Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients Read online

  The auroch skull with a bullet hole in it.

  “The second conclusion is the more plausible of the two, especially since the Rhodesian skull was found 60 feet below the surface. Only a period of several thousand years can account for a deposit of that depth. To assume that nature could have accumulated that much debris and soil over only two or three hundred years would be ridiculous.”3

  Noorbergen concludes by mentioning the skull of an auroch, a type of extinct ox, which was discovered west of the Lena River and has been judged as several thousand years old at the Paleontological Museum in Moscow. The curator of the museum, Professor Constantin Flerov, was curious about a small round hole piercing the forehead. The hole has a polished appearance, without radial cracks, indicating the projectile entered the skull at a very high velocity. The auroch survived the shot, as is evidenced by calcification around the hole. The auroch later died of other causes.3

  One reason that we don’t have many iron or other metallic objects that are tens of thousands of years old is that such an object wouldn’t last that long. Most metals, such as iron, copper, bronze and tin will corrode and oxidize into nothing. An iron nail, if exposed to water, will rust and disappear in a matter of a few years. This is why gold is particularly valuable—it is indestructable. All gold that ever existed in ancient times still exists today, as jewelry, coins, bullion, or whatever. Gold is too soft, however, to be used for weapons or machines, at least in its pure form. Other metals that also last for exended periods of time are lead and mercury. In order to find artifacts of the rusting metals, it is necessary for them to have been somehow sheltered from the enviroment. The following stories prove that artifacts do exist.

  Back of the sun and way deep under our feet, at the earth’s center, are not a couple of noble mysteries but a couple of joke books.

  —Tennessee Williams

  A Spark Plug Found in a Geode

  In 1961, Wally Lane, Mike Mikesell, and Mrs. Virginia Maxey, co-owners of the LM&V Rockhounds Gem and Gift Shop in Olancha, California, went into the Coso Mountains in the Inyo National Forest near Death Valley to look for unusual rocks. Near the top of a 4,300 ft. peak overlooking the dry bed of Owens Lake they found a fossil-encrusted geode. When they opened the geode, which are generally hollow with crystals inside them, they found something that resembled a spark plug.

  The Coso Artifact—a spark plug in a geode?

  In the middle of the geode was a metal core, about .08 inch (2 millimeters) in diameter, which responded to a magnet. Enclosing this was what appeared to be a ceramic collar that was itself encased in a hexagonal sleeve carved out of wood that had become petrified, presumably at a later date. A fragment of copper still remaining between the ceramic and petrified wood suggests that the two may once have been separated by a now-decomposed copper sleeve. Around this was the outer layer of the geode, consisting of hardened clay, pebbles, bits of fossil shell, and “two nonmagnetic metallic objects resembling a nail and a washer.” Based on the fossils contained in the geode, the object was estimated to be at least 500,000 years old!16, 39

  When Ron Calais, Brad Steiger’s researcher, did the basic research on the Coso artifact for Vol. 1, No. 4 of Ivan T. Sanderson’s INFO Journal, editor Paul J. Willis accepted the challenge to come up with an idea of what the object might have been. After examining X-ray photos of the geode and doodling a bit with his pencil, Willis ventured his opinion that the hexagonal part reminded him of a spark plug.16

  “I was thunderstruck,” his brother, Ron Willis, writes, “for suddenly all the parts seemed to fit. The object sliced in two shows a hexagonal part, a porcelain or ceramic insulator with a central metallic shaft—the basic components of any spark plug.” The Willis brothers then set about attempting to saw a common spark plug in half near its hexagon. They soon found the porcelain was too hard for their hacksaw, but they did manage to get the plug apart.

  “We found all the components similar to the Coso artifact,” Ron writes, “but with some differences. The copper ring around the halves displayed in the object seems to correspond to a copper sealer ring in the upper part of the steel casing of any spark plug.”

  It is their belief that the hexagonal area in the geode is probably composed of rust, the remains of a steel casing. The Willis brothers also noted that the central shaft of the spark plug they had dismembered had a tint reminiscent of brass, and they recalled Virginia Maxey’s words that the metal core had a “slightly brassy appearance.”

  The upper end of the object appears to end in a spring, but Ron and Paul Willis theorized that what is seen in the X-ray photograph might be “the remains of a corroded piece of metal with threads.” Although the larger metallic piece in the upper section of the Coso artifact may not seem to correspond exactly with a contemporary, ordinary spark plug, the overall effect is certainly that of some kind of electrical apparatus. If it is some bizarre trick of Nature, it is indeed a good one.

  The Willis brothers asked an INFO member to call upon Wallace A. Lane, who at that time (circa 1969) was residing in Vista, California, and who was in possession of the Coso artifact. Virginia Maxey had told Ron Calais that the object had been displayed at the Southeastern California Museum in Independence for approximately three months during 1963, but when INFO investigated, Lane had the artifact in his home. The Coso artifact, Lane said, could be purchased for $25,000. If a buyer should be interested, Lane went on, he had better hurry, because several museums were after it.

  “There is no indication that any professional scientist has ever carefully examined the object, so what it may be is still questionable,” Ron Willis concluded his article. “The Coso artifact now seems to join the club with the Casper, Wyoming, mummy, the Voynich manuscript and other Fortean objects whose owners refuse to allow anyone to examine the object in question without an exorbitant payment.”8, 16

  Oddities Found in Solid Stone

  A book by Frank Edwards entitled Strangest of All53recounts the discovery of several similar out-of-place objects: “Somewhere in the dusty storage room of a museum there lies a chunk of feldspar which was taken from the Abbey mine near Treasure City, Nevada, in November of 1869. This fist-sized piece of stone was unusual because firmly embedded in it was a metal screw about two inches long. Its taper was clearly visible as was the regular pitch of the threads. Having originally been of iron, it had oxidized, but the hard stone which held its crumbling remains had faithfully preserved its delicate contours. The trouble with this exhibit was that the feldspar in which the screw was embedded was millions of years older than man himself (as estimated by science), so the annoying exhibit was sent off to a San Francisco academy and quietly forgotten.”

  It was reported in Scientific American in 1852 (No. 7, page 298) that 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 a bed of formerly solid rock. The vase, just under five inches high, was made of an unknown metal and embellished with floral inlays of silver—the “art of some cunning workman,” according to the local newspaper report.

  The editor of Scientific American gave as his opinion that the vase had been made by Tubal Cain, the biblical father of metallurgy. In response, Charles Fort, who collected such stories of oddities in his four books, said, “Though I fear that this is a little arbitrary, I am not disposed to fly rabidly at every scientific opinion.”39

  In 1891, Mrs. S. W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois, was breaking a lump of coal for her stove and noticed a gold chain firmly embedded in the now-split chunk. In 1851 Hiram de Witt, of Springfield, Massachusetts, accidentally dropped a fist-sized piece of gold-bearing quartz that he had previously brought back from California. The rock was broken apart in the fall and, inside it, de Witt found a two-inch cut-iron nail, slightly corroded. “It was entirely straight and had a perfect head,” re-ported the Times of London.39

  The metallic sphere from the Ottosdal Mines in South Africa believed to be 2.8 billion ye
ars old.

  Similarly, Frank Edwards remarks, “In 1851, in Whiteside County, Illinois, the twisting bit of a well driller brought up two artifacts from sand at one hundred twenty feet. One was a copper device shaped like a boat hook; the other a copper ring of unknown purpose. And in 1971, near Chillicothe, Illinois, drillers brought up a bronze coin from one hundred fourteen feet—another bit of evidence that man had been there. But when, no man can say.”53

  There are probably hundreds of reports of anomalistic items like these, reports of artifacts that are unquestionably man-made, yet, according to uniformitarian geology, must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years old! Geological dating of coal, fossils, geodes, etc., is done on the basis of geological strata. Lower strata are deemed older than the strata above them. On the assumption that geological change is slow and uniform, then strata can be said to coincide with certain time periods during which the components were deposited (5 million years, etc.).

  Given the distinct possibility that uniformitarian geology and dating are completely erroneous, objects that would initially appear to have a startlingly ancient date, say hundreds of thousands or millions of years, might actually be of much more recent manufacture. I suggest that this is the case with most of these artifacts. While it seems that most of them are authentic, they are probably closer to tens of thousands of years old, rather than millions of years old.

  Another interesting thing to note here is the mechanism for burying artifacts in coal, stone and geodes. This is the same mechanism that creates fossils—not slow geological change, but sudden geological cataclysms, like the one that supposedly sank the ancient continents. It appears that such cataclysms are not isolated, rare events, but occur with alarming regularity!

  A curious discovery along these lines was first reported in 1982. According to various reports, including one in the book Forbidden Archeology,113 over the past several decades, South African miners have found hundreds of metallic spheres, several of which have three parallel grooves running their 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.” Roelf Marx, curator of the museum in Klerksorp, South Africa, where some of the spheres are currently being housed said in a 1984 letter, “There is nothing scientific published about the globes, but the facts are: They are found pyrophyllite, which is mined 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 hard steel.” The Moh scale is a hardness scale using ten minerals as reference points, with diamond the hardest (10) and talc the softest (1).113

  French metallic tube.

  The grooved metallic spheres from the Ottosdal mines are thought, by uniformitarian geology, to come from a stratum that is termed Precambrian, a mineral deposit that is “believed” to be 2.8 billion years old. 2.8 billion! It seems unlikely that such a gap would occur in the history of metallurgy, and I would theorize that these metal spheres are tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. Much of uniformitarian dating is overly conservative and it has been proven that large deposits of strata, up to several meters thick, can be deposited in a manner of days, rather than over millions of years, as uniformitarians are fond of guessing. It is sometimes said that “strata are dated by the fossils, and the fossils are dated by the strata.” Such circular reasoning is used with the grooved metallic spheres; they are undoubtedly old, but are they billions of years old?

  Another similar find is cataloged by William Corliss in Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts:5the discovery of molded metallic objects found in a chalk bed in France. The discovery was made in Caen, France on September 30,1968. Some metallic nodules were formed in a hollow in an “Aptian” chalk bed in a quarry being worked in Saint-Jean de Livet. These metallic nodules have a reddish brown color, and a semi-ovoid, identical form (of different sizes). The chalk bed was thought to be 65 million years old and the metallic nodules were deemed artificial, created by “intelligent beings” that had lived in remote antiquity.5, 113

  More Ancient Artifacts

  The files of history are full of strange reports of unaccountable objects. I mused over a report from the The American Antiquarian published in 1883 which said that in about 1880, a Colorado rancher went on a journey to fetch coal from a seam driven into a hillside. The particular load that he collected was mined about 150 feet (45 meters) from the mouth of the seam, and about 300 feet (90 meters) below the surface.

  When he returned home, the rancher found the coal lumps were too big to burn on his stove. He split some of them—and out of one of the lumps fell an iron thimble!

  At least, it looked like a thimble—and “Eve’s thimble” was the name given to the object in the locality, where it became well known. It had the indentations that modern thimbles have, and a slight raised “shoulder” at the base. The metal crumbled easily, and flaked away with repeated handling by curious neighbors. Eventually it was lost.

  In 1883 it was not thought that tribes of American Indians had ever used thimbles, nor metallic objects at all. Besides, this seam of coal was dated as between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, which are generally dated at about 70 million years ago.

  It was an impossible artifact, yet it fit snugly into a cavity in the coal. Like similar out-of-place-artifacts (Ivan T. Sanderson called them ooparts) it appears to be quite genuine, yet totally impossible by today’s geological dating and accepted history of the planet.8, 16

  In 1967, human bones were reported to have been discovered in a vein of silver in a Colorado mine. A copper arrowhead four inches (ten centimeters) long accompanied them. The silver deposit was, of course, several million years old and much more ancient than humanity, according to generally accepted ideas.18

  Although the following story has nothing to do with ancient metals, per sé, it is fascinating and bears repeating here. It is absolutely true and still mystifies researchers to this day. In October of 1932, a couple of gold prospectors were working a gulch at the base of the Pedro Mountains about 60 miles west of Casper, Wyoming when they spotted some “color” in the rock wall of the gulch and used an extra heavy charge of dynamite to rip a section of the rock out in their search for mineral wealth.

  The powerful blast exposed a small natural cave in solid granite, a cave not more than four feet wide, four feet high and about 15 feet deep. When the smoke had cleared, the miners got down and peered into the opening. What they saw was shocking, for peering back at them was a tiny mummy of a man-like creature!

  He was on a tiny ledge, legs crossed, sitting on his feet, arms folded in his lap. He was dark brown, deeply wrinkled with a face that was almost monkey-like in some respects. One eye had a definite droop as though this strange little fellow might be winking at his discoverers. The ancient mummy was astonishingly small, only about 14 inches high!

  The prospectors carefully picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket and headed back for Casper, where the news of their discovery attracted considerable attention. Scientists were skeptical, but interested; for according to conventional archaeology it would be impossible for a living being to be entombed in solid granite. Yet, the creature was real!

  The mummy was examined and X-rayed by scientists. It was only 14 inches tall, weighing only about 12 ounces. The X-rays showed unmistakably that the tiny mummy had been an adult. Biologists who examined it declared it to be about 65 years old at the time of death. The X-rays showed a full set of teeth, a tiny skull, a full backbone and ribs and completely formed arms and legs. The mummy was not a clever hoax but a genuine biological entity with normal, though miniature, features.

  The features had had an overall bronze-like hue. The forehead was very low, the
nose flat with widespread nostrils, the mouth very wide with thin lips twisted in a sardonic smile.

  According to the popular science writer Frank Edwards, the Anthropology Department of Harvard said that there was no doubt about the the genuineness of the mummy. Dr. Henry Shapiro, head of the Anthropology Department of the American Museum of Natural History, said that the X-rays revealed a very small skeletal structure covered by dried skin, obviously of extremely great age, historically speaking, and of unknown type and origin. The mystery mummy, said Dr. Shapiro, is much smaller than any human types now known to man.

  Common speculation was that the mummy was a deformed, diseased infant, though anthropologists who examined the mummy were of the opinion that, whatever it was, it was fully grown at the time of death. Edwards says that the curator of the Boston Museum Egyptian department examined the creature and declared that it had the appearance of Egyptian mummies which had not been wrapped to prevent exposure to the air. Still another expert, Dr. Henry Fairfield, ventured the supposition that the mystery mummy of the Pedro Mountains might be a form of anthropoid which roamed the North American continent about the middle of the Pliocene Age.19