, the vase was circulated from museum to museum, and then disappeared. It is probably gathering dust in some curator's basement, its identity or source long forgotten.

_____________

Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois. (metal medallion)

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.

Professor Alexander Winchell, wrote in his book "Sparks From a Geologist's Hammer", that he received a detailed statement, dated December 1871, of the deposits where the metal "coin" was uncovered.

The stratification took this form:

Soil - 3 feet

Yellow clay - 17 feet

Blue clay - 44 feet

Dark vegetable matter - 4 feet

Hard purplish clay - 18 feet

Bright green clay - 8 feet

Mottled clay -18 feet

Paleosol (ancient soils) - 2 feet

Coin location; yellowish clay - 1 foot

Sand, clay and water - 11 feet.

The strange "coin-medallion" was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of an U.S. quarter of that period.

It was uniform in thickness, round, and the edges seemed to have been cut.

Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs; the figures had somehow been etched in acid.

One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or head-dress.

Her left arm is raised, and her right arm holds a child, also crowned.

The woman appears to be speaking.

On the opposite side is a figure of a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail (dog, wolf, lion?).

Below and to the left of it is another animal, which look like a horse. (The horse has been extinct in American for over 10 000 years*)

Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are indecipherable glyphs.

Recent calculations estimate an age for materials from just below a depth of 100 feet to be between 100,000 and 150,000 years.

Conclusions:

• A civilisation existed on the North American continent which worked in copper and other metals;
• Possessed art and writing
• Wore crowns and clothing
• Domesticated several animals including the horse
• Utilised acids for etching
• Possessed machinery for the cutting, rolling and processing of metal pieces.

______________

In 1851, in Whiteside County, another well-drilling bit brought up from sand stratum 120 feet deep two copper artefacts:

A hook, and a ring.

Their age is thought to be the same as that of the coin - about 150,000 years old.

_____________

On February 13,1961, three rock hunters - Mike Mikesell, Wallace Lane and Virginia Maxey - were collecting geodes about 12 miles east-south-east of Olancha, California.

Geodes are spherical stones with hollow interiors lined with crystals.

On this particular day, while searching in the Coso Mountains, they found one stone located near the top of a peak approximately 4,300 feet in elevation and about 340 feet above the dry bed of Owens Lake.

They took it to be a geode, but later found it was not, because it bore traces of fossil shells.

The next day when Mikesell cut the stone in half, he nearly ruined a ten-inch diamond saw in the process, for it did not contain crystals, but rather something totally unexpected.

Inside were the remains of some form of mechanical device:

Beneath the outer layer of hardened clay, pebbles and fossils is a hexagonal shaped layer of a substance resembling wood, softer than agate or jasper.

This layer forms a casing around a three-quarter inch wide cylinder made of solid white porcelain or ceramic.

In the center of the cylinder is a two-millimetre shaft of bright, brassy metal.

This shaft, the rock hunters discovered, is magnetic, and after several years of exposure never showed traces of oxidation.

Also, surrounding the ceramic cylinder are rings of copper, much of them now corroded.

Embedded too in the rock, though separate from the cylinder, are two more items - what look like a nail and a washer.

The rock hunters sent their find to the Charles Fort Society, who specialises in investigating things out of the ordinary.

The Society made an X-ray examination of the cylinder object enclosed in the fossil-encrusted rock, and found further evidence that it was indeed some form of mechanical apparatus.

The X-rays revealed that the metallic shaft was corroded at one end, but on the other end terminated in what appeared to be a spring or helix of metal.

As a whole, the "Coso artefact" is now believed to be something more than a piece of machinery:

The carefully shaped ceramic, metallic shaft and copper components hint at some form of electrical instrument.

The closest modern apparatus that researchers have been able to equate it with is a spark plug.

However, the spring or helix terminal does not correspond to any known spark plug today.

A competent geologist at 500,000 years old dated the rock, in which the instrument was found.

______________

The Illinois Springfield Republican reported in 1851:

A businessman named Hiram de Witt had brought back with him from a trip to California a piece of auriferous quartz rock about the size of a man's fist, and while showing the rock to a friend, it slipped from his hand and split open upon hitting the floor.

There, in the center of the quartz, they discovered a cut-iron nail, six-penny size, slightly corroded but entirely straight, with a perfect head. The quartz was given an age of over one million years.

___________

Treasure City, Nevada (metal screw)

In 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 oxidised, 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.

__________

In 1844, Sir David Brewster made a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that created quite a stir.

A nail of obvious human manufacture had been found half-embedded in a sandstone block excavated from the Kindgoodie Quarry near Inchyra, in northern Britain. It was badly corroded, but identifiable nonetheless.

The sandstone was determined to be at least 40 million years old.

_________

Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria

Autumn1885:

(At an iron foundry owned by the sons of Herr Isidor Braun located in Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria)

A workman named Riedl was breaking up a block of Tertiary brown coal that had been mined from the pits at Wolfsegg, near Schwannstadt, and was about to be used to heat the foundry's giant smelters.

As the block disintegrated into several pieces, out dropped a strange cube-like object.

1886,

Mining engineer Dr. Adolph Gurlt made a report to the Natural History Society at Bonn, Germany.

He noted that the object, coated with a thin layer of rust, is made of iron, measures 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches, weighs 1.73 lbs., and has a specific gravity measurement of 7.75.

Four of the iron "cube's" sides are roughly flat, while the two remaining sides - opposite each other - are convex.

A fairly deep groove was incised all the way around the object, about mid-way up its height.

Other early studies on the iron artefact were in scientific journals of the day as Nature (London; November 11, 1886, page 36) and L'Astronomie (Paris; 1886, page 463).

A plaster cast was also made before the turn of the century

(Important because the original object subsequently suffered from handling, and from being disfigured by samples having been cut from it by investigators for research).

The cast is kept in the Oberosterreichisehes Landesmuseum in Linz, Austria, where the original object was also exhibited from 1950 to 1958.

The iron cube is presently in the custody of Herrn O.R. Bernhardt of the Heimathaus Museum in Vocklabruck.

In 1966-67, the iron "cube" was carefully analysed by experts at the Vienna Naturhistorisehes Museum, using electron-beam microanalysis.

They found no traces of nickel, chromium or cobalt in the iron - which means the object was not of meteoric origin.

No sulphur was detected either, ruling out the chance of it being a pyrite.

Because of low magnesium content, Dr. Kurat of the Museum, and Dr. R. Gill of the Geologisehe Bundesanstalt of Vienna, are of the opinion that the object was made of cast-iron.

In 1973, Hubert Mattlianer concluded from yet another detailed investigation that the object had been made from a hand-sculptured lump of wax or clay pressed into a sand base, this forming the mould into which the iron had been poured.

The conclusion is that the object is man-made.

What it was doing encased in coal dating to the Tertiary - 60 million years old?

___________

On June 9, 1891, Mrs. S.W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shovelling coal into her kitchen stove when a large lump broke in two and out from the center of it fell a gold chain.

The chain, about 10 inches long, made of eight carat gold, weighed 8 pennyweight, was described as being "of antique workmanship."

The Morrisonville Times of June 11 reported that investigators were convinced the chain had not simply been accidentally dropped in with the coal:

One portion of the coal lump still clung to the chain, while the part that had separated from it still bore the impression of where the chain had been encased.

The Times could only comment:

"Here is one for the student of archaeology who loves to puzzle his brain over the geological construction of the Earth from whose ancient depth the curious are always dropping out."

In this case, the "curious" "dropped out" of a piece of coal from the Pennsylvanian era - over 300 million years old.

___________

In 1912, two employees of the Municipal Electric Plant of Thomas, Oklahoma were shovelling coal into the plant furnaces, using fuel that had been mined near neighbouring Wilberton.

Several experts subsequently examined the iron pot. The object came from coal dated from 300 to 325 million years.

Metal Objects

Historians and archaeologists, point to the ancient Middle East as the home of the first metal production (and so everything else).

Here, man began to melt and shape copper, iron, gold, and silver only 8,000 years ago. But relics brought up from the depths of the earth tell a different story.

In 1826, a well dug near the Ohio River in north Cincinnati produced the unexpected.

From a level 94 feet down, a buried tree stump was brought to the surface showing the marks of an axe. The marks were well cut, indicating the use of a sharp blade.

The axe had been made of metal, as, in the top of the stump, a wedge of iron was found.

The stump came was estimated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years old.

___________

Archives in Madrid dated 1572, records the account of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artefact which came into his possession.

That year, Indian miners removed from a layer of gravel, a large boulder, and broke it into pieces for disposal.

As it shattered, out of the center fell a perfect six-inch nail?

The nail was later given to the Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it examined, and verified it's finding.

The first mystery is that iron was unknown to the Peruvian Indian, the second is that the rock the nail was 75,000 to 100,000 years old.

___________

In the June 1851 issue of Scientific American (volume 7, pages 298-299), a report from the Boston Transcript about two parts of a metallic vase dynamited out of solid rock on Meeting House Hill, Dorchester, Massachusetts.

When the two parts were put together, they formed a bell-shaped vase, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top and an eighth of an inch thick.

The metal of the vase was composed of an alloy of zinc and a considerable portion of silver.

On the sides were six figures of a flower in bouquet arrangements, inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver.

The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some unknown craftsman.

This curiosity was blown out of solid pudding stone from 15 feet below the surface. Estimated age - 100,000 years.

Unfortunately, the vase was circulated from museum to museum, and then disappeared. It is probably gathering dust in some curator's basement, its identity or source long forgotten.

_____________

Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois. (metal medallion)

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.

Professor Alexander Winchell, wrote in his book "Sparks From a Geologist's Hammer", that he received a detailed statement, dated December 1871, of the deposits where the metal "coin" was uncovered.

The stratification took this form:

Soil - 3 feet

Yellow clay - 17 feet

Blue clay - 44 feet

Dark vegetable matter - 4 feet

Hard purplish clay - 18 feet

Bright green clay - 8 feet

Mottled clay -18 feet

Paleosol (ancient soils) - 2 feet

Coin location; yellowish clay - 1 foot

Sand, clay and water - 11 feet.

The strange "coin-medallion" was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of an U.S. quarter of that period.

It was uniform in thickness, round, and the edges seemed to have been cut.

Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs; the figures had somehow been etched in acid.

One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or head-dress.

Her left arm is raised, and her right arm holds a child, also crowned.

The woman appears to be speaking.

On the opposite side is a figure of a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail (dog, wolf, lion?).

Below and to the left of it is another animal, which look like a horse. (The horse has been extinct in American for over 10 000 years*)

Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are indecipherable glyphs.

Recent calculations estimate an age for materials from just below a depth of 100 feet to be between 100,000 and 150,000 years.

Conclusions:

• A civilisation existed on the North American continent which worked in copper and other metals;
• Possessed art and writing
• Wore crowns and clothing
• Domesticated several animals including the horse
• Utilised acids for etching
• Possessed machinery for the cutting, rolling and processing of metal pieces.

______________

In 1851, in Whiteside County, another well-drilling bit brought up from sand stratum 120 feet deep two copper artefacts:

A hook, and a ring.

Their age is thought to be the same as that of the coin - about 150,000 years old.

_____________

On February 13,1961, three rock hunters - Mike Mikesell, Wallace Lane and Virginia Maxey - were collecting geodes about 12 miles east-south-east of Olancha, California.

Geodes are spherical stones with hollow interiors lined with crystals.

On this particular day, while searching in the Coso Mountains, they found one stone located near the top of a peak approximately 4,300 feet in elevation and about 340 feet above the dry bed of Owens Lake.

They took it to be a geode, but later found it was not, because it bore traces of fossil shells.

The next day when Mikesell cut the stone in half, he nearly ruined a ten-inch diamond saw in the process, for it did not contain crystals, but rather something totally unexpected.

Inside were the remains of some form of mechanical device:

Beneath the outer layer of hardened clay, pebbles and fossils is a hexagonal shaped layer of a substance resembling wood, softer than agate or jasper.

This layer forms a casing around a three-quarter inch wide cylinder made of solid white porcelain or ceramic.

In the center of the cylinder is a two-millimetre shaft of bright, brassy metal.

This shaft, the rock hunters discovered, is magnetic, and after several years of exposure never showed traces of oxidation.

Also, surrounding the ceramic cylinder are rings of copper, much of them now corroded.

Embedded too in the rock, though separate from the cylinder, are two more items - what look like a nail and a washer.

The rock hunters sent their find to the Charles Fort Society, who specialises in investigating things out of the ordinary.

The Society made an X-ray examination of the cylinder object enclosed in the fossil-encrusted rock, and found further evidence that it was indeed some form of mechanical apparatus.

The X-rays revealed that the metallic shaft was corroded at one end, but on the other end terminated in what appeared to be a spring or helix of metal.

As a whole, the "Coso artefact" is now believed to be something more than a piece of machinery:

The carefully shaped ceramic, metallic shaft and copper components hint at some form of electrical instrument.

The closest modern apparatus that researchers have been able to equate it with is a spark plug.

However, the spring or helix terminal does not correspond to any known spark plug today.

A competent geologist at 500,000 years old dated the rock, in which the instrument was found.

______________

The Illinois Springfield Republican reported in 1851:

A businessman named Hiram de Witt had brought back with him from a trip to California a piece of auriferous quartz rock about the size of a man's fist, and while showing the rock to a friend, it slipped from his hand and split open upon hitting the floor.

There, in the center of the quartz, they discovered a cut-iron nail, six-penny size, slightly corroded but entirely straight, with a perfect head. The quartz was given an age of over one million years.

___________

Treasure City, Nevada (metal screw)

In 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 oxidised, 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.

__________

In 1844, Sir David Brewster made a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that created quite a stir.

A nail of obvious human manufacture had been found half-embedded in a sandstone block excavated from the Kindgoodie Quarry near Inchyra, in northern Britain. It was badly corroded, but identifiable nonetheless.

The sandstone was determined to be at least 40 million years old.

_________

Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria

Autumn1885:

(At an iron foundry owned by the sons of Herr Isidor Braun located in Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria)

A workman named Riedl was breaking up a block of Tertiary brown coal that had been mined from the pits at Wolfsegg, near Schwannstadt, and was about to be used to heat the foundry's giant smelters.

As the block disintegrated into several pieces, out dropped a strange cube-like object.

1886,

Mining engineer Dr. Adolph Gurlt made a report to the Natural History Society at Bonn, Germany.

He noted that the object, coated with a thin layer of rust, is made of iron, measures 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches, weighs 1.73 lbs., and has a specific gravity measurement of 7.75.

Four of the iron "cube's" sides are roughly flat, while the two remaining sides - opposite each other - are convex.

A fairly deep groove was incised all the way around the object, about mid-way up its height.

Other early studies on the iron artefact were in scientific journals of the day as Nature (London; November 11, 1886, page 36) and L'Astronomie (Paris; 1886, page 463).

A plaster cast was also made before the turn of the century

(Important because the original object subsequently suffered from handling, and from being disfigured by samples having been cut from it by investigators for research).

The cast is kept in the Oberosterreichisehes Landesmuseum in Linz, Austria, where the original object was also exhibited from 1950 to 1958.

The iron cube is presently in the custody of Herrn O.R. Bernhardt of the Heimathaus Museum in Vocklabruck.

In 1966-67, the iron "cube" was carefully analysed by experts at the Vienna Naturhistorisehes Museum, using electron-beam microanalysis.

They found no traces of nickel, chromium or cobalt in the iron - which means the object was not of meteoric origin.

No sulphur was detected either, ruling out the chance of it being a pyrite.

Because of low magnesium content, Dr. Kurat of the Museum, and Dr. R. Gill of the Geologisehe Bundesanstalt of Vienna, are of the opinion that the object was made of cast-iron.

In 1973, Hubert Mattlianer concluded from yet another detailed investigation that the object had been made from a hand-sculptured lump of wax or clay pressed into a sand base, this forming the mould into which the iron had been poured.

The conclusion is that the object is man-made.

What it was doing encased in coal dating to the Tertiary - 60 million years old?

___________

On June 9, 1891, Mrs. S.W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shovelling coal into her kitchen stove when a large lump broke in two and out from the center of it fell a gold chain.

The chain, about 10 inches long, made of eight carat gold, weighed 8 pennyweight, was described as being "of antique workmanship."

The Morrisonville Times of June 11 reported that investigators were convinced the chain had not simply been accidentally dropped in with the coal:

One portion of the coal lump still clung to the chain, while the part that had separated from it still bore the impression of where the chain had been encased.

The Times could only comment:

"Here is one for the student of archaeology who loves to puzzle his brain over the geological construction of the Earth from whose ancient depth the curious are always dropping out."

In this case, the "curious" "dropped out" of a piece of coal from the Pennsylvanian era - over 300 million years old.

___________

In 1912, two employees of the Municipal Electric Plant of Thomas, Oklahoma were shovelling coal into the plant furnaces, using fuel that had been mined near neighbouring Wilberton.

Several experts subsequently examined the iron pot. The object came from coal dated from 300 to 325 million years.

Metal Objects

Historians and archaeologists, point to the ancient Middle East as the home of the first metal production (and so everything else).

Here, man began to melt and shape copper, iron, gold, and silver only 8,000 years ago. But relics brought up from the depths of the earth tell a different story.

In 1826, a well dug near the Ohio River in north Cincinnati produced the unexpected.

From a level 94 feet down, a buried tree stump was brought to the surface showing the marks of an axe. The marks were well cut, indicating the use of a sharp blade.

The axe had been made of metal, as, in the top of the stump, a wedge of iron was found.

The stump came was estimated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years old.

___________

Archives in Madrid dated 1572, records the account of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artefact which came into his possession.

That year, Indian miners removed from a layer of gravel, a large boulder, and broke it into pieces for disposal.

As it shattered, out of the center fell a perfect six-inch nail?

The nail was later given to the Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it examined, and verified it's finding.

The first mystery is that iron was unknown to the Peruvian Indian, the second is that the rock the nail was 75,000 to 100,000 years old.

___________

In the June 1851 issue of Scientific American (volume 7, pages 298-299), a report from the Boston Transcript about two parts of a metallic vase dynamited out of solid rock on Meeting House Hill, Dorchester, Massachusetts.

When the two parts were put together, they formed a bell-shaped vase, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top and an eighth of an inch thick.

The metal of the vase was composed of an alloy of zinc and a considerable portion of silver.

On the sides were six figures of a flower in bouquet arrangements, inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver.

The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some unknown craftsman.

This curiosity was blown out of solid pudding stone from 15 feet below the surface. Estimated age - 100,000 years.

Unfortunately, the vase was circulated from museum to museum, and then disappeared. It is probably gathering dust in some curator's basement, its identity or source long forgotten.

_____________

Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois. (metal medallion)

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.

Professor Alexander Winchell, wrote in his book "Sparks From a Geologist's Hammer", that he received a detailed statement, dated December 1871, of the deposits where the metal "coin" was uncovered.

The stratification took this form:

Soil - 3 feet

Yellow clay - 17 feet

Blue clay - 44 feet

Dark vegetable matter - 4 feet

Hard purplish clay - 18 feet

Bright green clay - 8 feet

Mottled clay -18 feet

Paleosol (ancient soils) - 2 feet

Coin location; yellowish clay - 1 foot

Sand, clay and water - 11 feet.

The strange "coin-medallion" was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of an U.S. quarter of that period.

It was uniform in thickness, round, and the edges seemed to have been cut.

Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs; the figures had somehow been etched in acid.

One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or head-dress.

Her left arm is raised, and her right arm holds a child, also crowned.

The woman appears to be speaking.

On the opposite side is a figure of a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail (dog, wolf, lion?).

Below and to the left of it is another animal, which look like a horse. (The horse has been extinct in American for over 10 000 years*)

Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are indecipherable glyphs.

Recent calculations estimate an age for materials from just below a depth of 100 feet to be between 100,000 and 150,000 years.

Conclusions:

• A civilisation existed on the North American continent which worked in copper and other metals;
• Possessed art and writing
• Wore crowns and clothing
• Domesticated several animals including the horse
• Utilised acids for etching
• Possessed machinery for the cutting, rolling and processing of metal pieces.

______________

In 1851, in Whiteside County, another well-drilling bit brought up from sand stratum 120 feet deep two copper artefacts:

A hook, and a ring.

Their age is thought to be the same as that of the coin - about 150,000 years old.

_____________

On February 13,1961, three rock hunters - Mike Mikesell, Wallace Lane and Virginia Maxey - were collecting geodes about 12 miles east-south-east of Olancha, California.

Geodes are spherical stones with hollow interiors lined with crystals.

On this particular day, while searching in the Coso Mountains, they found one stone located near the top of a peak approximately 4,300 feet in elevation and about 340 feet above the dry bed of Owens Lake.

They took it to be a geode, but later found it was not, because it bore traces of fossil shells.

The next day when Mikesell cut the stone in half, he nearly ruined a ten-inch diamond saw in the process, for it did not contain crystals, but rather something totally unexpected.

Inside were the remains of some form of mechanical device:

Beneath the outer layer of hardened clay, pebbles and fossils is a hexagonal shaped layer of a substance resembling wood, softer than agate or jasper.

This layer forms a casing around a three-quarter inch wide cylinder made of solid white porcelain or ceramic.

In the center of the cylinder is a two-millimetre shaft of bright, brassy metal.

This shaft, the rock hunters discovered, is magnetic, and after several years of exposure never showed traces of oxidation.

Also, surrounding the ceramic cylinder are rings of copper, much of them now corroded.

Embedded too in the rock, though separate from the cylinder, are two more items - what look like a nail and a washer.

The rock hunters sent their find to the Charles Fort Society, who specialises in investigating things out of the ordinary.

The Society made an X-ray examination of the cylinder object enclosed in the fossil-encrusted rock, and found further evidence that it was indeed some form of mechanical apparatus.

The X-rays revealed that the metallic shaft was corroded at one end, but on the other end terminated in what appeared to be a spring or helix of metal.

As a whole, the "Coso artefact" is now believed to be something more than a piece of machinery:

The carefully shaped ceramic, metallic shaft and copper components hint at some form of electrical instrument.

The closest modern apparatus that researchers have been able to equate it with is a spark plug.

However, the spring or helix terminal does not correspond to any known spark plug today.

A competent geologist at 500,000 years old dated the rock, in which the instrument was found.

______________

The Illinois Springfield Republican reported in 1851:

A businessman named Hiram de Witt had brought back with him from a trip to California a piece of auriferous quartz rock about the size of a man's fist, and while showing the rock to a friend, it slipped from his hand and split open upon hitting the floor.

There, in the center of the quartz, they discovered a cut-iron nail, six-penny size, slightly corroded but entirely straight, with a perfect head. The quartz was given an age of over one million years.

___________

Treasure City, Nevada (metal screw)

In 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 oxidised, 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.

__________

In 1844, Sir David Brewster made a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that created quite a stir.

A nail of obvious human manufacture had been found half-embedded in a sandstone block excavated from the Kindgoodie Quarry near Inchyra, in northern Britain. It was badly corroded, but identifiable nonetheless.

The sandstone was determined to be at least 40 million years old.

_________

Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria

Autumn1885:

(At an iron foundry owned by the sons of Herr Isidor Braun located in Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria)

A workman named Riedl was breaking up a block of Tertiary brown coal that had been mined from the pits at Wolfsegg, near Schwannstadt, and was about to be used to heat the foundry's giant smelters.

As the block disintegrated into several pieces, out dropped a strange cube-like object.

1886,

Mining engineer Dr. Adolph Gurlt made a report to the Natural History Society at Bonn, Germany.

He noted that the object, coated with a thin layer of rust, is made of iron, measures 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches, weighs 1.73 lbs., and has a specific gravity measurement of 7.75.

Four of the iron "cube's" sides are roughly flat, while the two remaining sides - opposite each other - are convex.

A fairly deep groove was incised all the way around the object, about mid-way up its height.

Other early studies on the iron artefact were in scientific journals of the day as Nature (London; November 11, 1886, page 36) and L'Astronomie (Paris; 1886, page 463).

A plaster cast was also made before the turn of the century

(Important because the original object subsequently suffered from handling, and from being disfigured by samples having been cut from it by investigators for research).

The cast is kept in the Oberosterreichisehes Landesmuseum in Linz, Austria, where the original object was also exhibited from 1950 to 1958.

The iron cube is presently in the custody of Herrn O.R. Bernhardt of the Heimathaus Museum in Vocklabruck.

In 1966-67, the iron "cube" was carefully analysed by experts at the Vienna Naturhistorisehes Museum, using electron-beam microanalysis.

They found no traces of nickel, chromium or cobalt in the iron - which means the object was not of meteoric origin.

No sulphur was detected either, ruling out the chance of it being a pyrite.

Because of low magnesium content, Dr. Kurat of the Museum, and Dr. R. Gill of the Geologisehe Bundesanstalt of Vienna, are of the opinion that the object was made of cast-iron.

In 1973, Hubert Mattlianer concluded from yet another detailed investigation that the object had been made from a hand-sculptured lump of wax or clay pressed into a sand base, this forming the mould into which the iron had been poured.

The conclusion is that the object is man-made.

What it was doing encased in coal dating to the Tertiary - 60 million years old?

___________

On June 9, 1891, Mrs. S.W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shovelling coal into her kitchen stove when a large lump broke in two and out from the center of it fell a gold chain.

The chain, about 10 inches long, made of eight carat gold, weighed 8 pennyweight, was described as being "of antique workmanship."

The Morrisonville Times of June 11 reported that investigators were convinced the chain had not simply been accidentally dropped in with the coal:

One portion of the coal lump still clung to the chain, while the part that had separated from it still bore the impression of where the chain had been encased.

The Times could only comment:

"Here is one for the student of archaeology who loves to puzzle his brain over the geological construction of the Earth from whose ancient depth the curious are always dropping out."

In this case, the "curious" "dropped out" of a piece of coal from the Pennsylvanian era - over 300 million years old.

___________

In 1912, two employees of the Municipal Electric Plant of Thomas, Oklahoma were shovelling coal into the plant furnaces, using fuel that had been mined near neighbouring Wilberton.

Several experts subsequently examined the iron pot. The object came from coal dated from 300 to 325 million years.

* This is true, but I added it to the text.

Metal Objects

Historians and archaeologists, point to the ancient Middle East as the home of the first metal production (and so everything else).

Here, man began to melt and shape copper, iron, gold, and silver only 8,000 years ago. But relics brought up from the depths of the earth tell a different story.

In 1826, a well dug near the Ohio River in north Cincinnati produced the unexpected.

From a level 94 feet down, a buried tree stump was brought to the surface showing the marks of an axe. The marks were well cut, indicating the use of a sharp blade.

The axe had been made of metal, as, in the top of the stump, a wedge of iron was found.

The stump came was estimated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years old.

___________

Archives in Madrid dated 1572, records the account of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artefact which came into his possession.

That year, Indian miners removed from a layer of gravel, a large boulder, and broke it into pieces for disposal.

As it shattered, out of the center fell a perfect six-inch nail?

The nail was later given to the Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it examined, and verified it's finding.

The first mystery is that iron was unknown to the Peruvian Indian, the second is that the rock the nail was 75,000 to 100,000 years old.

___________

In the June 1851 issue of Scientific American (volume 7, pages 298-299), a report from the Boston Transcript about two parts of a metallic vase dynamited out of solid rock on Meeting House Hill, Dorchester, Massachusetts.

When the two parts were put together, they formed a bell-shaped vase, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top and an eighth of an inch thick.

The metal of the vase was composed of an alloy of zinc and a considerable portion of silver.

On the sides were six figures of a flower in bouquet arrangements, inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver.

The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some unknown craftsman.

This curiosity was blown out of solid pudding stone from 15 feet below the surface. Estimated age - 100,000 years.

Unfortunately, the vase was circulated from museum to museum, and then disappeared. It is probably gathering dust in some curator's basement, its identity or source long forgotten.

_____________

Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois. (metal medallion)

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.

Professor Alexander Winchell, wrote in his book "Sparks From a Geologist's Hammer", that he received a detailed statement, dated December 1871, of the deposits where the metal "coin" was uncovered.

The stratification took this form:

Soil - 3 feet

Yellow clay - 17 feet

Blue clay - 44 feet

Dark vegetable matter - 4 feet

Hard purplish clay - 18 feet

Bright green clay - 8 feet

Mottled clay -18 feet

Paleosol (ancient soils) - 2 feet

Coin location; yellowish clay - 1 foot

Sand, clay and water - 11 feet.

The strange "coin-medallion" was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of an U.S. quarter of that period.

It was uniform in thickness, round, and the edges seemed to have been cut.

Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs; the figures had somehow been etched in acid.

One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or head-dress.

Her left arm is raised, and her right arm holds a child, also crowned.

The woman appears to be speaking.

On the opposite side is a figure of a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail (dog, wolf, lion?).

Below and to the left of it is another animal, which look like a horse. (The horse has been extinct in American for over 10 000 years*)

Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are indecipherable glyphs.

Recent calculations estimate an age for materials from just below a depth of 100 feet to be between 100,000 and 150,000 years.

Conclusions:

• A civilisation existed on the North American continent which worked in copper and other metals;
• Possessed art and writing
• Wore crowns and clothing
• Domesticated several animals including the horse
• Utilised acids for etching
• Possessed machinery for the cutting, rolling and processing of metal pieces.

______________

In 1851, in Whiteside County, another well-drilling bit brought up from sand stratum 120 feet deep two copper artefacts:

A hook, and a ring.

Their age is thought to be the same as that of the coin - about 150,000 years old.

_____________

On February 13,1961, three rock hunters - Mike Mikesell, Wallace Lane and Virginia Maxey - were collecting geodes about 12 miles east-south-east of Olancha, California.

Geodes are spherical stones with hollow interiors lined with crystals.

On this particular day, while searching in the Coso Mountains, they found one stone located near the top of a peak approximately 4,300 feet in elevation and about 340 feet above the dry bed of Owens Lake.

They took it to be a geode, but later found it was not, because it bore traces of fossil shells.

The next day when Mikesell cut the stone in half, he nearly ruined a ten-inch diamond saw in the process, for it did not contain crystals, but rather something totally unexpected.

Inside were the remains of some form of mechanical device:

Beneath the outer layer of hardened clay, pebbles and fossils is a hexagonal shaped layer of a substance resembling wood, softer than agate or jasper.

This layer forms a casing around a three-quarter inch wide cylinder made of solid white porcelain or ceramic.

In the center of the cylinder is a two-millimetre shaft of bright, brassy metal.

This shaft, the rock hunters discovered, is magnetic, and after several years of exposure never showed traces of oxidation.

Also, surrounding the ceramic cylinder are rings of copper, much of them now corroded.

Embedded too in the rock, though separate from the cylinder, are two more items - what look like a nail and a washer.

The rock hunters sent their find to the Charles Fort Society, who specialises in investigating things out of the ordinary.

The Society made an X-ray examination of the cylinder object enclosed in the fossil-encrusted rock, and found further evidence that it was indeed some form of mechanical apparatus.

The X-rays revealed that the metallic shaft was corroded at one end, but on the other end terminated in what appeared to be a spring or helix of metal.

As a whole, the "Coso artefact" is now believed to be something more than a piece of machinery:

The carefully shaped ceramic, metallic shaft and copper components hint at some form of electrical instrument.

The closest modern apparatus that researchers have been able to equate it with is a spark plug.

However, the spring or helix terminal does not correspond to any known spark plug today.

A competent geologist at 500,000 years old dated the rock, in which the instrument was found.

______________

The Illinois Springfield Republican reported in 1851:

A businessman named Hiram de Witt had brought back with him from a trip to California a piece of auriferous quartz rock about the size of a man's fist, and while showing the rock to a friend, it slipped from his hand and split open upon hitting the floor.

There, in the center of the quartz, they discovered a cut-iron nail, six-penny size, slightly corroded but entirely straight, with a perfect head. The quartz was given an age of over one million years.

___________

Treasure City, Nevada (metal screw)

In 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 oxidised, 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.

__________

In 1844, Sir David Brewster made a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that created quite a stir.

A nail of obvious human manufacture had been found half-embedded in a sandstone block excavated from the Kindgoodie Quarry near Inchyra, in northern Britain. It was badly corroded, but identifiable nonetheless.

The sandstone was determined to be at least 40 million years old.

_________

Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria

Autumn1885:

(At an iron foundry owned by the sons of Herr Isidor Braun located in Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria)

A workman named Riedl was breaking up a block of Tertiary brown coal that had been mined from the pits at Wolfsegg, near Schwannstadt, and was about to be used to heat the foundry's giant smelters.

As the block disintegrated into several pieces, out dropped a strange cube-like object.

1886,

Mining engineer Dr. Adolph Gurlt made a report to the Natural History Society at Bonn, Germany.

He noted that the object, coated with a thin layer of rust, is made of iron, measures 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches, weighs 1.73 lbs., and has a specific gravity measurement of 7.75.

Four of the iron "cube's" sides are roughly flat, while the two remaining sides - opposite each other - are convex.

A fairly deep groove was incised all the way around the object, about mid-way up its height.

Other early studies on the iron artefact were in scientific journals of the day as Nature (London; November 11, 1886, page 36) and L'Astronomie (Paris; 1886, page 463).

A plaster cast was also made before the turn of the century

(Important because the original object subsequently suffered from handling, and from being disfigured by samples having been cut from it by investigators for research).

The cast is kept in the Oberosterreichisehes Landesmuseum in Linz, Austria, where the original object was also exhibited from 1950 to 1958.

The iron cube is presently in the custody of Herrn O.R. Bernhardt of the Heimathaus Museum in Vocklabruck.

In 1966-67, the iron "cube" was carefully analysed by experts at the Vienna Naturhistorisehes Museum, using electron-beam microanalysis.

They found no traces of nickel, chromium or cobalt in the iron - which means the object was not of meteoric origin.

No sulphur was detected either, ruling out the chance of it being a pyrite.

Because of low magnesium content, Dr. Kurat of the Museum, and Dr. R. Gill of the Geologisehe Bundesanstalt of Vienna, are of the opinion that the object was made of cast-iron.

In 1973, Hubert Mattlianer concluded from yet another detailed investigation that the object had been made from a hand-sculptured lump of wax or clay pressed into a sand base, this forming the mould into which the iron had been poured.

The conclusion is that the object is man-made.

What it was doing encased in coal dating to the Tertiary - 60 million years old?

___________

On June 9, 1891, Mrs. S.W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shovelling coal into her kitchen stove when a large lump broke in two and out from the center of it fell a gold chain.

The chain, about 10 inches long, made of eight carat gold, weighed 8 pennyweight, was described as being "of antique workmanship."

The Morrisonville Times of June 11 reported that investigators were convinced the chain had not simply been accidentally dropped in with the coal:

One portion of the coal lump still clung to the chain, while the part that had separated from it still bore the impression of where the chain had been encased.

The Times could only comment:

"Here is one for the student of archaeology who loves to puzzle his brain over the geological construction of the Earth from whose ancient depth the curious are always dropping out."

In this case, the "curious" "dropped out" of a piece of coal from the Pennsylvanian era - over 300 million years old.

___________

In 1912, two employees of the Municipal Electric Plant of Thomas, Oklahoma were shovelling coal into the plant furnaces, using fuel that had been mined near neighbouring Wilberton.

Several experts subsequently examined the iron pot. The object came from coal dated from 300 to 325 million years.