The curiosity of the forgotten, ancient, and deeply underground, mystery structure

There are all sorts of evidence of the various intelligences that occupied the earth in the past. Most are buried deep down inside mountains, or fossilized into stone, or twisted and bent into unrecognizable shapes and appearances.

I have cataloged numerous examples for the sake of curiosity. And they are able to tell us some things of interest.

In this article we will look at the discovery of a buried wall… not just a few feet under the ground (a meter), but rather many miles under the ground (kilometers down, down, and down). So far down, and so deeply underground that it is unfathomable how it got there.

Underground Wall

Indeed, often structures are often found deep, deep underground. These structures are frequently manufactured out of quarried stone; stone that is not locally quarried. The problem with such structures is that excavation at such great depths are problematic and require enormous financial outlays.

One such discovery was the 1927 find by W. W. McCormick of Abilene, Texas. Here, he reported his grandfather’s account of a stone block wall that was found deep within an Oklahoma coal mine (The reader should note the location of the wall relative to the Oil Lamp discovery.):

"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." 

The Location

This location in on the Eastern side of Oklahoma.

General location.

It has interesting topography and geology. Here’s a geologic map of the region. The mine in question could be either in the Arkoma Basin, or part of the Ozark Uplift.

The mines…

Much of the mining done in the Eastern half of Oklahoma are coal and lead-zinc. Given the story, and other stories of objects found in nearby coal seams, it seems quite probable that the story relates to a coal mine.

The two major types of mining towns in Oklahoma were coal and lead-zinc. The coal-mining regions cover much of the eastern half of the state, spanning over twelve thousand square miles. The most prominent coal-producing areas are in the McAlester and Coalgate districts of southeastern Oklahoma.

-Oklahoma Mining Towns

The Story

One evening, Mathis was blasting coal loose by explosives in “room 24” of this mine.

"The next morning, 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. 

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." 

Size of the structure

The “wall” or structure feature is (at least) roughly 125 yards (125 meters) long on one side. That’s a pretty big structure.

The question is, what was it doing in the middle of a swampy lowland?

Age of the structure

The coal in the mine was Carboniferous, which would mean the wall was at least 286 million years old.

The Carboniferous Period

The Carboniferous Period is a geologic time period that took place between 360 to 286 million years ago. The Carboniferous Period is named after the rich coal deposits that are present in rock layers from this time period. The Carboniferous world was a remarkably different one to that we know today, but it is extremely significant nonetheless. The name Carboniferous is Latin for coal-bearing, which is appropriate given that much of the coal reserves we rely on today were formed during this time. Nonetheless, to today’s observer, the Carboniferous Earth would have looked and felt remarkably alien.

Map of the United States at this time showing the general location of the mine. At 300 million years ago, the area was lush swamps full of bogs and large aquatic reptiles.

The Age of Amphibians

The Carboniferous Period is also known as the Age of Amphibians. It is the fifth of six geologic periods that together make up the Paleozoic Era. The Carboniferous Period is preceded by the Devonian Period and followed by the Permian Period.

The climate of the Carboniferous Period was quite uniform (there were no distinct seasons).

It was also more humid and tropical than our present-day climate. The plant life of the Carboniferous Period resembled modern tropical plants.

Life in the Carboniferous Period.

The Carboniferous Period was a time when the first of many animal groups evolved: the first true bony fishes, the first sharks, the first amphibians, and the first amniotes.

During the Carboniferous Period, the vast oceans that covered the earth often flooded the continents, creating warm, shallow seas. It was during this time that the armored fish that had been abundant in the Devonian Period became extinct and were replaced by more modern fishes.

Vast Swamp Forests

Freshwater wetlands increased and formed vast swamp forests. Fossil remains show that air-breathing insects, arachnids, and myriapods were present during the Late Carboniferous.

Vast swamp bogs covered much of the planet, and were inhabited by enormous insects.

The seas were dominated by sharks and their relatives, and it was during this period that sharks underwent much diversification.

The Air Was Completely Different

The Carboniferous, as evidenced by air trapped in ice from that period, is known for having the highest percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere ever. If you were to visit the Carboniferous, you’d instantly notice that the air is ‘richer’ to breath, since it reached a peak of 35% oxygen as opposed to today’s 21%. This dramatic difference also allowed insects to grow to truly ungodly proportions.

The insects were HUGE.

It Was a Time of Enormous Climate Change

The early Carboniferous saw lush jungles and swamps span vast stretches of the world, and the average global temperature was some 6 °C warmer than it is today. The atmospheric CO2 content was also three times higher than preindustrial levels, making for a far stronger greenhouse effect than that which concerns us today. However, from the middle of the period, the glaciers started to advance from the poles, and global temperatures decreased to bring about a severe ice age.

Timekeeping Wasn’t Easy

If you were to be transported back to the Carboniferous, your alarm clock and calendar wouldn’t be much use. 350 million years ago, the day was only 22.4 hours long, and there were approximately 385 days in a year. The Earth’s faster rotation, combined with its thicker atmosphere, also made winds significantly stronger than they are today.

The Map Was Unrecognizable

Since the Carboniferous was so long, the natural movement of the tectonic plates had ample time to change the map significantly, but at no time did it look anything like the one we’re familiar with today.

By the end of the period, what is now Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia and South America were all joined together with Antarctica. The Eurasian tectonic plate was connected to this enormous southern content, named Gondwana, by a thick strip of land.

Insects ruled the earth

Long before dinosaurs, birds or mammals existed, insects ruled the Earth, leading the Carboniferous to be dubbed the Age of Insects.

Due to the much higher oxygen levels, insects were able to evolve to horror-movie sizes. The meganeura, for example, was a dragonfly sporting a 30-inch (75 cm) wingspan.

Although not technically an insect, the arthropleura was another enormous creepy-crawly, a millipede that grew as long as a car. Adapted perfectly for the Carboniferous atmosphere, animals such as these would not be able to survive in today’s air.

The enormous arthropleura.

Wow!

Arthropleura (name meaning “Jointed Ribs”) is a genus of millipede arthropod that originated during the Late Carboniferous period in what is now North America and Europe. A distant relative of modern millipedes and centipedes measuring 3 meters long, it was the largest known of all the terrestrial arthropods as well as the largest land invertebrate of all time and grew so large because of the high concentration of oxygen level in the Carboniferous’s atmosphere. Despite its large size, Arthropleura was herbivorous, in fact, one of the first mainly herbivorous terrestrial animals. They had strong jaws, but it is unlikely that it may have been poisonous for defense.

Here’s an interesting write-up on these impressive creatures…

Era & Discovery

Arthropleura lived in North America and Scotland during the Late Carboniferous, approximately 315 – 299 million years ago. It lived alongside other animals like Megarachne, Pulmonoscorpius, Meganeura, and even the primitive reptiles and giant predatory amphibians. Since their discovery in 1854, there are many fossilized footprints from Arthropleura can be found on the coast of Scotland in the Scottish land of Arron.

Physical Attributes

Arthropluera was perhaps the largest arthropod of the Carboniferous and was overall among the largest arthropods that ever lived, measuring on average between 6.6 – 10 feet (2 – 3 m) long, as large as a man or crocodile and as long as a car. However, there were very rare colossal specimens that were discovered to have measured around 20 feet (6 m) in length. Arthropleura is the largest land arthropod known, a huge relative of the modern millipedes closely resembling a giant centipede or millipede.

The reason why they were able to grow so large is that oxygen levels were 50% higher than today. The higher oxygen level content in the atmosphere of the Carboniferous could support larger species whose circulatory system was not as efficient as those of mammals and other species. Therefore, it allowed this creature (and many others) to grow to very large sizes. In addition, males and females were different in appearance. Arthropluera was arguably the largest known land invertebrate of all time and would have had few predators (If any as an adult.)

Arthropleura was heavily defended by thick, tough, and wide armor plating along its back. Underneath its armor were lots of small legs and a soft underbelly. On its head, it had two pincers and two antennae. The color of Arthropleura varied. Some of them were red with yellow lines whilst some were brown with yellow lines. The body of the Arthopleura was composed of thirty armored plates, which each had a pair of legs under them. However, it was not invincible as large amphibians, like Proterogyrinus, could relatively easily get the better of it. Even its own environment could threaten it. Sharp rocks could easily impale Arthropleura and the superpowered Carboniferous storms were often devastating to Arthropleura as well as other animals.

Behavior & Traits

Arthropleura was a solitary creature, often foraging on the forest floors of the Carboniferous. Arthropleura was a massive arthropod that they were such powerful beasts. In spite of its daunting appearance, it as a herbivore, feeding on the rotting foliage, dead-wood and leaves on the floor of the steamy Carboniferous Period swamp forests. Although later found out they were vegetarians, their strong jaws can still have delivered a nasty bite.

Arthropleura was herbivorous though when they were juveniles, they ate meat because they couldn't digest plants until they grew older. Arthropleura was one of the first animals to eat plants, they had strong jaws, but it is unlikely that it may have been poisonous for defense. Arthropleura was practically blind but had a good sense of smell and touch through which to detect other animals. It is discovered that while Arthropleura was a timid creature, it was also shown to be highly aggressive and could be easily provoked into attacking.

Most Arthropleura lived in piles of leaves or foliage or in small underground dens whilst some lived out in the open. As its body armor was colored similar to its surroundings, Arthropleura was camouflaged. However, its armor couldn't protect it from the Carboniferous forest fires. Although the animal would often crouch for cover on the ground, most of the time it was burned alive.

Defense

When it comes to fighting, their armor was their best defense unless it got split. Much like cobras, Arthropleura could rear up at its opponent so it could tower over it, tall enough to look humans right in the eye. And that rearing up was obviously a defensive reaction. However, rearing up would expose its soft innards and were a bulls-eye for predators. They could spray like modern millipedes and centipedes. They could secrete cyanide. That smells of almonds and when they spray in the eyes of their enemies, and it really burned. Uniquely, Arthropleura was also able to leap long distances, which allowed it to strike at its prey like a battering ram.

Additionally, Arthropleura possessed a deadly venom, injected into a victim through a long, thin, metallic-looking tube located behind its mandibles, in a similar manner to an insect bite. When a large mammal such as a human was poisoned by an Arthropleura, the venom would slowly attack their central nervous system, putting the bitten victim into a state of uncontrollable shaking and convulsion very shortly after being bitten, and rendering them barely able to move, before they lost consciousness after a while. An antivenin could be derived from pure samples of Arthropleura venom, but without this antidote, poisoned humans would have a zero chance of survival, dying a matter of hours after being bitten. If one did survive and recover from an Arthropleura's venomous bite, then they would still be left with short-term memory loss.

As did scorpions …

Scorpions are one of the oldest orders animals on Earth, having existed for some 430 million years. However, the early Carboniferous saw the most horrifying scorpion of all – the 28-inch (70 cm) long pulmonoscorpius, and the largest arachnid that ever lived. It’s likely that pulmonoscorpius lived on other arthropods and perhaps smaller amphibians. As is the case with Carboniferous insects, it is thought that the scorpion’s terrifyingly large size was also a due to the higher oxygen levels.

A pulmonoscorpius with some other “friends”.

Sharks Dominated the Seas

The early Carboniferous saw sharks at the top of the food chain in the seas, but they weren’t much like the sharks today. Among the stranger of the many species of that period was the akmonistion, characterized by its bizarre anvil-shaped crest and spines on the top of its head. Fortunately, however, at one metre (3 feet) long, it probably didn’t look particularly threatening.

However, the helicoprion, which first appeared towards the very end of the Carboniferous, grew three times longer, and it sported a circular sawblade for jaw.

The helicoprion.

Trilobites Started to Decline

Trilobites, a highly diverse class of marine arthropod, that ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, started to decline rapidly towards the end of the Carboniferous period, likely due to competition with the explosion of versatile sea life. By the end of the period, only three families survived, which themselves became extinct some 250 million years ago.

Trilobites in the Carboniferous period.

Amphibians Were Highly Successful

Alongside insects, amphibians radiated to form the ancestors of the reptiles, birds and mammals that followed. These creatures made up the taxonomic clade of synapsida, which also includes all mammals.

The earliest of these was the archaeothyris, a lizard-like creature that grew about 20 inches long and lived some 306 million years ago.

The archaeothyris.

About the wall / structure…

Perfectly smooth sided concrete blocks show an assembly sequence involving exact molds. A mirror finish suggests metal or plastic mold forms with possible release chemical to get the sides so smooth. According to the miner, it appeared to be just everyday utility grade concrete.

Concrete cubes all totally finished with smooth mirror-like surfaces.

We can say that the use of perfectly square blocks and not rectagles is instructive. As anyone who has played with Legos can attest to, it’s awfully difficult to create an interlocking structure with just simple square blocks.

Blocks that fail to interlock require the supportive mortar to bind them together.

Thus, this is suggestive of a wall, a retaining wall, or some type of decorative finish.

Since, the miner did not say anything at all about this being the outer finish of a structure, we are left to conclude that it was part of a wall, a retaining wall or a rampart of some type.

Rampart retaining wall.

Followup story

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.

Musings…

What could this be? Well, I am certainly curious. The things is that we really don’t know much about all this. It’s a wall found in an “impossibly” deep location underground. It’s made out of manufactured cement blocks at a time when the earth was covered in swamps, bogs and populated with large insects.

What else can we figure out?

What we do know is…

  • Other items suggestive of metal forgery, utensils, roads, clothing, wheeled transport and creature domestication has been found is nearby / related Carboniferous coal strata.
  • Combined together, this suggests a planet-wide series of socities and cultures that lived and thrived within the dense oxygen atmosphere, with it’s enormous insects and creatures.
  • Other items, such as the bell, and the wheeled cart suggest a society of dimunitive (child size) intelligent humanoids with insectoid attributes.

These other similiar trending explorations and discoveries are enough to better flush out what this wall-like structure represents.

Rather than a singular lone outpost in a swampy bog-like land, the picture is emerging of a large, planet-wide network of creatures that apparently seem to resemble the mantids as displayed in popular lore. They seem to have lived in societies that were well at home and comfortable in the dense swampy lands that existed on the earth at that time.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this somewhere in my OOPART Index here…

Mysteries Explained

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Complete PDF of Forbidden Archaeology (Free Full Text)

This article provides a free PDF of the amazing work titled “Forbidden Archaeology” for the MM readership. It is an amazing work that documents OOPARTS that prove the the statist view of what history is, and mankind are is absolutely wrong.

It’s an AMAZING work. And the book is the size of a thick table dictionary. Seriously.

It’s not the kind of tome that you would sit down and read page by page. It tends to be on the dry side. However, just parsing and going though it you will be amazed at the careful documentation of proof of humans on this earth long, long before we were supposed to evolve.

It’s a truly amazing work. And the OOPART section is stunning in it’s volume and background.

In 1993, Cremo and Richard Thompson published Forbidden Archaeology (FA), a voluminous exposé of “anomalous archaeological artifacts” that suggested modern people possibly lived on earth almost as long as the world existed, some 4.3 billion years ago.

Summary

Forbidden Archeology is a work that questions current beliefs about human evolution. Part I of Forbidden Archeology (which covers 458 pages) is based on what the authors call anomalous evidence and

"provides a well documented compendium of reports absent from many current references and not otherwise easily obtainable."

The authors discuss how scientific evidence has been

"systematically suppressed, ignored, or forgotten...not through a conspiracy organized to deceive the public, but through an ongoing social process of knowledge filtration that appears quite innocuous, but has a substantial cumulative effect."

Chapter One discusses information that has been overlooked, suppressed, or forgotten even though a lot of the evidence was discovered immediately after Darwin published The Origin of the Species. This chapter explains the basics about archeology, such as the geological timetable and the incompleteness of the fossil record.

The authors’ thesis is based on the premise that anomalous finds should be studied and possibly accepted along with currently accepted evidence. Perhaps as is the case with other types of controversial information,

"One prominent feature in the treatment of anomalous evidence is what we could call the double standard... evidence agreeing with a prevailing theory tends to be treated very leniently...In contrast, evidence that goes against an accepted theory tends to be subjected to intense critical scrutiny, and it is expected to meet very high standards of proof."

There is a section in Chapter One titled The Phenomenon Of Suppression which perfectly describes what abductees or experiencers and those involved with experiencer research are faced with.

"...there are some observations that so violently contradict accepted theories that they are never accepted by any scientists. These tend to be reported by scientifically uneducated people in popular books, magazines, and newspapers."

Chapter Two covers detailed descriptions of reports involving intentionally cut and broken bones of animals. In other words, bones that have been altered by man. Some of this evidence points toward a theory that there was a human presence in the Americas far earlier than was originally believed, which is thought to be between 12 thousand and 25 thousand years ago. However, many serious scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reported that marks on bones as old as 25 million years old were indicative of human work.

This chapter illustrates that when ‘unbelievable‘ information arises and people are convinced that it cannot exist, the evidence pointing to such conclusions is overlooked or ignored by the scientific community.

Chapters Three, Four and Five continue with extremely detailed studies of anomalous old stone tools and industries. Chapter Six closes out the first section of Forbidden Archeology with a discussion of anomalous human skeletal remains. In their conclusion of Part I, the authors write:

"…the evidence suggests the existence of anatomically modern humans as far back as the early Tertiary - the first period of the Cenozoic era; 65¬37 million years ago."

A partial review of this anomalous evidence is listed at the end of this report.

Part Two of Forbidden Archeology involves discussions of ‘accepted evidence.’ Beginning with a review and discussions of Java Man, and continuing with The Piltdown Case, and Peking Man, which is very interesting. In addition, a highly recommended read is Chapter Nine, Peking Man and Other Finds in China.

The authors write in detail about how the Rockefeller Foundation funded many of the digs in Peking (Beijing). From page 534:

"It thus becomes clear that at the same time the Rockefeller Foundation was channeling funds into human evolution research in China, it was in the process of developing an elaborate plan to fund biological research with a view to developing methods to effectively control human behavior. [Canadian physician Davidson] Black's research into Peking man must be seen within this context in order to be properly understood."

From pages 537 and 538, in reference to a new beginning of philanthropy,

"All programs in various Rockefeller charities 'relating to the advance of human knowledge' were shifted to the Rockefeller Foundation, which was organized into five divisions. Each division was run by a highly competent academic and technical staff who advised the trusties of the Foundation where to give their money. It was not to be five programs each represented by a division of the Foundation; it was to be essentially one program, directed to the general problem of human behavior, with the aim of control through understanding…the Foundation also saw itself engaged in a kind of thought control. Fosdick (1952, pg.143) said: 'The possession of funds carries with it power to establish trends and styles of intellectual endeavor.' "

In a discussion about Beijing man, when actual physical evidence is not available for study, some reports are believed while others are dismissed:

"[The authors] propose that reports about evidence conforming to the standard view of human evolution generally receive greater credibility than reports about non-conforming evidence. Thus deeply-held beliefs, rather than purely objective standards, may become the determining factor in the acceptance and rejection of reports about controversial evidence."

Bigfoot 

Chapter Ten is titled Living Ape Men? This chapter reviews and discusses many descriptions of what is sometimes referred to in the Pacific Northwest as “Bigfoot.” The term used by the authors most often is “wild men.” This chapter is highly recommended. It increased my knowledge and awareness about the prevalence of reports concerning this type of creature or being.

Indeed, after pages and pages of descriptions and discussions of evidence, the authors write,

"Despite all the evidence we have presented, most recognized authorities in anthropology and zoology decline to discuss the existence of wild men. If they mention wild men at all, they rarely present the really strong evidence for their existence, focusing instead on the report least likely to challenge their disbelief."

Later in the book during another discussion about skeletal remains discovered in Africa the authors write [pg. 649]:

"Most of the discoveries scientists have used to build up their picture of human evolution are similarly ambiguous, their significance obscured by professional rivalries and imperfect investigative methods."

A Sample of Anomalous Evidence

From pages 795-814 Appendix 2, which is titled Evidence for Advanced Culture In Distant Ages. A sample of anomalous evidence follows:

"Raised letter-like shapes found inside a block of marble from a quarry near Philadelphia, PA. The block of marble came from a depth of 60-70 feet, which suggests the letters were made from intelligent humans from the distant past." 

"A metallic bell-shaped vessel that was blown out of pudding stone now called the Roxbury conglomerate, is over 600 million years old...by current standards, life was just beginning to form on this planet...but this vessel indicates the presence of artistic metal workers in North America over 600 million years before Leif Erikson." 

"A chalk ball was found...and based on its stratigraphic position, it can be assigned a date of 45-55 million years ago."

The appendix has a long list of other anomalous evidence, but since I’ve already over-quoted from this text, I will leave the remainder of the secrets to be discovered by the reader.

The Book

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this somewhere in my OOPART Index here…

Mysteries Explained

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

The non-physical components of megalithic locations and their implications

This article discusses the idea that ancient megalithic locations and sites have a non-physical component; a designed energy field for one reason or the other. And it’s an interesting idea and concept. After all, it shakes the entire foundation of the idea of “cave men” being dumb, brute savages. Which is the Newtonian, and Victorian narrative. And instead gives us a picture of an astonishing understanding of things that are far in advance of what their physical accomplishments might say otherwise.

But before we jump into the meat of this article, let’s talk a little about MM here. Because [1] it’s what I want to talk about, and [2] it affects the writing of this article. As this article will be the first article written on this new computer.

I got a new computer! Woo Woo!

Yeah. I have been dealing with a five year old ASUS that ran on Windows 8. It was a budget model, on sale when I bought it. But it met my needs. But then Windows automatically installed Windows 10 on it. And then wouldn’t stop. No matter what switches and commands that I specified.

Windows 10 kept on adding bloatware, and hogging up more and more of my computer resources until it reached a point of saturation. I simply could not run a 4GB ram computer with an OS that required 4 GB just to operate. Jeeze!

Indeed, it was a pain in the ass. Not to mention the periodic (every two day) updates, and so forth.

My solution was to run an Unix based system, and I was all “gung-ho” to do so too. However, the wife ordered me to get a new computer. And guys, you know who is the boss. Right? And so I did.

And I started a looking.

I went into the local stores and found off the shelf computers from 2,000 RMB to 8,000 RMB. (Roughly $350 USD to $1230 USD.) I was just about ready to snag one when I realized that everything was in Chinese, and while I can get by on Chinese, I wanted a wholly English language system. It’s a personal preference, don’t you know.

Enter Amazon

So I figured that I would buy a wholly American computer (made in China obviously) but with American software, American duties, American taxation, and American systems including American spyware.

So I went to the website Amazon.com. I hear that it is a pretty popular website in the States today, and well known. But I cannot verify that. What I can verify is that I went there and found many computers that met my needs, but none were actually available. They were on “waiting lists”. Jeeze!

Prices appeared (in the basic capability range) to be in the $1500 to $2300 USD arena with all the taxes and duties taken into account.

Enter an IT professional

Recognizing my consternation, my wife laid down the law and told me what to do.

So we contacted my IT guy (an employee of mine) and he made up a custom computer laptop for me. He used Windows 10 as that is what I am used to, but used a Chinese modified version. (A scalpel was taken to the NSA backdoors and reporting systems, as well as updates. It’s a “safe” and inert version for Chinese users.) Granted, it’s still bloatware, and a pain in the ass sometimes, but it gets me where I want to go. And on this newer and faster system, it’s like a hot knife through butter.

My old computer had 2 GB ram. Windows 10 needs 4 GB ram just to operate. This new joy used 32 GB ram and the difference is astounding.

My old PC had 100GB storage in SSD HD. And I was told that “everyone” used cloud storage “these days”.

Bullshit.

I couldn’t get anything done without contortions and manipulations.

My new PC has an internal 500GB SSD storage and an outside HD of 2TB SSD storage. Holly Hell!

Connection speeds are off the charts. Typing is easy as all get out, and the graphics are astounding. This system has amazing graphics. Maybe I’ll install a few simulators that I have been Jonesing about. Like the X-Plane 11.

X-Plane 11

Or Flyinside…

Flyinside

Anyways, my IT guy took an off the shelf Shaomi, modified it with Samsung memory and local Chinese graphics cards. The price is much cheaper than what you would get in the ‘States. For certain and meets my needs.

BTW, I have received tremendous support from MM readers who have substantial skill in IT matters. They helped me keep typing while my old computer burped and sighed as it got older. 

Now you would think that I wouldn't need this help as I had an IT guy nearby. But I didn't. I have a periodic IT guy that jets around all over Asia, and helps me remotely as time permits. He made up this computer remotely to my specifications and then shipped it to me via the mail.

People! You make do with what is available to you. And never forget the network of friends that you have.

Here a BIG call out to those who have helped me in the past, and the movies, and the step by step instructions that they sent me. It keep MM alive. Big THANK YOU!

I do not play games that often

I do love a good game, and the computer games are awesome, but this is a work computer. Not a gaming computer. It has a lighted keyboard, and the ram, but not the graphics card need to run the modern intensity games. But this computer can run most of the conventional games of interest, and that’s good enough for me.

Though X-plane 11 does look awfully tasty…

X-Plane 11.

My biggest sigh of relief is that the MS Windows will not be trying to jam a watermelon down into a pin hole any longer. I can actually get some work down without MS shutting down the system for lack of resources every forty minutes or so.

Harmony OS

Oh, and Harmony OS is not yet ready for PC operation. Which is a great disappointment to me. But you deal with what you are familiar with and what you work with. And that is that.

Harmony OS

Did I cop out?

Nope. If you need to dig a ditch you grab what ever shovel is available and you use it. If you have a choice, you use the best one available to you.

I wish that I could tell you that I could walk into a nearby store with a Harmony OS or UNIX computer off the shelf with the latest and greatest hardware, but that is not possible at this time. And so you make do with what you have available to you.

All in all…

All in all, a computer is just a tool. It’s like a car, a blender, a lawnmower or a razor. You use it as you see fit and if you use it often enough, you will want to use the best quality tool available and treat it with care and dignity.

And now to the article…

Is there MORE to the eye when you look at these 10,000 year old piles of rock and stone? Are there magnetic alignments, electrical currents, eddy currents and forces that geographically exist, but is not discernible to those without the necessary equipment?

And if so…

Then 10,000 years ago either

Ancient humans had the ability to naturally sense these magnetic or electromagnetic lines of force.

Or,

They had equipment that could.

They’re Alive! Megalithic Sites Are More than Just Stone

By Freddy Silva

It doesn’t take much to stimulate the human body’s electro-magnetic circuitry, in fact a small change in the local environment is enough to create a change in awareness.

People who visit ancient temples and megalithic sites often describe such a sensation. The standard explanation is that such feelings are nothing more than a ‘wow’ factor: the result of visual stimuli from the overwhelming impression generated by megalithic constructions such as stone circles, ancient temples and pyramids.

But the cumulative evidence proves otherwise: that megaliths and other ancient sacred places are actually attracting, storing, even generating their own energy field, creating the kind of environment where one can enter an altered state of consciousness.

Generating Energy Fields

In 1983 a comprehensive study was undertaken by engineer Charles Brooker to locate magnetism in sacred sites. The test subject was the Rollright stone circle in England. A magnetometer survey of the site revealed how a band of magnetic force is attracted into the stone circle through a narrow gap of stones that act as the entrance. The band then spirals towards the center of the circle as though descending down a rabbit hole.

Two of the circle’s western stones were also found to pulsate with concentric rings of alternating current, resembling ripples in a pond.

Magnetomer survey image of the Rollright Stones. Adapted from Charles Brooker. Magnetism and Standing Stones, New Scientist, January 13, 1983.

The analysis led Brooker to state how,

“the average intensity of the [geomagnetic] field within the circle was significantly lower than that measured outside, as if the stones acted as a shield.”

Such discoveries help us decipher what the ancients were up to when they built megalithic structures. At the Temple of Edfu in Egypt there is a wall featuring what amounts to a recipe for establishing a space that differs energetically from its surrounding landscape — a temple. The instructions describe how certain creator gods first established a mound and ‘pierced a snake’ to the spot, whereupon a special force of nature impregnated the mound, which led to the construction of the physical temple.

The symbol of the serpent has always been a culturally shared metaphor of the earth’s meandering lines of force, what scientists refer to as telluric currents.

Egyptian goddess harnessing the serpent energy.

Controlling the Laws of Nature

It seems ancient architects had a fine degree of control of the laws of nature, because a recent study of energy fields in and around Avebury, the world’s largest stone circle, shows how its megaliths are designed to attract a ground current into the site.

Electrodes planted at Avebury reveal how its circular ditch breaks the transmission of telluric ground current and conducts electricity into the ditch, in effect concentrating energy and releasing it at the entrance to the site, sometimes at double the rate of the surrounding land.

Magnetic readings at Avebury die away at night to a far greater level than can be accounted for under natural circumstances. They charge back at sunrise, with the ground telluric current from the surrounding land attracted to the henge just as magnetic fluctuations of the site reach their maximum.

Studies conducted by the late physicist John Burke also discovered how the stones of Avebury are deliberately placed and aligned so as to focus electro-magnetic currents to flow in a premeditated direction using an identical principle to modern atomic particle colliders, in which airborne ions are steered in one direction.

Avebury stone circle. Image by Freddy Silva.

The effect of sacred sites behaving like concentrators of electromagnetic energy is enhanced by the choice of stone. Often moved across enormous distance, the stone used in megalithic sites contains substantial amounts of magnetite. The combination makes temples behave like weak, albeit huge, magnets.

Spiritual Technology

This has a profound influence on the human body, particularly the dissolved iron that flows in blood vessels, not to mention the millions of particles of magnetite floating inside the skull, and the pineal gland, which itself is highly sensitive to geomagnetic fields, and whose stimulation begins the production of chemicals such as pinolene and serotonin, which in turn leads to the creation of the hallucinogen DMT. In an environment where geomagnetic field intensity is decreased, people are known to experience psychic and shamanic states.

An exhaustive investigation into the Carnac region of France, where some 80,000 megaliths are concentrated, reveals a similar spiritual technology at work. At first the leading researcher, electrical engineer Pierre Mereux, was skeptical that megalithic sites possessed any special powers.

Mereux’s study of Carnac shows how its dolmens amplify and release telluric energy throughout the day, with the strongest readings occurring at dawn. The voltage and magnetic variations are related, and follow a phenomenon known as electric induction . According to Mereux,

“The dolmen behaves as a coil or solenoid, in which currents are induced, provoked by the variations, weaker or stronger, of the surrounding magnetic field. But these phenomena are not produced with any intensity unless the dolmen is constructed with crystalline rocks rich in quartz, such as granite.”

His readings of menhirs reveal an energy that pulsates at regular intervals at the base, positively-and negatively-charged, up to thirty-six feet from these upright monoliths, some of which still show carvings of serpents.

Extreme pulsations recycle approximately every 70 minutes, showing that the menhirs charge and discharge regularly.

Mereux also noticed how the voltage of standing stones in the Grand Ménec alignment diminished the farther away they lay from the stone circle, which itself behaved as a kind of condenser or concentrator of energy.

Carnac menhir caption: One of the 80,000 menhirs in the Carnac region. Image by Freddy Silva.

The composition of the stones and their ability to conduct energy was not lost on Mereux and others. Being very high in quartz, the specially chosen rocks are piezoelectric, which is to say they generate electricity when compressed or subjected to vibrations.

The megaliths of Carnac, positioned as they are upon thirty-one fractures of the most active earthquake zone in France, are in a constant state of vibration, making the stones electromagnetically active.

It demonstrates that the menhirs were not planted on this location by chance, particularly as they were transported from 60 miles (97 km) away, because their presence and orientation is in direct relationship to terrestrial magnetism.

Sacred Sites and Magnetic Portals

Ancient Mysteries traditions around the world share one peculiar aspect: they maintain how certain places on the face of the Earth possess a higher concentration of power than others.

These sites, named “spots of the fawn” by the Hopi, eventually became the foundation for many sacred sites and temple structures we see today. What is interesting is that each culture maintains that these special places are connected with the heavens by a hollow tube or reed, and by this umbilical connection the soul is capable of engaging with the Otherworld during ritual. However, it also allows a conduit for the spirit world to enter this physical domain.

In 2008 NASA may have unwittingly proved this observation to be true when it published details of an investigation into FTEs, or flux transfer events, in which this organization describes how the Earth is linked to the Sun by a network of magnetic portals which open every eight minutes.

Such discoveries help to validate, in the scientific eye, the long-held belief by sensitives and dowsers since the recording of history that megalithic sites and ancient temples are places set aside from the normal world, where a person can connect with locations far beyond this planetary sphere.

Certainly the ancient Egyptian priests regarded the temple as far more than a conglomerate of dead stones. Every dawn they awakened each room with orations, treating the temple as a living organism that sleeps at night and awakens at dawn.

Material based on the author's book The Divine Blueprint: Temples, power places, and the global plan to shape the human soul , Invisible Temple, 2012. Available at invisibletemple.com

Pretty interesting but wait…

…there’s more.

Maybe others have “brushed up against these discoveries” but do not realize what they have found…

Exploring the Megaliths of Magnetic Rock – Guidepost for Ancient Man?

By Charbruns

Near Copper Harbor, Michigan, USA, at the northern tip of the Keewenaw Peninsula, a large and long protrusion of rock emerges far up the hillside in deep forest.

Many petroglyphs cover this rock. It sits on the ancient shoreline of Lake Duluth. One figure is a large boat rigged with a square sail. Most viewers who trek that far into the forest proclaim it a Viking boat. Other carvings on this stone called ‘Picture Rock’ have recently been defaced as the location becomes well known and the public gains greater access.

A dolmen, a large cap stone supported by three shim stones holding it aloft, is located on the Kelso River out of Sawbill Landing, Minnesota, within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) in a national forest. Canada considers these to be lithic works created by the Neolithic cultures long before recorded history. Many others have been found on this continent and around the world, suggesting they are guideposts for ancient man.

lithic

By definition, Lithic means “of the nature of or relating to stone.” Strong and formidable, stone has laid the foundation for infrastructure.

In ancient times, water levels were higher from melting glaciers. The surface of the earth was still pressed down from the Ice Ages and had not begun rebounding with the removal of all that ice.

If ancient boats did traverse the Laurentian Divide (a raised area across North America dividing the direction of water flow) between the watersheds, this spot is a likely possibility. Several times I have trekked to Magnetic Rock on the border trail (prominent on the north side atop the Laurentian Divide) between Magnetic Lake and the Gunflint Trail. It was only after the Ham Lake forest fire in 2007 that the rock ‘reappeared’.

b-stone.

In an article by Wakefield and de Jong on megaliths in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, a standing menhir closely resembles the rock in Minnesota.

Dr. de Jong’s interpretation was sailing data is encrypted in the Orkney stone, explaining the unique shape and lines of the stone on our northern border.

The stone I was sitting on in photo below is possibly a shim placed to hold the stone erect. The rock was raised, by persons unknown, to mark a water passage through the Laurentian Divide. At that date, higher water levels would have created a channel. The menhir sits on the highest elevation, according to USGS maps. The swampy valley below is the headwaters of the Cross River.

Author rests upon may have been a shim placed to hold the standing stone erect.

If this area was used by man in the distant past, supporting evidence was crucial. Further exploration produced indications of the presence of prehistoric man.

Magnetic Lake, Superior National Forest, Minnesota, and surrounds.

Magnetic Rock is the same high iron content igneous rock that makes up the Laurentian Divide. A waterhole near the Gunflint Trail attracted our attention due to the right angles and cut rocks surrounding it. Sitting next to the watercourse was a stone cube. Two other cubes were subsequently located, the smallest on the heights east of the river.

Cubed rocks.

The rock did fracture at right angles.

The lower right image might have been a demonstration of an ancient mining technique, wherein intense fire is doused with water to fracture the rock. Today First Nation, or Native American peoples pour boiling water, during winter, into cracks in the Souix Quartzite to freeze and break apart the rocks, to aid mining of Catlinite, a reddish-brown rock in Pipestone, Minnesota.

On the ridge overlooking this area, large boulders were placed exactly on the top edge of the slope and prepared with trigger stones to be rolled down the hill. They dot the cliff line, and one is shown in detail. They are a fixed defense and would require more than one person to function. The purpose for these rocks is not known, but they are obvious in intent and lethal in scale. The border trail heads north from here along the ridge of a cliff that leads to Magnetic Rock .

On the west edge of this cliff, on a short ledge four feet below the summit, was a cache.

West Edge

It is well designed and skillfully made.

The right image shows where the cap stone was taken from the cliff, then moved horizontally along the ledge through human effort. While the chamber is empty today, detritus has accumulated on the ledge, awaiting qualified investigation.

Across flowing water to the east, on a ledge below steep cliffs, sits a large boulder calling attention to itself by shape and position in the landscape.

Kerri Jones of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, took a telephoto image.

This rock, upon closer examination by Diane Bruns, showed chisel marks and shaping.

While not a classic dolmen, I believe this qualifies as a piece of Neolithic rock art.

The placement, shape, and expression speak too much of the monuments left by man in this time, contemporary with Stonehenge in Britain and the pyramids of Egypt.

An amethyst deposit was removed directly beside the menhir and a “sun sign” remains. The rock is igneous, so this is not a fossil. Kasey Jones, pointing, said this was found close to magnetic rock. Note the sun sign on the Kelso Dolmen, so-named for the Keslo River (below, hand calling attention to the symbol). Since this photo was taken, the standing stone has fractured due to natural forces and a large slab has calved off the side, now covering this important piece of evidence of man’s activity. I fear to never set eyes on it in the future.
This photo by TJB Archaeological Associates-Thunder Bay, ON.

Kelso dolmen and Magnetic Rock have been shown over the internet recently on YouTube, gaining awareness.

The climb from the Gunflint Trail to Magnetic Rock was improved last year by the Minnesota Conservation Corp.

It is important to evaluate and preserve these unique sites for posterity. While the Ham Lake forest fire brought this menhir back out of the forest, the heat of the fire and exposure to elements has taken a toll.

This unique spot, a transit point between watersheds, may have been used to access the rich copper deposits of Isle Royale and the Keewenaw Peninsula. Four thousand years ago higher water levels and a temperate arctic may have brought conditions allowing this.

A demand for copper clearly existed. Several locations around the prehistoric world were known for stepping up to metallurgy.

It is obvious there must have been a copper period before the Bronze Age could exist. A defining aspect of human culture is trade, and the success of many early groups was rated by the distance their resources were distributed, or the cultural practices they followed.

Float copper would have been available for easy transportation and man has always practiced war and trade, both being methods for transferring wealth.

Our technology offers new data and insights into cultures invisible to written history. Questioning and studying the aquaculture of Machu Picchu is astounding urban designers today. It is only in the last century we understand what the stone masons were doing building the Greek Parthenon.

There are levels of sophistication we are not aware of at this time. These odd spots in the forest must be protected, and require qualified examination and evaluation with an open mind. New paradigms are arising in understanding the activities of Neolithic man.

Some Conclusions

Well, let me suggest some thoughts.

  • Ancient man at 10,000 years ago had understanding and abilities regarding the ability to sense non-physical actions, and energy better than what we modern humans have.
  • The mining of metals, notably copper occurred during this time with implies the utilization of metal tools.
  • How the ancient peoples used their skills to both sense these fields, and fashion metals tools indicates early civilizations of a far greater capability and extraordinary utility than what has been assigned to them.

I like to believe that by studying their actual abilities at this time, we should be able to decipher more about who they were and what their societies were at that remote time in the past.

And now it’s time to go and eat…

Some of my thoughts on food (while I am at it). And why not? Seriously. Why not? When I go on adventures, meet attractive and interesting people, women or animals, or just enjoy a beautiful day, I think about food.

Like a nice steak. Thick, heavy with nice juices.

Some of the best food porn used to be found on Tumblr before it was “perfected” by Yahoo into a sterile corporate money-making platform, instead of a refuge for amateurs and artists.

I must tell you that they make real delicious perfects steaks in two places on this planet. The places are Brazil and Zambia. And you have no idea how well taken cared for you are and with delicious thick juicy steaks in the lands of Zambia and Brazil.

Typical Lusaka, Zambia steak.. Eggs, ham, sausages, french fries, mushrooms, fried tomatoes and icy cold beer. My goodness!

Typical Lusaka, Zambia steak.

Now, for my comment of the day.

Instead of buying five "Fast Food" package meals for lunch all week, how about bagging it with some home made soups and sandwiches, and then spend Friday night eating a delicious steak like the one pictured above. The same amount of money will be used, it's just that the quality of what you will eat will change substantially.

But that’s just my opinion.

My belief is that you move away from five “fast food” fill-up dash-and-burp meals, and replace them with home-made fresh simple but filling meals. Then spend the savings on a deluxe special meal at the end of the week. Depending on your situation and the budget you can decide on restaurants or on cooking at home.

Oh, and don’t forget your friends, and your little guys. It’s a time to go out and celebrate just for the heck of it. You DO NOT NEED an excuse. You just make some phone calls and tell those folk to show up.

If you all are poor…

…make it “pot luck” and everyone brings a home-made dish. Just organize it. Suzy and Jake brings a salad. Tom and Roy bring a bacon / cauliflower dish. Daniel brings some rolls, breads. James brings a case of beer. Tommy brings some potato chips. Etc. Etc. Etc.

What are you waiting for?

An invitation?

And while I am at it, here’s a Zambian Africa version of steak and mushroom pizza. I tell you what, you won’t find such a concentration of mushrooms and steak on a pizza anywhere else. You just won’t.

Zambian steak and mushroom pizza.

Maybe you can make home-made steak and mushroom pizzas as the theme. Provide lots and lots of beverages, and just invite friends to come over, eat their fill, drink and chat with you. I’ll tell you that if one of my friends told me that they are experimenting making steak pizzas and wants me to come over, smunch, jam (with some music) and watch a movie later on, I’d be the first one at their door-step.

What will it do?

Nothing obviously. Stop thinking in terms of “profit motives”. Instead of thinking about changing your lifestyle into something better. Making it a more adventuresome and exciting fun life. A life, mind you, that you share with others.

But, you do know, that it will set things in motion that will manifest later on. Just do it. Trust in the wisdom of MM.

Now…

Talking about themes…

You know, if I lived in the UK, I would take this moment to go visit some of these most interesting megalithic sites that all throughout the region. Maybe not the most famous ones, but the “out of the way” places. Then take some pictures, get a “feeling” for the area. Who knows, maybe I could experience some feelings of the Leigh Lines, or whatever they are called.

Then…

Check out the local pub(s). Try the local meal specialties (if any). Chat it up with the old bar flies there, the townies, and all the rest, and maybe make some friends. I’d make a day of it. But that’s just me.

Fine delicious pub food.

Of course, for me, a beef pie would be awesome. Just awesome, while everyone else might yawn and look the other way. As if (to say) “tourist”.

But really, there’s so much to see and explore in this world.

I well remember a fine meat pie lady who well investigated a OOPART in the UK. Such an adventure, and even though no direct discoveries occurred, the day trip was a wonderful adventure with many, many good times. Memories. Companionship.

Oh, and she did discover a curious abandoned construction that somehow ended right on top of what used to be the ruins. What a coincidence.

And you all know about coincidences, eh?

Anyways, the fact that you go out of your house, and you go forth and explore, and that you go and make friends. Oh, Lordy! It’s so awesome!

If I was in Indiana, Pennsylvania or Ohio, I would tromp out to the local historical parks, and museums and see if I could sense of “feel” any magnetic or patterns around the structures there. I probably couldn’t, but the exercise in trying to discover the effects would actually be awesome. I think.

Mound builders “footprint”.

You never know what life will present to you.

I once had an interview for a job in Deland, Florida.

What a beautiful place. And interesting work on sonar buoys. But they low-balled me on salary. I mean really, seriously offered me a salary just above minimum wage. WTF?

But I told them that I would consider it.

Deland, Florida.

And the wife and I (my first wife) spent a week trying to figure out if that place was good for us. And it was certainly beautiful.

They had fern farms. That’s right, this was were they grew ferns. They has these ferns under the trees that lay under an canopy and it was really deep, dark, lush and calm. Spanish moss hung from the trees.

So nice.

Deland, Florida.

Alas, I did not accept the job. Not that I didn’t want to accept the low salary, but we physically couldn’t afford it. The rents were out of our reach at that salary. Which is probably why the turnover was so high at the company. Sigh.

But it was in the 1990’s. It was at the time when profits over all drove all companies throughout the USA.

Working in the 1990’s really sucked.

But, what I want to tell you all is that next to the area where we stayed was a horse race track. And we visited it during the day to have lunch.

Very relaxing.

The riders were not racing. Just going through their paces, and we got a reasonably inexpensive lunch on an off moment in time.

A nice relaxing lunch at the club or the track.

But as we got back to our rental car, we heard meowing.

And there near the fence was around 16 of the cutest little kittens you ever did see. (Sixteen kittens. So many.) They were all white. Every single one of them.

Perhaps two or three white cats gave birth to all these kittens, and they were so friendly and came up to us. I just wanted to take all of them home.

But I didn’t.

Many white kittens.

I should have taken the event as a SIGN.

“Signs”. They do occur.

Signs are real things. But I didn’t. I was too focused on the material aspects of a functional life. I shouldn’t have been, but I did.

This was just a few months after my only ever white kitten; snowflaker, died.

Instead I took another job. It fizzled and I left it. But maybe I should have listened to the signs…

Maybe I should have listened to the signs

Maybe I should have listened to the signs

Maybe I should have listened to the signs

…but I would never have been exposed to the signs if I did not venture forth and get out of the environment that I was in. Oh, so many MM readers are still in their boxes. It’s tough to venture outward, but when you do, things happen.

THINGS HAPPEN.

Things happen.

OK. So what am I trying to say. Well, go out of your “comfort zone” and try to explore the world nearby. You might be surprised at how interesting it is. And if you don’t find it interesting, you might be surprised at all the new experiences you will have.

Even the most bland place has some very interesting stories that are just waiting for YOU to experience.

I well remember living in Kentucky. Bored, my wife and I went for a long ride.  Lord knows where we went, but somehow we ended up in the middle of no where. So we pulled up at a lone gas station. There was a glider sofa, on the porch.

Kentucky

We got some ice cream, and spent one hour just rocking on that glider while the world sat frozen in time. It was magical.

Kentucky

I always enjoyed glider sofas. Everyone used to have them. Both of my grandparents had them, and later on my father got a old antique one that he refurbished and fixed up and put on his porch. Most people put cushions or throws on the sofas and set them on their porch.

So nice.

Glider sofa.

Can you just imagine what it would have been like if we lived in France?

France…

France.

In Scotland?

Scotland.

In Germany?

Germany

In Poland?

Female hiker enjoying mountain trip, and taking pictures. Photo taken in Tatra Mountains, Poland.

In Morocco?

Morocco.

In Namibia?

Namibia.

But I lived in Kentucky.

Kentucky

Stop reading about the adventures of others. Use your knowledge and your desire for adventure to experience things on your own.

-Lecture ends.-

Remember, that adventures will surprise you

The thing about going out and going forth doing something new, or something that you don’t often do, is that  you will experience some surprises.

I went to visit a 200 year old greenhouse as a day trip when I lived in Massachusetts, and then ended up discovering the best retro diner that I ever sat in.

Or, I once went to visit a butterfly conservatory. It was this enormous network of connected greenhouses just filled with butterflies from all over the world. It was awesome, but what’s more on the way home we pulled off and discovered the largest collection of twine in all of Northern Massachusetts. This crazy old coot spent his entire life collecting twine and made a huge ball of it. They had to make this metal pole building around it to keep it out of the weather.

Who knows what might lurk nearby…

A swimming pool perhaps…

A swimming pool.

Maybe a chance to tour a Craftsman style home that is being sold and has an “open house”…

Craftsman style house.

Or maybe just pull into a campground, and spend the night in the tent (that you keep in the trunk of your car just for that occasion.) You never know.

Time for a nice fire, eh?

You never know.

Final thoughts

It is hot as hell her in this middle of September 2021 in Zhuhai. Temperatures are routinely in the high 90’s F, or the 34 to 36C, and all with abnormally high humidity. I feel like I am swimming when I walk down the halls.

But it will end.

Sooner or later.

What ever your situation or your condition, please realize that it will change. Change is the natural state of affairs in this region of reality. And do not give up up hope or be frustrated. Good times lie in the future. It is up to you to navigate to that crossroads. I believe in you.

Keep on pushing forward.

And…

…never, ever, ever, ever, give up.

Never give up.

And a final message…

Everyone has ups and downs. Everyone gets happy and gets sad.

But you must know, that sometimes life can “bitch slap you” so hard that you lie broken and collapsed. You are hurt. Not just hurt. You are shattered. Financially, socially, physically, mentally and emotionally. You are just burnt out, and discarded.

I know that there are some frustrated folk out in MM land. I know that things are tough, tight, seemingly hopeless or impossible. And upsetting and sad as all get out. I know this.

Jobs.

Work and money.

Uncertain futures.

Even, just Eating.

You feel like giving up. You feel like quitting.

Focus on your affirmation campaigns. Be a good person. Eat only delicious and healthy food. Spend time with your friends. Spend time with your animals / pets. Calm your mind through meditation, hemi-sync, and long walks in nature. Be the Rufus.

Leave the world behind you safer, happier, cleaner, and better because YOU happened by.

And you know…

Never give up.

And that is not just some cutesy saying.

The biggest tool in your toolbox is persistence. You don’t just hop from one project to the other. American style like the USA government, or an American hire-and-fire company. No. You be like China and you plan for the long haul. No matter what happens, no matter what storms lash at you, and no matter how worried you are…

Never give up.

And I mean it. I really, really, really do.

It might seem so strange to talk about visiting parks, eating delicious food, and spending time with friends, when it seems like your entire world is collapsing. But it’s not. Focus. Relax as the rest of the world howls. Relax. And focus on your plans and actions.

And never, ever, ever give up.

Never give up.

And remember your little buddies…

They can help you.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this somewhere in my OOPART Index here…

Mysteries Explained

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Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

Someone Else is on The Moon by George Leonard (Full text in PDF)

The following is the full text of the late 1970’s paperback book titled “Someone else is on the moon”, by George Leonard. It is provided here for free in PDF format.

Few people noticed the secret codewords used by our astronauts to describe the moon. Until now, few knew about the strange moving lights they reported.

George H. Leonard, former NASA scientist, fought through the official veil of secrecy and studied thousands of NASA photographs, spoke candidly with dozens of NASA officials, and listened to hours and hours of astronauts' tapes.

Here, Leonard presents the stunning and inescapable evidence discovered during his in-depth investigation:

-Immense mechanical rigs, some over a mile long, working the lunar surface.

-Strange geometric ground markings and symbols.

-Lunar constructions several times higher than anything built on Earth.

-Vehicles, tracks, towers, pipes, conduits, and conveyor belts running in and across moon craters.

Somebody else is indeed on the Moon, and engaged in activities on a massive scale. Our space agencies, and many of the world's top scientists, have known for years that there is intelligent life on the moon.

"An extremely convincing case the moon has life on it - an intelligent race that probably moved in from outside the solar system..." -UFO Report

"Leonard's photos are truly mind-boggling..." -Publisher's Weekly

This is an interesting book. I can tell you that. I believe that I read it back when I was in College. Not that I was assigned books to read, like the rest of my friends. My courses were all heavy mathematics and physics. So to unwind, I would read all sorts of paper-books. And this was one such book.

It’s a great fun read, and he’s a searcher who has stumbled across some uncomfortable truths got got him ridiculed. Well, so what?

To download the book click on the link below…

I am going to put this article in my Type-1 Greys sub index because I really don’t know where else to put it.

To can visit that Index here…

Type-1 Grey

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Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

Anomalous Metallic Object Discovered Inside a 4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite

Ai! We talk about thousands of year old anomalous objects, and MM introduces millions of years old objects. But what of billions of years old objects? What the fuck is going on?

Well, just today I have a “new” entry in the world of “what the fuck”. And you know these things come and go, and eventually completely disappear. But in reality just realize that our universe is completely populated with intelligence, and we are just infants in the grand scheme of things.

So whoa!

Anomalous Metallic Object Discovered Inside a 4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite

This is a complete reprint from HERE. The usual disclaimers apply. You all know the drill.

As meteorite dealers, my wife Linda and I have continued supplying meteorites and importing new stock throughout lockdown. On Friday, April 17th 2020, I received a parcel of meteorites I had ordered from a dependable regular source. These were twenty examples of a very well-known and popular common chondrite known as NWA 869. One of them was different and appeared to contain a metallic object inside.

For over twenty years we have been the owners of the UK’s only full-time meteorite dealership, Spacerocks UK. We both have university qualifications in astronomy and have lectured widely at many of the country’s most auspicious institutions. At any one moment we have several thousand meteorites of all types in our inventory. We are therefore completely familiar with their appearance.

The origin of meteorites

At this point, it’s worth giving a brief explanation about what meteorites are and where they come from. The solar system (the Sun, planets, asteroids and comets) condensed from a cloud of dust and gas known as the solar nebula around five billion years ago. The first solid objects were millimetric spheres called chondrules. These joined together over a few million years to form increasingly large chunks. Eventually, by collision, these accreted to form planetissimals and finally, around 4.5 billion years ago, the eight large planets and other, smaller bodies that make up the solar system.

The vast gaps between the orbits of the eight major planets are full of debris left over from these early days. Additionally, a region between Mars and Jupiter holds many thousands of smaller planetary objects known as asteroids. These occasionally collide (more so in the past), launching further rocky and metallic debris into the solar  system  .

If one of these fragments collides with the Earth on its passage around the Sun, it will heat up to over 6,000 degrees Celsius because of friction with the atmosphere. This is the cause of the familiar shooting stars, or meteors, we may see at night. If a chunk is large enough, it may survive and reach the surface of the Earth. This residual object is known as a meteorite.

Explaining the types of meteorites

There are, broadly speaking, three types of meteorite:

  • Chondrites: fragments of the original ancient stones that remain from the beginnings of the solar system. These often contain chondrules, the small spheres mentioned earlier. Chondrites are all around 5 billion years old.
  • Achondrites: stony material blasted off the surface of a planet, asteroid or satellite by the impact of another object. Achondrite meteorites have been proven to have originated on many bodies, including Mars, the Moon and asteroids such as Vesta,
  • Irons and stony irons are fragments of the cores of fully-formed small planets that were disrupted during collisions billions of years As the first planets grew in size, heavy elements such as nickel and iron sank to their centers to form metallic cores, like that of the Earth.

Generally speaking, meteorites are named after the place where they fell or were found. That’s why the iron meteorite that made the Arizona Meteor Crater is called Canyon Diablo and that which exploded over Russia in 1947 is known as Sikhote-Alin.

A 1.7kg individual meteorite from the Sikhote Alin meteorite shower (coasrsest octahedrite, class IIAB). This specimen is about 12cm wide. Sikhote Alin meteorite shower fell on 1947 February 12 in the dense forest of eastern Siberia, and over 23 tons of meteoritic material has been recovered. (H. Raab / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The NWA 869 meteorite in question

The meteorite we are discussing here, NWA 869, comes from a large strewn field which was the 869 th such to be discovered in North West Africa: hence its name. Why 869 is so prized by collectors is that most of meteorites  from this field are small, complete examples, rather than fragments of larger bodies that exploded as they passed through the atmosphere (see photos).

The majority have an attractive blue-grey fusion crust (melted surfaced) and their shape reflects their attitude as they streaked downwards. This is known as ‘orientation’: a bit like the way spacecraft enter the atmosphere heat- shield first. OK, that’s the technical stuff out of the way!

This NWA 869 meteorite was like nothing the writer had seen before. (Author supplied)

When I was processing the parcel of newly-arrived 869s, I suddenly noticed a metallic glint from one of them. This isn’t unusual: all chondrites contain nickel-iron and some (see photo) display quite obvious metallic flecks. This was different. In this case, the shiny region could be seen to be a small cylindrical feature around 6 mm (0.2 in) in diameter.

This metallic area was protruding at an angle from a region of glassy fusion crust, which, in places, could be seen to flow away from the object. Another interesting feature is that the cylinder had a small impact crater on its surface, something not uncommonly seen on iron meteorites or, indeed, spacecraft on their return from orbit.

The meteorite and its strange inclusion have been examined both microscopically and spectroscopically by a contact at the University of East Anglia. The preliminary results indicate that the silver cylinder is not composed of any of the usual accessory minerals found in meteorites. Further examination is scheduled.

I have no doubt at all that the object embedded in the NWA 869 meteorite was in place as the stone entered the Earth’s atmosphere some time in the past. Since the meteorite itself was formed several hundred millions of years before the planets, it begs the questions: who made it, and where did it originate before becoming part of the solar nebula? A very real possibility might be that the cylinder originated on a planet orbiting a Population 2 star that exploded as a nova several billion years before our solar system formed.

What does all this mean?

The oldest stars in the universe are, counterintuitively, called Population 3 stars. The “nuclear furnaces” at the heart of these were the origin of some of the elements “heavier” than hydrogen. As these ancient stars ran out of hydrogen, the larger ones would have shrunk, then exploded, releasing gas, dust and some of these heavier elements into the universe. It was this material that condensed to form Population 2 stars ten to fifteen billion years ago. The larger examples of these also underwent cataclysmic supernovae, generating regions of star formation where Population 1 stars like our Sun – and their associated planets – condensed.

The oldest stars in the universe are, counterintuitively, called Population 3 stars. The “nuclear furnaces” at the heart of these were the origin of some of the elements “heavier” than hydrogen. As these ancient stars ran out of hydrogen, the larger ones would have shrunk, then exploded, releasing gas, dust and some of these heavier elements into the universe. It was this material that condensed to form Population 2 stars ten to fifteen billion years.

It is now known that planets are very common. So far astronomers have discovered over 4,000! It is probably the case that most Pop 1 stars have planetary systems. Since the oldest of these stars were formed ten billion years ago – twice as long ago as the Sun – it would seem highly likely that life and ultimately civilizations evolved upon those in suitable locations.

Any that ended their lives as supernovae will have scattered all kinds of stellar, planetary and – possibly – archaeological debris into its galaxy. Either we are alone – unique – in the cosmos, or life occurs wherever there is the slightest possibility of it: in which case, we should expect to find alien artifacts within ancient meteorites.

You can find out more about the world of Meteoritics in David’s book, Spacerocks, available from Amazon.

Conclusion

Amazing stuff.

Most of the stuff that I, MM have dealt with is millions of years old. Not billions. So this is a great find. I really only know about the stuff prior to the formation of the solar system though the chatter of my pilot. And at that its all really limited. I never felt the need to inquire further. Maybe I should have. Never the less it’s interesting stuff. That is for certain.

It might be nice for someone in the UK to visit this person and have a first hand look at the object… of course, once the coronavirus restrictions are lifted.

A billions of year old object is most certainly something worth checking out. Don’t you agree? I mean it’s not everyday that you come across an object that is fabricated by intelligence that predates the solar system.

And finally, I want to provide a RUFUS video.

Remember all this insight in to how our universe really is, is really interesting. But seriously, it is how we live our lives that really matters.

If you have a dear friend on his deathbed, maybe it is the most Rufus thing to do is to defy the rules and conventions and instead to spend time with him in his last moments. Be the Rufus. Anything else is below you. Here’s my video HERE. 13MB.

You know who you are. (wink.)

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my OOPARTS section. Here…

Mysteries Explained

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The archaeological dilemma of the 250,000 year old Hueyatlaco site remains

According to mainstream understandings, mankind is only around 6,000 years old. And while there is much evidence to support earlier dates going as far back as 30,000 years few will embrace the implications of these discoveries. Thus, we are faced with an enigma. What to make of remains that are dated at over  250,000 years old?

Could it be that everything that we were taught in school is wrong?

My opinion is YES.

Life and Living

There is a strong and significant percentage of the population that wants things; life and relationships, to be “black and white”. Where everything is simple. Where everything is cleanly put inside it’s own box; nicely labeled, categorized and filed away for future use. It certainly looks nice. It’s orderly. It’s easy to index. It’s great to conceptualize.

But…

Life is not that way.

And many people like to describe this key to organization through the understanding of disorganization as “shades of grey” as opposed to “black and white” thinking. But you know, that life isn’t something that is easily cataloged. It is dynamic, complex and endlessly interesting.

To understand things, you shouldn’t have single dedicated articles to only that particular issue. Like a website for a specific type of nail, or a website for how to groom poodles. For while they are easy to look up and search for, and helpful for writing an essay or report for school, they do not convey or transfer information in the same way as an up-front “hands on”, “face to face” discussion with a close friend would have.

If you are with a close friend, you will know them. You will understand their likes, and dislikes, their passions, their biases, and their exaggerations. And knowing that will best help you to understand the conveyance of information at hand.

Which is why you trust your best friend to help get you out of a mess, while you wouldn’t dare ask a colleague. Which is why you would believe a family member who told you not to buy a used car from THAT man, and why you wouldn’t believe Bill Clinton or Donald Trump when they offered to sell you a used car.

Don’t buy a car from this man.

Everything comes with context.

Everything.

Propaganda relies on the lack of full contextual information to control you.

For instance, the “China mishandled the Wuhan virus” narrative relies on the omission that Jon Bolton was the head of the Bio-weapon program for his entire term under the Trump Administration.

There are many such examples of this.

But let’s not digress too deeply.  Instead, let’s recognize that everything [1] comes with context, and that [2] it’s very difficult to provide contextual information inside of any article. Which is why we must assume [3] bias or slant in any information that you read or study.

Noteworthy Website

One of my favorite websites is “Ancient Origins“. They offer up mysteries of the past, exciting discoveries and alternative views of history. Anyone with even a passing interest in history would find this site interesting.

Some of the articles are fantastical, while others are bland and boring and relates to obscure subject matter. But that’s all right. As long as your recognize what the website is, what it’s purpose is, and why it exists that is often enough to provide enough contextual information to understand the relative value of the articles that you are reading there.

In a way, websites with greatly diverse content is the modern day incarnations of periodicals and magazines. And while times have changed. Who we are haven’t.

The early years.

Back in my early teen years, I used to read “Treasure Magazine”. And inside that magazine (and others of a similar genre)  were stories of mysterious objects that people found. Some were found by metal detectors, while others were found in unlikely places, like a hidden room, or up in the rafters of a chicken coop. There were also stores of lost treasure, and the stories that had now become obscure local legends.

As a young boy, I “ate it up”. I literally read those magazines cover to cover, and then put them carefully in a stack (of magazines) that kept on a growing in the bathroom next to my bedroom. There, in that stack were issues of Mad Magazine, National Geographic, Weird Stories comic books, Analog Magazine, “The Good Old Days” and “Men’s” Magazines.

Magazines fit for a boy of 12.

For me, they took me to far off lands, strange adventures and interesting places. I could imagine myself fighting of hordes of hungry otters, discovering buried golden treasure, exploring an abandoned castle dungeon, and finding a book filled with secrets in a long lost attic.

In those days I would hastily make myself a sandwich out of leftover pot roast, slices of cheese, and a sliced tomato from the garden (plus some Miracle Whip brand mayonnaise) and put it on a plate. There, I would go to a quiet spot, eat my sandwich and read my magazines. All away from others so that I wouldn’t get “roped” into doing a new chore or other task.

(Mississippi style) pot roast sandwich.

I found this activity relaxing, fun and enjoyable. And more than a few times, my trusty cat Sedwick would scamper up the tree and let himself in to chill out besides me.

Such was my youth.

Now, you have to take everything into account. At that time, while I was busily attending “middle school”, the subjects (while interesting) were not the same. For it was the subjects that I read at home; the science fiction stories, the poetry, and the adventure stories that tickled my imagination. And that, I believe is critical. You cannot live your entire life believing everything that is taught to you. You have to probe, push and understand things in new and different ways.

And maybe they are bullshit, and don’t make sense.

But maybe they are real and are suggestive of other things. Certainly Erich vonniken greatly influenced me. And while I never (at that time) ever thought that I would some day meet the strange beings that I read about it was nice to have a contextual background that made the introduction of such beings more reasonable and palatable to me.

Now, I know that the past is interesting and colorful. Certainly my exposure to events, changes and things have greatly influenced my thoughts in this matter. And now when I read the fantastical, I judge things through the contextual lens of my background and my experience.

And here is one such story.

I read this story while I had a glass of basic red wine at my side, and a plate of toasted Italian bread with peppers, onions and cheese. And found the following article to be just as tasty as what I was enjoying.

Red wine and Italian bread.

Controversy at Hueyatlaco: When Did Humans First Inhabit the Americas?

Found HERE. Written on 28 April, 2021 - 18:53  Aleksa Vučković All credit to the author, and note that it was edited to fit this venue, and MM comments and thoughts abound.

What happens when an archaeological site is so extraordinary, that it threatens to eclipse everything we knew about history up to that point?

Some discoveries are just too hard to fully grasp, and that makes us question their accuracy.

Hueyatlaco in Mexico is one such archaeological site.

It is forcing us to reconsider the time frame of human habitation in South America.

By a lot.

The finds presented at Hueyatlaco are still a matter of heated debate amongst scholars today, but one thing is certain – there are still many unanswered questions which need to be explored.

The accepted history

Here is the accepted history for how, and when humans arrived to the Americas. Anything that differs from this narrative is rejected out of hand, and certainly enrages statists who have their careers and their reputation entangled with this narrative. The following is from an academic website.

The narrative;

Around 16,000 BP, people migrated from Siberia (Asia) to Alaska (North America) over the Bering Land Bridge (map below).

  • New evidence found in Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico, including tools made from a type of limestone not originating from the cave itself, suggests that humans first arrived in North America possibly as far back as 30,000 BP. At that time, the ice sheets covering North America during the last ice age were still extensive, which would have made cross-continental travel very difficult, and suggests that the Pacific coast was the more probable travel route. This idea is known as the Pacific Coastal Route Hypothesis.
    • This new research indicates that even though people likely reached North America no later than 26,500 to 19,000 BP, occupation did not become widespread until the very end of the last ice age, around 14,700 to 12,900 BP.
    • This new evidence dispels the Clovis-first model, named for evidence of human occupation in Clovis, New Mexico. This model suggests that the first people to reach North America traveled across the Bering Land Bridge and then into North America along an ice-free cross-continental corridor around 16,000 to 10,000 BP. It is likely that  by then North America had already been occupied by people who migrated via the Pacific coastal route.
    • Under the Pacific Coastal Route Hypothesis, people traveled south along the “kelp highway” of the western coast of the Americas because it was mainly ice-free and therefore easier to traverse than the ice-covered inland areas (map below). The coastal waters had common giant kelp species such as Durvillaea antarctica and Macrocystis pyrifera, which supported rich ecosystems that provided food, such as sea bass, cod, rockfish, sea urchins, abalones, and mussels for the migrating people. At the end of the last ice age, glaciers melted and sea levels rose, flooding the “kelp highway.”

  • During the last ice age, which peaked around 21,000 BP and ended around 10,700 BP, global sea levels were up to 100 meters lower than they are today because colder temperatures resulted in large amounts of water becoming frozen in glaciers.
  • The Bering Land Bridge existed during this time of low sea levels. When the glaciers melted and sea levels rose to their present-day position, the land bridge flooded and formed the Bering Strait that now separates Asia from North America. See below for an interactive map of the Bering Land Bridge and the Bering Strait over time.

After the initial migrations to North America, people began moving southward, following the Pacific coast from Alaska to Chile.

Those who made it to northern and central South America were limited to small communities because the cold, harsh climate of the ice age prevented populations from expanding.

A short period of rising temperatures and retreating glaciers followed, which allowed people to migrate further south and establish new settlements in Patagonia, such as in Monte Verde (map below).

Then, around 14,500 BP, in what is known as the Antarctic Climate Reversal, temperatures dropped as much as 6℃ below present-day and remained low for 2 millenia.

When temperatures rose yet again, more glaciers melted, flooding the Strait of Magellan and cutting the southernmost settlements on Tierra del Fuego off from the mainland (map below), leading to a cultural division between mainland and coastal inhabitants.

Anything that differs from this narrative is considered to be suspect or fraudulent.

Such is the archaeological dilemma of the 250,000 year old Hueyatlaco site.

The Valsequillo Basin

The site in question is located in Mexico in an area known as The Valsequillo Basin. It is a depressed area that used to be an enormous lake or series of lakes thousands of years ago.

The Valsequillo Basin is located near the city of Puebla, in Mexico.

Situated in the central part of the country, this basin has been the focus of much interest for geologists, archaeologists and the scientific world as a whole.

This interest was sparked due to the presence of numerous megafaunal remains and evidence of very early human habitation.

Megafauna, as we know, is the term commonly used for large animals that roamed the landscapes of the Pleistocene, such as mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and cave lions.

What is megafauna?

We’ve all heard stories from the age of the dinosaurs, when giant creatures the size of buses or even buildings roamed the land and the oceans, but their disappearance didn’t mean the end of the giants: In fact, megafauna was predominant in every continent on Earth, through multiple glaciations and climate change periods, until about 50,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene. That is, until humans entered the picture. Our increasing hunting and habitat pressure lead to a great decrease in the numbers and distribution of megafauna, followed by subsequent extinctions.

The decline of megafauna started so early in our history, and its progress was so steady, that only now are we starting to acknowledge and study the effects of megafauna in regulating our ecosystems and the impacts of megafaunal loss across the globe.

-True Nature Foundation

However, although rich in important discoveries, the site has always been the cause of much  controversy, simply because some of the theories surrounding it are very hard to fully grasp.

It has been proposed that the landscapes of the Early Pleistocene period were characterized by many deep lakes, and that this basin might once have been one such lake.

Reconstruction using GIS of the maximum level of the shallow Late Pleistocene lake at the Valsequillo Basin, Puebla, also shown are La Malinche Volcano and Cerro Toluquilla Volcano.

However, no direct proof for this ever surfaced and dating has proven quite difficult for scholars.

Nevertheless, the area is of immense geological interest due to it being dominated by the stratovolcanoes  Popocatépetl and La  Malinche, and its location in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt.

As such, this is a site with a time-worn history, which also helps shed some light on early human habitation of the region, because  geology and archaeology often go hand in hand.

Criticisms Mount Against Claim of Hominins in the Americas Over 100,000 Years Ago

Some of the first excavations at Hueyatlaco were carried out in 1961, when professor Cynthia Irwin-Williams conducted an extensive dig at the site.

Even before she arrived, the region was known as a place rich in animal fossils, which sparked the interest of scholars.

Irwin-Williams was soon joined by other prominent persons of the U.S. Geological Survey, notably Virginia Steen-McIntyre, who was responsible for publicizing the find and the magnificent discoveries it entailed.

Due to the vast numbers of animal fossils, it was commonly believed that this site was a kill site, where ancient humans butchered the animals they  hunted.

The countless animal remains were located in fluviatile deposits commonly known as Valsequillo gravels, which were often plain and exposed in the high cliff sides of the Valsequillo Reservoir.

In geography and geology, fluvial processes are associated with rivers and streams and the deposits and landforms created by them. When the stream or rivers are associated with glaciers, ice sheets, or ice caps, the term glaciofluvial or fluvioglacial is used. The White River is so named due to the clay it picks up in the Badlands of South Dakota.

-Fluvial processes - Wikipedia

Some of the ancient animal fossils found included  bison, camel, dire wolf, peccary, short-faced bear,  sloth, horse, tapir,  mammoth, saber-toothed cat, mastodon, glyptodon, four-horned antelope, and several other species.

glyptodon

But the really important finds were made in 1962, when Irwin-Williams discovered both animal bones and stone tools, together, in situ.

Indicative of tool-making humanoids that hunted and killed the animals.

The subsequent struggle to positively identify the age of these remains led to much controversy.

The tools that were discovered included some very crude and primitive implements, but also tools that were much more sophisticated, with double edges and detailed flaking construction.

Indicative of multiple societies, or the immensity of age of a singular society.

These tools were diverse and included quite elaborate projectile points, many of which were made from non-local materials.

Indicative of travel, or possibly trade.

This was a clear proof that Hueyatlaco was used by various groups of people for a long period of time.

Either way, these findings were quickly pushing back the previously believed timeline of human habitation in South America, which caused conflicts in the scientific world.

Dating to 250,000 years, when at the time, the earliest human presence was dated to 6,000 years ago.

Unhappy Historians

Very early on in the excavations, attempts were made to discredit the work done at Hueyatlaco, and some turned out to be blatant attacks on the work.

Someone seemingly had a problem with the idea that South America was inhabited so much earlier than was commonly believed.

In 1967, Jose Lorenzo, a member of the Mexican  Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia,  came forth with a controversial claim that the artifacts discovered were deliberately planted at the site, in a way that made it difficult to know whether they were actually discovered.

This gossip was seemingly unmerited and looked a lot like an attempt to disrupt the crew from making further claims at the site.

What is more, the suspicious activities did not stop here.

Irwin-Williams did make a startling discovery of mammoth bone fragments that were carved with intricate images, depicting various megafauna animals such as serpents and saber-toothed cats.

Similar carved images have been discovered all over the world, and are associated with early man.

However, these carved bones disappeared under puzzling circumstances, as if someone didn’t want them to reach the public eye.

Yet, while the evidence has disappeared, the photographs of the carvings survive.

By 1969, Irwin-Williams sought support in the scientific community, and gained support from three renowned scholars who visited the site of the excavations and confirmed that everything was being conducted in a professional manner.

During that same year, the team published their first scientific paper that detailed the excavations and the importance of the site.

And that importance was the age .

Dating the site

Various methods for dating the finds were utilized, many of which were revolutionary for the time.

The usual radiocarbon dating  indicated that the remains were roughly 35,000 years old.

However, dating by uranium suggested the remains to be far older, roughly 260,000 years old.

At the time, these results were considered an anomaly, especially due to the fact that general science proposed a general time of 16,000 years before present for the settling of the Americas.

Radiocarbon dating did not agree with uranium dating; thus creating an anomaly.

Some suggested that the strata (or geological layers) were eroded by ancient waterways, and that might have mixed up the specimens, and causing such differing results.

By 1973, scientists returned to Hueyatlaco, hoping to conduct new excavations and attempt to once more examine the layers and to resolve the oddities of dating the finds.

Their research concluded that the layers were not eroded and that specimens were not mixed up.

What is more, this new team managed to analyze volcanic ash from the site and apply the revolutionary zircon fission track dating method.

Through this geochemistry approach, they determined that the volcanic ash – discovered in the same layer as the tools – was roughly between 370,000 and 240,000 years old.

This confirmed the extremely old age of human habitation at the site, and further deepened the enigma that was Hueyatlaco.

The remote age of the artifacts was confirmed by the geochemistry method.

In time, plenty of friction arose between the team members, as they could not agree on the age, the direction in which the excavation was heading, or the accuracy of the dating methods.

Uranium dating was extremely new at the time, and its reliability not well known, while the fission track dating method had a substantial margin of error.

In time, the excavation team was separated by their views.

Site controversy

Irwin-Williams believed that the probable age was 20,000 years before present, although that view in itself was considered controversial by many.

On the other hand, Harold Malde and Virginia Steen-McIntyre, other team leaders, firmly believed the original dating of 200,000 years before present – which was so revolutionary that it was hard to comprehend.

Some suggested that the 20,000 year theory by Irwin-Williams was “puzzling” and almost a deliberate tactic to discredit the find.

This was believed mainly because no evidence for that age was found in the excavations at all.

Irwin-Williams never went forward to solidify her claims.

In fact, she never published a report on the site whatsoever, which led to questions on the honesty of her claims.

On the other hand, the other part of the team firmly believed in their 200,000 year theory, and were not willing to drop it.

Formal announcement

In 1981, this faction made up of Malde, Fryxell, and Steen-McIntyre published an extensive scientific paper in the  Journal of Quaternary Research , providing a detailed insight and evidence for the extremely old dating of human habitation at the site.

In their paper, they provided the results from four different dating tests: [1] the fission track, [2] the uranium-thorium test, [3] the study of mineral weathering to determine age, and [4] the tephra hydration tests.

All of these tests confirmed the age of the remains to be roughly 250,000 years old which confirmed their theories.

To that end, the authors wrote in their paper:

"The evidence outlined here consistently indicates that the Hueyatlaco site is about 250,000  years old. 

We who have worked on geological aspects of the Valsequillo area are painfully aware that so great an age poses an archaeological dilemma [...] 

In our view, the results reported here widen the window of time in which serious investigation of the age of Man in the New World  would be warranted. 

We continue to cast a critical eye on all the data, including our own."

This was an educated, accurate response that acknowledged that such a radical claim  did seem odd, but was not entirely impossible.

The story of Hueyatlaco continued to look like a deliberate attempt to discredit these finds or hide them under the carpet.

The evidence was there: early humans could have inhabited the so-called New World, the Americas, far earlier than was commonly believed.

Not good enough!

But seemingly, someone did not want that truth to be accepted.

To that end, Irwin-Williams, who was at odds with the rest of the team, raised objections to several aspects of the published paper, seemingly continuing her attacks on the finds.

The team were confident and quickly refuted her attempts to discredit their work.

Further secrets were soon revealed.

Virginia Steen-McIntyre was at one point fired from her job due to her claims, and she also revealed that some of the original team members were harassed, their careers were threatened, and they were proclaimed incompetent – all because of their involvement in the project.

So, we need to wonder, why did these findings cause so much enmity from mainstream science?

Sure, to some, the claims of such an old age might seem radical and hard to believe.

But rather than simply disagreeing with the claims, mainstream scholars went to great lengths to attack, harass, and fully discredit the professional work the team has conducted.

Nevertheless, as time progressed, new tests were conducted, providing new evidence and deepening the controversy related to the site.

Testing, testing and then even more testing!

In 2004, for example, researcher Sam Van Landingham conducted extensive bio- stratigraphic analysis, confirming that the strata that bore the discovered tools was some 250,000 years old.

He re- confirmed these finds once again in 2006.

He states in his papers that the samples can be dated to the so-called Sangamonian stage  (from 80,000 to 220,000 years before present) due to the presence of several diatom species only appearing in that age.

Diatoms are single-celled algae

Diatoms are algae that live in houses made of glass. They are the only organism on the planet with cell walls composed of transparent, opaline silica. Diatom cell walls are ornamented by intricate and striking patterns of silica.

More findings appeared in 2008, when paleomagnetic testing was conducted on the volcanic ash layers from the site, dating them to roughly 780,000 years before present.

The geological time scale is used by geologists and paleontologists to measure the history of the Earth and life. It is based on the fossils found in rocks of different ages and on radiometric dating of the rocks.

Sedimentary rocks (made from mud, sand, gravel or fossil shells) and volcanic lava flows are laid down in layers or beds. They build up over time so that that the layers at the bottom of the pile are older than the ones at the top. Geologists call this simple observation the Principle of Superposition, and it is most important way of working out the order of rocks in time. Ordering of rocks (and the fossils that they contain) in time from oldest to youngest is called relative age dating.

Once the rocks are placed in order from oldest to youngest, we also know the relative ages of the fossils that we collect from them.

Relative age dating tells us which fossils are older and which fossils are younger. It does not tell us the age of the fossils. To get an age in years, we use radiometric dating of the rocks. Not every rock can be dated this way, but volcanic ash deposits are among those that can be dated. The position of the fossils above or below a dated ash layer allows us to work out their ages.

-How paleontologists tell time

Hueyatlaco remains a true scientific anomaly.

It is not at all impossible that early man could have crossed over to the Americas much, much earlier than is currently believed.

In fact, there already is the conundrum of the Solutrean theory , which tells us that the  Clovis people , the proposed ancestors of the Native Americans, were not the first inhabitants of the Americas.

Besides these, there are numerous pieces of evidence across the continent that tell us that it is nigh time that we reconsider the history of human habitation in the Americas.

Some Conclusions

Assuming that the array of scientific evidence is correct, then the Hueyatlaco site is truly ancient and indicates tool-using, and tool-manufacturing humanoids 250,000 years ago. This not only turns conventional evolutionary theories “upside down”, but is pretty much discards the vast number of theories in support of human “land bridge” migration.

In short, for the humans to be in the Americas at this date, one of two things must have happened.

Either;

[A] Early man constructed ocean capable vessels and sailed across the wide oceans.

Or,

[B] Early man evolved independently in the Americas as well as in Africa.

We need to come to grips and accept the idea that there was probably various evolutionary clusters and separate lineages that did not originate from a common “Lucy” humanoid. Many died out, and many adapted and evolved, and many propagated throughout the world.

While not popular at this time, you can rest assured that this understanding will be embraced hundreds of years in the future.

But wait!

This is NOT a lone, isolated find.

Other Ancient Discoveries

There are many reported human skeletal finds which are in discordance with current evolutionary beliefs dating back to anomalously ancient geological periods in the distant past, way before it is accepted that human beings ever existed.

One intriguing report surfaced in an American journal called The Geologist dated December 1862:

“In Macoupin County, Illinois, the bones of a man were recently found on a coal-bed capped with two feet of slate rock, ninety feet below the surface of the earth. . . The bones, when found, were covered with a crust or coating of hard glossy matter, as black as coal itself, but when scraped away left the bones white and natural.” 

The coal in which the remains were found have been dated at between 320 and 286 million years old, which, despite a lack of supporting evidence and little information on the discovery, is certainly worthy of inclusion here.

The Foxhall Jaw

A better documented account of an anomalous find is of a human jaw discovered at Foxhall, England, in 1855 which was dug out of a quarry at a level of sixteen feet (4.88 meters) under ground level, dating the specimen to at least 2.5 million years old.

American physician Robert H. Collyer described the Foxhall jaw as ‘the oldest relic of human existence’.

The problem with this particular fossil was its modern appearance.

A more apelike mandible would have been more acceptable despite its great antiquity, but many dissenters disbelieved the authenticity of the bone ‘probably because the shape of the jaw was not primitive’, according to paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Buenos Aires Skull

A fully modern human skull was found in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in an Early Pliocene formation, revealing the presence of modern humans in South America between 1 and 1.5 million years ago.

But once more, the modern appearance of the skull doesn’t fit with conventional thinking on human origins so was discounted on these grounds alone.

Here we see a clear example of dating by morphology, and a distinct disregard of all other data, no matter how credible.

The thinking is simple; if it looks modern – it must be modern. No modern humans could possibly have existed that far back in time so it must be ruled out.

This approach employs illogical thinking if one considers that the skull was found in a Pre-Ensenadean stratum, which, according to present geological calculations, dates back up to 1.5 million years.

The scientific data, as with a plethora of cases worldwide, does not match the final analogy, and instead of pursuing the matter further until a satisfactory scientific conclusion is arrived upon, the discovery has slipped unsurprisingly into anonymity.

The Clichy Skeleton

In a quarry on the Avenue de Clichy, Paris, parts of a human skull were discovered along with a femur, tibia, and some foot bones by Eugene Bertrand in 1868.

The layer in which the Clichy skeleton was dug out from would make the fossils approximately 330,000 years old.

It wasn’t until Neanderthals became accepted as the Pleistocene ancestors of modern humans that French anthropologists were forced to drop the Clichy skeleton from the human evolutionary line, as a modern type of human could not predate their allegedly older Neanderthal relatives.

Neanderthals are conventionally understood to have existed from 30,000 to 150,000 years ago, and the Clichy skeleton which dated at over 300,000 years ago was simply not an acceptable find despite the evidence to support its authenticity.

The Ipswich Skeleton

In 1911, another anatomically modern human skeleton was discovered beneath a layer of glacial boulder clay near the town of Ipswich, in England, by J. Reid Moir.

Found at a depth of about 4.5 feet (1.37 meters) between a layer of clay and glacial sands, the skeleton could be as much as 400,000 years old.

Naturally, the modern appearance of the skeleton was the cause of strong opposition, but if the find had of been Neanderthal-like, there would have been no questions raised over its position in the glacial sediments.

As Scottish anatomist and anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith explained,

“Under the presumption that the modern type of man is also modern in origin, a degree of high antiquity is denied to such specimens.”

The deposits in which the Ipswich skeleton was excavated from were recorded by the British Geological Survey as an intact layer of glacial boulder clay which had been laid down between the onset of the Anglian glaciation and the Hoxnian glaciations, a period that stretched between 330,000 and 400,000 years ago.

Some authorities have even put the beginning of the Mindel glaciation (which is equivalent to that of the Anglian) at around 600,000 years ago, which could potentially allow the Ipswich skeleton to also date back that far.

The deposits in which the Ipswich skeleton was excavated from were recorded by the British Geological Survey as an intact layer of glacial boulder clay which had been laid down between the onset of the Anglian glaciation and the Hoxnian glaciations, a period that stretched between 330,000 and 400,000 years ago.

Some authorities have even put the beginning of the Mindel glaciation (which is equivalent to that of the Anglian) at around 600,000 years ago, which could potentially allow the Ipswich skeleton to also date back that far.

The Castenedolo Bones

Situated in the southern slopes of the Alps, at Castenedolo, six miles (9.66 km) southeast of Brescia, lays a low hill called the Colle de Vento, where millions of years ago during the Pliocene period , layers of mollusks and coral were deposited by a warm sea washing in.

In 1860, Professor Giuseppe Ragazzoni traveled to Castenedolo to gather fossil shells in the Pliocene strata exposed in a pit at the base of the Colle de Vento. Reporting on his finds there Ragazzoni wrote:

“Searching along the bank of coral for shells, there came into my hand the top portion of a cranium, completely filled with pieces of coral cemented with blue-green clay characteristics of that formation. 

Astonished, I continued the search, and in addition to the top portion of the cranium I found other bones of the thorax and limbs, which quite apparently belonged to an individual of the human species.” 

Once more, negative reactions ensued by both geologists and scientists who were unwilling to accept the Pliocene age offered by Ragazzoni for the skeletal remains.

It was explained away by an insistence that the bones, due to their clearly modern characteristics, must have come from a recent burial and somehow or other found themselves among the Pliocene strata.

If in doubt, simply explain it away with logical thinking, even if you ignore the facts within plain sight and filter out the parts which do not fit.

Ragazzoni was understandably not pleased with the reception he received and the disregard given to his legitimate discovery of an anomalously ancient human skeleton, so he kept his eye on the site where he had found the relics once the land was sold to Carlo Germani in 1875, (on the advice of Ragazzoni, who had advised that the phosphate-rich clay could be sold to farmers as fertilizer).

Many more discoveries followed from 1879, as Germani kept his word and informed the professor immediately upon finding more bones in the pit.

Jaw fragments, teeth, backbone, ribs, arms, legs and feet were all dug out of the Pliocene formation which modern geologists have placed at around 3-4 million years old.

All of them were completely covered with and penetrated by the clay and small fragments of coral and shells, which removed any suspicion that the bones were those of persons buried in graves, and on the contrary confirmed the fact of their transport by the waves of the sea’, said Ragazzoni.

And on February 16, 1880, Germani informed Ragazzoni that a complete skeleton had been discovered, enveloped in a mass of blue-green clay, remains which turned out to be that of an anatomically modern human female.

“The complete skeleton was found in the middle of the layer of blue clay. . . The stratum of the blue clay, which is over 1 metre thick, has preserved its uniform stratification, and does not show any sign of disturbance” wrote Ragazzoni, adding, “The skeleton was very likely deposited in a kind of marine mud and not buried at a later time.”

After personally examining the Castenedolo skeletons at the Technical Institute of Brescia in 1883, Professor Giuseppe Sergi, an anatomist from the University of Rome, was convinced that they represented the remains of humans who had lived during the Pliocene period of the Tertiary.

Writing of his disdain towards the naysayers within the scientific community Sergi commented,

“The tendency to reject, by reason of theoretical preconceptions, any discoveries that can demonstrate a human presence in the Tertiary is, I believe, a kind of scientific prejudice. 

Natural science should be stripped of this prejudice.”

Anomalous Skeletons Have Their Place Too!

Unfortunately, this prejudice which continues to this day, shows no signs of abating, as Professor Sergi recognized back in the 19th century, ‘By means of a despotic scientific prejudice, call it what you will, every discovery of human remains in the Pliocene has been discredited.’

So why does its modern appearance override the other factors?

It doesn’t seem to be a very scientific approach to disregard an archaeological find simply because it does not conform to contemporary evolutionary theses.

The examples cited in this article are only a small selection which has been rescued from obscurity by vigilant researchers, but how many more cases have suffered similar dismissal due to their anomalistic circumstances ?

If science continues to sweep unusual discoveries under the carpet, how are we supposed to progress as a species if we are intent on denying data which contradicts our rigid paradigms?

It would appear that the knowledge filter has been in place for some time, much to the detriment of humankind and our quest to illuminate our foggy, mysterious ancient past.

Of course we cannot be sure of the validity of the anomalous finds mentioned above, but by ignoring the sheer volume of cases which question current scientific paradigms regarding the evolution of man, we are being denied the whole story – which can only be detrimental to the ongoing study of human evolution .

References

Meltzer, D. 2009.  First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America . University of California Press.

Steen-McIntyre, V. and Fryxell, R. and Malde, H. 1981.  Geologic Evidence for Age of Deposits at Hueyatlaco Archaeological Site . U.S. Geological Survey.

Various, 2016. “Early–Mid Pleistocene environments in the Valsequillo Basin, Central Mexico: a reassessment” in Journal of Quaternary Science .

Zillmer, H. 2010.  The Human History Mistake: The Neanderthals and Other Inventions of the Evolution and Earth Sciences . Trafford Publishing.

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The mystery find of a polished metal part within a geode that’s millions of years old

Here I am going to take a well-deserved break from the insanity of American-led global politics and discuss a curious find. A treasure, if your will. It is a mystery to some, and a curiosity to others. It is a geode with a polished, machined, and finished metal part inside of it.

Which is pretty much an interesting subject, anyways.

Just finding a geode to begin with is an excitement; an adventure. But to find one with a mysterious machined part inside is well… double exciting.

What is a Geode?

A geode is a Greek word that means the shape of the earth. The name originates from their shape, which is earthlike or oblong (like the shape of an egg). Geodes are consequently defined as secondary structures that are usually found in specific volcanic and sedimentary rocks.
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A beautiful quartz geode.

Geologic Occurrence and Formation

Geodes are not found randomly here and there. Instead they are usually found in large numbers in areas where the rocks have formed in a special geochemical environment.

Most geodes localities are in A) stratified volcanic deposits such as basalts and tuffs; or B) stratified sedimentary carbonate deposits such as limestones and dolomites. A diversity of other environments can also occasionally yield a small number of geodes.

The geodes are said to be formed in any hollow or cavity like areas such as in tree roots or animal burrows.

Geodes in sedimentary rocks are usually found in limestones, dolomites, and calcareous shale. In these deposits a gas-filled void can serve as the opening for geode formation.

Shells, tree branches, roots and other organic materials often decay away to leave a void for the formation of mineral materials. These cavities can be filled with quartz, opal, agate or carbonate minerals. They are generally smaller than the geodes formed in volcanic rocks.

The Discovery

An uncommon quartz geode embedded with screw-threaded metal bar was discovered by a geode collector in Lanzhou, China. His name is a Mr. Zhilin Wang. He found this stone on a field research trip to Mazong Mountain area located on the border of Gansu and Xinjiang provinces.

The pear-shaped stone is extremely hard and has an unusual external black color. It is about 8 x 7 cm and weighs 466 grams. It’s interior is filled with quartz crystals. Which seems to suggest a void eventually  causing the creation of the geode over time.

The most surprising part of the stone is the embedded 6 cm long, cone-shaped metal bar which bears clear screw threads.

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The screw-threaded metal bar – clearly a manufactured item – is tightly enclosed in the black lithical material.

Yet the fact that it was buried in the ground long enough for hard rock to form around it, which rather means that it must be millions of years old.

The screw thread width remains consistent from the thick end to the thin end, instead of varying due to the growth of  rhe quartz crystals.

Truthfully, there is little that we can determine from the information available to us. Personally, I would love to have an analysis performed on the metal. That would tell us something about the part, and a few close up photos of the surface would indicate the manufacturing process and finishing techniques.

But what little we know can tell us a little more than what the rock find suggests.

The Age of the Geode

Using what we know, we can estimate the age of the formation of the geode by the age of the surrounding rock. We know that the geode was discovered by the Mr. Zhilin Wang while on a field research trip to Mazong Mountain area. This area consists of the Mazong mountains and the Jinta basin.

We present results from a multidisciplinary investigation of the Jiujing fault (JJF) system and adjacent Jiujing Basin in the southern Beishan block, western China. 

Structural and geomorphological fieldwork involving fault and landform investigations, remote sensing analysis of satellite and drone imagery, analysis of drill-core data, paleoseismological trench studies, and Quaternary dating of alluvial sediments suggest the JJF is a late Pleistocene to Holocene oblique sinistral-slip normal fault. 

Satellite image analysis indicates that the JJF is a connecting structure between two regional E-W-trending Quaternary left-lateral fault systems. 

The Jiujing Basin is the largest and best developed of three parallel NE-striking transtensional basins within an evolving sinistral transtensional duplex. Sinistral transtension is compatible with the orientation of inherited basement strike belts, NE-directed SHmax, and the modern E-NE-directed geodetic velocity field. Cosmogenic Al/10Be burial dating of the deepest sediments in the Jiujing Basin indicates that the basin began to form at ~5.5 Ma. 

-GeoScience World

It’s a “tough nut to crack”, but we are looking at geology that can date as far ago as 5.5 million years to the Late Pleistocene (129,000 to 11,700 years ago).

That’s a long period.

Never the less, it is unlikely that Anatomically modern humans (AMHs) of the Late Pleistocene were able to machine and thread metal tapered screws and place them inside a container for the geologic forces of heat and pressure over time to create a geode.

The Basic Geometry

The fact that this is a quartz geode indicates that it formed as the result of a stratified sedimentary carbonate deposit that surrounded a void. Over time, the forces of temperature and pressure acted upon the void and compressed it into the egg shaped geode that we see today.

If this speculation is correct, then it is possible that the virgin; pre-compressed void might have resembled something like this…

Of course, it’s really difficult to determine what the actual shape would be, or what the function was. What we only have to “go on” is the understanding on how certain types of geodes form, the dating of the rocky strata surrounding the object, and the observations of what is present.

Yet, even this tells us something.

This was a machined part or element within a subassembly that was buried and over time became a geode.

A Calrod

This polished metal rod like structure looks identical in shape, finish and appearance to an article that we, in the industry, refer to as a “calrod”.

Calrod heating elements generate dispersed heat by electrical energy conversion. Like many other heating elements, Calrod™ heaters also have an electrical supply running through them that gets converted to heat energy. A Calrod heater has a metallic alloy in its heating apparatus, which has resistance characteristics. This impedes the flow of current and transforms a portion of the energy into heat energy. This heat is passed on via radiation, and may be used to heat the surrounding air or water.

Heat can be transferred in a number of ways, through conduction, radiation and convection. In the case of the Calrod heater, heat is at first radiated to the surroundings, but it can be further dissipated through other methods of convection or conduction as well.

-Wattco

It’s a heating element that is used to maintain a temperature within a mechanism or chamber.

Calrod diagram.

Internal Structure Of The Heating Element In The Calrod Heater

The heating element of the Calrod heater is made of an alloy that consists of nickel and chromium. This mixture is said to make up an ideal alloy since it tends to have a minimum amount of resistance against heat generation. It also has a melting point that is quite high. This simply means that it will have higher chances of lasting longer, and this is of significant importance because it will be exposed to long term heating. Another brilliant advantage of using this alloy in the heating element is that it can be shaped to fit almost any kind of structure because it is highly malleable.

Calrod Heater Protection

Wire insulation within the Calrod heater is such that it is wrapped in a ceramic filler-binder. It also has a metal overcoat that conceals the element itself from air contact. With ceramic coating, there is more protection given to the element, as it is protected from the oxygen coming into contact with the surrounding air.

Insulation Calrod Heaters

Ceramic materials are chosen for insulation and protection of the Calrod heating elements due to the fact that they conduct the least amount of heat or electricity. Therefore, these materials are ideal for preventing heat or electrical energy from escaping. With this being most suitable for the outer surface, the metal encapsulation protects the element from any possible damage that might occur through mishandling.

What I would like

I would personally love to have a metallurgical analysis conducted on the metal rod. I would also like to look at the surface finish of the rod under a microscope. Those two items would be remarkably helpful in determining what the purpose of the object could have been.

I would also like to have a Psychometry reading conducted.

Psychometry is a psychic ability in which a person can sense or “read” the history of an object by touching it. Such a person can receive impressions from an object by holding it in his/her hands or, alternatively, touching it to the forehead.

Psychometry is a form of scrying–a psychic way of “seeing” something that is not ordinarily seeable. Some scry using a crystal ball, black glass or even the surface of water. With psychometry, this extraordinary vision is available through touch.

A person who has psychometric abilities–a psychometrist–can hold an antique glove and tell something about the history of that glove, the person who owned it, or about the experiences that person had while in the possession of that glove. The psychic may be able to sense what the person was like, what they did, or how they died. Perhaps most important, the psychic can sense how the person felt at a particular time. Emotions in particular, are most strongly “recorded” in the object.

The psychic may not be able to do this with all objects at all times and, as with all psychic abilities, accuracy can vary.

And here we diverge into psychometry…

A Brief History

“Psychometry” as a term was coined by Joseph R. Buchanan in 1842 (from the Greek words psyche, meaning “soul,” and metron, meaning “measure.”) Buchanan, an American professor of physiology, was one of the first people to experiment with psychometry.

Using his students as subjects, he placed various drugs in glass vials and then asked the students to identify the drugs merely by holding the vials. Their success rate was more than chance, and he published the results in his book, Journal of Man. To explain the phenomenon, Buchanan theorized that all objects have “souls” that retain a memory.

Intrigued and inspired by Buchanan’s work, American professor of geology William F. Denton conducted experiments to see if psychometry would work with his geological specimens. In 1854, he enlisted the help of his sister, Ann Denton Cridge. The professor wrapped his specimens in cloth so Ann could not see even what they were. She then placed the package to her forehead and was able to accurately describe the specimens through vivid mental images she was receiving.

From 1919 to 1922, Gustav Pagenstecher, a German doctor and psychical researcher, discovered psychometric abilities in one of his patients, Maria Reyes de Zierold. While holding an object, Maria could place herself in a trance and state facts about the object’s past and present, describing sights, sounds, smells and other feelings about the object’s “experience” in the world. Pagenstecher’s theory was that a psychometrist could tune into the experiential “vibrations” condensed in the object.

How Does Psychometry Work?

Pagenstecher’s vibration theory is getting the most serious attention from researchers. “Psychics say the information is conveyed to them,” writes Rosemary Ellen Guiley in Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience,

"through vibrations imbued into the objects by emotions and actions in the past."

These vibrations are not just a New Age concept, they have a scientific basis as well. In his book The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot says that psychometric abilities

"suggest that the past is not lost, but still exists in some form accessible to human perception."

With the scientific knowledge that all matter on a subatomic level exists essentially as vibrations, Talbot asserts that consciousness and reality exist in a kind of hologram that contains a record of the past, present, and future; psychometrics may be able to tap into that record.

All actions, Talbot says,

"instead of fading into oblivion, [remain] recorded in the cosmic hologram and can always be accessed once again."

Yet other psychical researchers think the information about an object’s past is recorded in its aura – the field of energy surrounding every object.

According to an article at The Mystica:

"The connection between psychometry and auras is based on the theory that the human mind radiates an aura in all directions, and around the entire body which impresses everything within its orbit.
All objects, no matter how solid they appear, are porous, containing small or even minute holes. These minute crevices in the object's surface collect minute fragments of the mental aura of the person possessing the object. Since the brain generates the aura then something worn near the head would transmit better vibrations."

“Psychometry – Psychic Gifts Explained” likens the ability to a tape recorder, since our bodies give off magnetic energy fields. “If an object has been passed on down the family, it will contain information about its previous owners. The psychic can then be thought of as a tape player, playing back the information stored on the object.”

Mario Varvoglis, Ph.D. at “PSI Explorer” believes that psychometry is a special form of clairvoyance. “The individual performing the psychometry,” he writes, “may gain psychic impressions directly from the person to whom the object belongs (through telepathy) or may clairvoyantly learn about past or present events in the life of the person. The object may simply serve as a kind of focusing device which keeps the mind from wandering off in irrelevant directions.”

How to Do Psychometry

Although some believe that psychometry is controlled by spiritual beings, most researchers suspect that it is a natural ability of the human mind. Michael Talbot agrees, saying that

"the holographic idea suggests that the talent is latent in all of us."

Here’s how you can try it yourself:

      1. Choose a location that is quiet and as free of noises and distractions as possible.
      2. Sit in a relaxed position with your eyes closed. Rest your hands in your lap with your palms facing up.
      3. With your eyes remaining closed, ask someone to place an object in your hands. The person should not say anything; in fact, it’s best if there are several people in the room and you don’t know who the person is giving you the object. The object should be something the person has had in his/her possession for a long time. Many researchers believe that objects made of metal are best, theorizing that they have a better “memory.”
      4. Be still… as images and feelings come into your mind, speak them aloud. Don’t try to process the impressions you get. Say whatever you see, hear, feel or otherwise sense as you hold the object.
      5. Don’t judge your impressions. These impressions may be strange and meaningless to you, but they might be of significance to the owner of the object. Also, some impressions will be vague and others might be quite detailed. Don’t edit–speak them all.
"The more you try, the better you will become,"

Says Psychometry – Psychic Gifts Explained.

"You should start to see better results as your mind becomes used to 'seeing' the information. 

But you can progress; at first, you will be pleased to pick up on things correctly, but the next stage is to follow the pictures or feelings. 

There may a lot more information that you can obtain."

Don’t worry too much about your rate of accuracy, especially at first. Keep in mind that even the most renowned psychometrists have an accuracy rate of 80 to 90 percent; that is, they are inaccurate 10 to 20 percent of the time.

"The important thing is to be confident that you will gain accurate psychic impressions when you handle the object,"

Says Mario Varvoglis at PSI Explorer.

"It's also important not to try to figure out likely histories of the object, not to analyze and interpret your impressions to find if they make sense. 

It's better to simply observe all the impressions that come into your mind and describe them without clinging to them and without trying to control them. 

Often the most unexpected images are likely to be most correct."

Conclusion

Since there is little that we can learn from this object except that it appears to be the fossilized remains of some kind of chamber, the use of Psychometry might be useful in the interpretation of the object.

Barring that, the closest object that I can think of is something that resembles the oxygen tanks about the Apollo spacecraft.

Here is a nice illustration of it…

And, here is a nice diagram of it…

And here is a schematic showing the oxygen tanks where they were located inside the Apollo spacecraft.

You see, in outerspace, it isn’t enough to have a cylinder filled with air. You need to have a system that controls the temperature, and pressure of the vessel that contains the atmosphere that you breathe. Thus we have a vessel, tending to be spherical, with probes and a heater assembly.

Truthfully, this resembles the pre-compressed and aged mechanism that was found as a geode.

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The creature with a great rack; the Megaloceros

Did you know that some species of creatures view size of particular shapes or body forms as sexually stimulating.  It’s sort of like how birds are attracted to displays of plumage, and precise mating dances, or how bees and insects are attracted to scents and colors. Well, what is very interesting and what we are going to talk about here are the sexual “turn ons” for long extinct animals.
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Sounds like fun, huh?
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In particular we are going to amuse ourselves with the magnificent rack on the megaloceros.
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I mean, when you see this creature cross the street, or walk into a store, or get into a car, you will not be able to help yourself. You will be staring at that absolutely stunning enormous rack. I am not kidding, I will tell you what!
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Megaloceros

Quick Megaloceros Facts

  • Lived from the Pleistocene through the Modern Period
  • Lived on the plains of Eurasia
  • Was as long as an elk
  • Weighed as much as 10 white-tailed deer
  • Was an herbivore
  • Its antlers were longer than a car

About Megaloceros

Megaloceros, also known as the Irish Elk, was a genus of deer which lived approximately 2 million to 10,000 years ago – from the Pleistocene through the Modern Period. It was first discovered during the late 18th century and was named by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1799. Its name means “giant horn.”

The genus of Megaloceros covers 9 distinct species of this genus, but only one of them were as large as small dinosaurs. And that species is Megaloceros giganteus. It is also the one that we will be talking about today.

Megaloceros.

If you look at Megaloceros pictures, then you’ll quickly realize that this animal looks like an elk with an extremely large set of horns. However, that is not entirely accurate. These mammals had more in common with North American deer than it did with European elks. Another one of the interesting facts about Megaloceros is that it wasn’t exclusive to Ireland either.  This deer lived all over Eurasia.

This animal was approximately 8 feet long and weighed around 1,500 pounds. Which is about the length of a modern elk but nearly double the weight of one. Another feature that made it quite different from looking like a modern elk is its antlers. Its antlers were about 12 feet long and weighed around 100 pounds.

As impressive as that sounds, their antlers weren’t used for combat, however. They were almost certainly used by the male deer to attract females.

Megaloceros went extinct right at the cusp of the last Ice Age. And scientists aren’t exactly sure why.

Some paleontologists have speculated that overpopulation and inbreeding led to a population of Megaloceros’s that were unable to adapt when the climate changed. Other paleontologists believe that mankind hunted them into extinction. Most likely, it was a combination of these two facts which led to the inevitable demise of these majestic looking animals.

Speaking about some large racks…

Of course, I just couldn’t help myself. Heh heh.

Index of large racks.

Here’s the videos. Most are under thirty seconds. Very quick. To open them up, just click on the link below.

  • MOV1 – She’s from Hunan, and I love her in traditional clothes.
  • MOV2 – She’s a mighty big girl.
  • MOV3 – She’s a clothing model.
  • MOV4 – It’s hard to concentrate on her trousers.
  • MOV5 – I do like her top.
  • MOV6 – Demure, but impressive.
  • MOV7 – Damn!
  • MOV8 – This is a really nice girl.
  • MOV9 – One of my favorites.
  • MOV10 – She always puts a smile on my face.

And a second group…

Now wasn’t that fun? Yeah. I like looking at pretty girls.

And the point that I am trying to make is… um… well, big physical attributes tell us nothing about the person who displays them. But they DO tend to get our attention.

I posit that the Megaloceros evolved with these large enormous horns not because it offered it better ability to forage, to run, to camouflage or to survive, but rather to attract the attention of females that wouldn’t help but notice his enormous, gigantic presence.

Instead of survival, it was procreation of the species.

Which is a very important driving force for life. And while it might not be all that progressively popular to admit, it is true. Species that are not able to procreate to the point where it is able to live within it’s environment are doomed for extinction.

Perhaps we see that manifesting in humans as well. Eh?

It does make you wonder about the LGBT movement…

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The mystery of the 300 million year old wheel embedded inside sandstone found in a deep mine

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The Stone Age marks a period of prehistory in which humans used primitive stone tools. Lasting roughly 2.5 million years, the Stone Age ended around 5,000 years ago when humans in the Near East began working with metal and making tools and weapons from bronze.

During the Stone Age, humans shared the planet with a number of now-extinct hominin relatives, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.
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The idea that Neanderthals were able to do anything besides one or two carvings on mammoth tusks, and using bones as hammers, is considered ludicrous.
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And when they pretty much were dying out, historians believe that that was the period of time when the use of stone tools started to make way for pottery, and perhaps roughly sewn clothing.
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Again from History.com
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The oldest pottery known was found at an archaeological site in Japan. Fragments of clay containers used in food preparation at the site may be up to 16,500 years old.

Stone Age food varied over time and from region to region, but included the foods typical of hunter gatherers: meats, fish, eggs, grasses, tubers, fruits, vegetables, seeds and nuts.

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But that’s pretty much the extent of it all. But, then we have an OOPART. A thing that should not exist. A thing or an item that shakes the very foundation that historians have created for the lineage of man.
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How? Well, these are the OLDEST dates that people are willing to attribute to humans…
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  • Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago.
  • The first modern humans began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago.
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Here we talk about this.

Enigmatic Ancient Wheel: The 300-Million-Year-Old Wheel and Anomalous Ancient Tracks Across the World

The following article is extracted from The Myth Of Man  by J.P. Robinson. All credit to the author, and please kindly note that it was edited to fit this venue. Along with some healthy MM additions.

In 2008, a curious find was discovered down a coal mine in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

As it could not be safely or successfully cut out due to the nature of the sandstone in which it was embedded, the mysterious artifact looking much like an ancient wheel remains in situ down the mine.

A fossilized (previously) wooden wheel has been unearthed in a mine in Eastern Europe / Russia. It is encased in rock (sandstone) that is 300 million years old.

Whilst drilling the coal coking stratum named J3 ‘Sukhodolsky’ at a depth of 900 meters (2952.76 feet) from the surface, workers were surprised to find what appears to be the imprint of a wheel above them in the sandstone roof of the tunnel that they had just excavated.

Thankfully, photographs of the unusual imprint were taken by the Deputy Chief V.V. Kruzhilin and shared with the mine foreman S. Kasatkin, who brought news of the find to light.

Without being able to further explore the site and inspect the imprint at close hand, we are left with only the photographs as evidence of their existence (there was more than one imprint) and the word of a group of Ukrainian miners.

Discovering the Wheel

Without being able to definitively date the strata in which the fossilized wheel print was found, it has been noted that the Rostov region surrounding Donetsk is situated upon Carboniferous rock aged between 360-300 million years ago.

As well as the widely distributed coking coals have derived from the middle to late Carboniferous; suggesting a possible age of the imprint at around 300 million years old.

This would mean that an actual wheel became stuck millions of years ago and dissolved over time due to a process called diagenesis, where sediments are lithified into sedimentary rocks, as is common with fossil remains.

Diagenesis () is the process that describes physical and chemical changes in sediments first caused by water-rock interactions, microbial activityand compaction after their deposition. The increase of pressure and temperature only starts to play a role as sediments get buried much deeper in the Earth's crust. 

In the early stages, the transformation of poorly consolidated sediments into sedimentary rock (lithification) is simply accompanied by a reduction in porosity and water expulsion (clay sediments), while their main mineralogical assemblages remain unaltered. 

As the rock is carried deeper by further deposition above, its organic content is progressively transformed into kerogens and bitumens. The process of diagenesis excludes surface alteration (weathering) and deep metamorphism. 

There is no sharp boundary between diagenesis and metamorphism, but the latter occurs at higher temperatures and pressures. Hydrothermal solutions, meteoric groundwater, rock porosity, permeability, dissolution/precipitation reactions, and time are all influential factors.

-Wikipedia

A miner below a wheel imprint in the mine. (Author provided) SMXL

The following is an extract from a letter written by S. Kasatkin (translated from Ukrainian) in reference to his testimony of having been witness to the anomalous wheel imprint discovered by his team of miners in 2008:

‘This finding is not a PR action. In due time (2008), we as a team of engineers and workers asked the mine director to invite scientists for detailed examination of the object, but the director, following the instructions of the then owner of the mine, prohibited such talks and instead only ordered to accelerate work on passing through this section of lava and on fast ‘charging’ of the section with mining equipment. 

Owing to that, this artifact and the smaller one found during further work came to be in a tunnel blockage and could not be taken out and studied. It is good that there were people, who in spite of the director’s prohibition, photographed this artifact. 

I have connections with the people who first discovered these imprints and also with those who photographed them. We have more than a dozen witnesses. As you understand, the admission in the mine is strictly limited (it is dangerous on sudden emissions) and to obtain such permit is rather difficult. 

The ‘wheel’ was printed on sandstone of the roof. Guys (drifters) tried to ‘cut away’ the find with pick hammers and to take it out to the surface, but sandstone was so strong (firm) that, having been afraid to damage a print, they have left it in place. At present the mine is closed (officially since 2009) and access to the ‘object’ is impossible - the equipment is dismantled and the given layers are already flooded.(with water)’ 

The wheel. (Author provided)

The wheel. 

With only this written testimony and that of the other witnesses, the photographs remain the only proof of this anomalous imprint, but it must be deemed worthy of mention despite any difficulties verifying the details beyond that which you have read.

For, if the photographic evidence is indeed legitimate, then one must question how a man-made wheel became embedded in such ancient strata, when according to scientific orthodoxy man had not even evolved yet.

Contemporaneous Cartwheel

Here is the design of a cartwheel made out of wood that was common prior to the industrial age.

Yeah.

You all might want to compare it with the wheel found in the 300 million year old limestone.

A curious thing about this cartwheel

it’s very difficult to make out, and (as far as I know) no one bothered to measure the wheel, from the pictures, it appears diminutive.

Most cartwheels that I have seen and know of from my personal experiences tend to be large. They are perhaps, 150 cm in diameter. (With obvious variations of course). This is roughly five feet in diameter.

This wheel appears to be much less than that. Maybe 100 cm in diameter, or roughly three feet.

Judging from this singular article, and extrapolating with many assumptions, you might want to suggest that the species, or creatures that manufactured this wheel were diminutive in size as well. Perhaps, 120 cm high (4 feet).

If so, then this would be in agreement with the hand bell that was found in a lump of coal that is contemporaneous with this wheel.

Go here to read about this…

Another curious thing…

The wheel apparently has metal banding on both the hub and the wheel. This implies directly, that the species that manufacturing this wheel was also able to work in metal.

Why is this an OOPART?

It’s not just that this wheel predates the “bronze age” of human technological advancement, but it predates all primates.

The wheel pre-dates to the time of the dinosaurs.

The Earth, 300 years ago…

This was a time before even the mighty dinosaurs roamed the Earth. A time in history when the plants and animals would be unrecognizable to us today, well most of them.

You’ll probably already know that at this time the Earth’s continents were fused together in the supercontinent Pangea. This supercontinent would eventually break up and produce the modern configuration of continents we are all too familiar with.

Professor Roger Steinberg from Del Mar College hand drew a sheet of paper with 5000 dots on it. He then photocopied it 200 times and stuck them all together to show his students. When shown the paper, he asked her students to guess the number of dots they could see. Estimates ranged from 4.6 billion (the age of the Earth) to 13.7 billion (the age of the Universe).

They were all shocked when he revealed it was only actually 1 million. Now imagine 60,000 of those sheets stuck together and you’ll “get a feel” for the length of time we are talking about here. Given the average dimensions for A4 paper (21 by 29.7 cm or 0.06 m2) that would cover an area of 3600 m2!

Now imagine this 300 times larger!

Incredible!

300 million years ago puts us firmly within the Palaeozoic period of geological history, technically speaking within the Permian-Pennsylvanian boundary. This was a time of great change in the animal kingdom. Amphibians had evolved into reptiles that will one day give birth to all-conquering dinosaurs in a few tens of millions of years.

300 million years ago puts us firmly within the Palaeozoic period of geological history.
The plants that were in the carboniferous period were very similar to those present in a tropical climate. It was known for swamp forest which had lots of life. Lycopsids were abundant during the Carboniferous period and were a big source of carbon. There was a lot of coal during this time period so it helped the coal a lot. Then the lycopsids went extinct due to a drying trend. After that ferns and sphenopsids were dominant.

The land was dominated by the ancestors of all mammals, the Synapsids, and the ancestor of all reptiles and birds, the Diapsids. Living Diapsids include crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and tuatara. The Synapsids would become a highly diversified group throughout the Permian ultimately evolving into the first mammals during the Triassic.

The iconic apex predator of the period, the Dimetrodon, would rule the land. This chap, although looking pretty reptilian, is actually more closely related to you than the dinosaurs that would follow it.

The Dimetrodon was the apex predator.

In the oceans, ammonites and ancient fish and sharks roamed the depths. Plant life on land was undergoing a revolution changing from the giant swamps of the Carboniferous to truly modern Gymnosperms taking dominance.

At this time in Earth’s history, the continents of the modern world were tightly locked together in the supercontinent known as Pangea. It is believed this assembly formed somewhere around 335 million years ago. It wasn’t to last, however.

The restless “gubbins” of the Earth would tear this assembly apart about 175 million years ago through a process known as plate tectonics. This gradual motion of the plates still continues today, in fact, Australia and India (they share the same plate), for example, are actually sliding northeast towards Asia and the central Pacific Ocean.

This a picture of what the world looked like during the Carboniferous Period. As you can see it looks nothing like the world we know today. The continents are in process of forming a super continent called Pangea.

So there you go. That’s how the world looked 300 million years ago. Cool eh?

The Carboniferous Period (350-300 Million Years Ago)

Some of the animals that were present during the Carboniferous period were Amphibiamus lyelli, Which had long snouts, short limbs and flattened heads. Labachia is an early relative of they conifers. Crocodiles were there and hey are still present today. There were some dinosaurs but not as many as the Mesozoic era. There was also marine reptiles, lizards,snakes, birds and land snails. They also had many insects such as big dragonflies, mayflies, millipedes, scorpions and spiders. The millipedes scorpions and spiders were very good for the environment. There was hylonomos which were lightly built with deep strong jaws and slender limbs. Some other animals were gastropods, bonyfish and sharks.

A Look at Prehistoric Life During the Carboniferous Period.

Amphibamus grandiceps, a dissorophoid temnospondyl from the late Carboniferous of Illinois.

The name “Carboniferous” reflects the most famous attribute of the Carboniferous period: the massive swamps that cooked, over tens of millions of years, into today’s vast reserves of coal and natural gas. However, the Carboniferous period (359 to 299 million years ago) was also notable for the appearance of new terrestrial vertebrates, including the very first amphibians and lizards.

Climate and Geography

The global climate of the Carboniferous period was intimately linked with its geography.

During the course of the preceding Devonian period, the northern supercontinent of Euramerica merged with the southern supercontinent of Gondwana, producing the enormous super-supercontinent Pangea, which occupied much of the southern hemisphere during the ensuing Carboniferous.

This had a pronounced effect on air and water circulation patterns, which resulted in a large portion of southern Pangea being covered by glaciers and a general global cooling trend (which, however, didn’t have much effect on the coal swamps that covered Pangea’s more temperate regions).

In the swampy forests of the Carboniferous Period, 360 to 286 million years ago, dragonflies with two-and-a-half-foot wingspans darted among the giant ferns. Mayflies grew to canary size. Cockroaches appeared suddenly (as cockroaches do) for the first time.

-Insects of the Oxygeniferous | Discover Magazine

Oxygen made up a much higher percentage of the Earth’s atmosphere than it does today, fueling the growth of terrestrial megafauna, including dog-size insects.

Terrestrial Life During the Carboniferous Period

The climate during the carboniferous period was tropical and mild temperatures. It was a uniform climate, and the early carboniferous period was relatively warm.

Amphibians. Our understanding of life during the Carboniferous period is complicated by “Romer’s Gap,” a 15-million-year stretch of time (from 360 to 345 million years ago) that has yielded virtually no vertebrate fossils.

What we do know, however, is that by the end of this gap, the very first tetrapods of the late Devonian period, themselves only recently evolved from lobe-finned fish, had lost their internal gills and were well on their way toward becoming true amphibians.

Carboniferous life.

By the late Carboniferous, amphibians were represented by such important genera as Amphibamus and Phlegethontia, which (like modern amphibians) needed to lay their eggs in water and keep their skin moist, and thus couldn’t venture too far onto dry land.

Reptiles. The most important trait that distinguishes reptiles from amphibians is their reproductive system: The shelled eggs of reptiles are better able to withstand dry conditions, and thus don’t need to be laid in water or moist ground.

The evolution of reptiles was spurred by the increasingly cold, dry climate of the late Carboniferous period.

One of the earliest reptiles yet identified, Hylonomus, appeared about 315 million years ago, and the giant (almost 10 feet long) Ophiacodon only a few million years later.

By the end of the Carboniferous, reptiles had migrated well toward the interior of Pangea. These early pioneers went on to spawn the archosaurs, pelycosaurs, and therapsids of the ensuing Permian period. (It was the archosaurs that went on to spawn the first dinosaurs nearly a hundred million years later.)

Invertebrates. As noted above, the Earth’s atmosphere contained an unusually high percentage of oxygen during the late Carboniferous period, peaking at an astounding 35%.

This surplus was especially beneficial to terrestrial invertebrates, such as insects, which breathe via the diffusion of air through their exoskeletons, rather than with the aid of lungs or gills.

Carboniferous life.

The Carboniferous was the heyday of the giant dragonfly Megalneura, the wingspan of which measured up to 2.5 feet, as well as the giant millipede Arthropleura, which attained lengths of almost 10 feet.

This is a drawing of the Dragon flies that were around during this time period. As you can see they look similar to the ones we have today except for their much larger size.

As well, as the domestically evolved Mantid species.

Insects of the Carboniferous Period

During the Carboniferous, numerous new insect families developed on Earth, with many insect species growing to incredible sizes. Fortunately, there’s a distinct lack of eight-foot-long millipedes today.

Bugs today are minuscule compared to the Carboniferous period, likely due to the way that insects breathe and how that system fails to hold up at large scales.

Invertebrate insects grew to enormous sizes.

Insect respiration relies on a series of small tubes, or tracheae, spread throughout their bodies. Most insects don’t even “breathe,” exactly, but rather allow oxygen to passively diffuse throughout their respiratory systems. When an insect gets too large, these tracheae can’t collect enough oxygen to support their bodies.

Around 300 million years ago, however, Earth was saturated with oxygen. Today’s atmosphere is 21% oxygen, while the Carboniferous period had an atmosphere that was 35% oxygen. With this overabundance, insects’ respiratory systems could support larger bodies than what we think of as typical. Being big is, generally, a good thing: large animals stand to win in a fight, can store more energy for when resources are scarce, and retain heat more efficiently.

Animals that were passive absorbers of oxygen, like insects, started growing to huge sizes. And I mean HUGE.

There was a species of caterpillar that grew to 2.5 metres in length, a scorpion that grew to 70 cm and a dragonfly that had a wingspan of 75 cm. Yikes!

Invertebrate insects grew to enormous sizes.

In fact, the size of many modern insects is only limited by ambient levels of oxygen. It’s not a genetic limit. More oxygen equals bigger size. There are scientists who are, right now, trying to grow large insects inside oxygen chambers. Someone should tell them to stop. PLEASE STOP.

For insects, there needed to be more oxygen in the air for this to happen. The extra oxygen didn’t suddenly appear, however; this change in the atmosphere can be attributed to the arrival of the first trees on the planet.

Prior to the Carboniferous period, trees didn’t exist. During this time, the first things that could properly be recognized as trees appeared. These were unlike the trees we know today—they were more like massive ferns with shallow roots that made them prone to falling over. They grew throughout the swamps that covered most of the planet during this period.

Invertebrate insects grew to enormous sizes.

However, ancient trees and modern trees do share a crucial characteristic. They both are made of a cellulose and lignin composite—wood. Wood also happens to be an excellent store of carbon. As these trees grew taller and taller to compete for sunlight, they sucked more and more carbon out of the atmosphere and exchanged it for oxygen, fundamentally changing the composition of the atmosphere.

Wood was a novel material on the planet: the fungi and microbes capable of digesting it didn’t exist yet. When these trees fell over and died, they stayed in place. Tree trunks slowly accumulated over the swampy Earth, storing away much of the carbon in the atmosphere. This is where the name of this period of time comes from: Carboniferous is Latin for coal-bearing. In fact, as layers of dead trees piled on top of each other, they were gradually compressed into a massive layer of coal, which is where we get most of the coal we use today.

Invertebrate insects grew to enormous sizes.

All of this paints a very surreal picture of ancient Earth. It would have been a moist, swampy place covered in endless fields of timber and giant ferns, crawling with Lovecraftian insects the size of your arm or larger.

On the WTF? “news”…

Scientists successfully breed giant prehistoric dragonflies

Crazed boffins in the USA say they have successfully carried out a Jurassic Park-style project in which enormous flesh-eating creatures from the remote prehistoric past have been successfully bred in the laboratory. Incomprehensibly this laboratory is not located on a remote island.

As many readers will doubtless be aware, during the late Paleozoic era the Earth was, if not exactly ruled or terrorized, at the least very seriously bothered by swarms of gigantic dragonflies with wingspans around 70cm across. The monster insects will have been all the more troublesome as dragonflies “need to hunt live prey”, according to experts.

One such expert is Dr John VandenBrooks, who has after a lengthy struggle managed to breed such much-enlarged dragonflies in his Arizona laboratory. The large size was achieved by enhancing atmospheric oxygen levels to 31 per cent, as seen in the Paleozoic (today’s air is only about 20 per cent O2).

Proudly showing off the results of their genetic experimentation.

The hard bit, according to the prof, was not the creation of this artificially enriched (or “hyperoxic”) atmosphere but the actual care and feeding of the monstrous, prehistoric winged flesh-eaters.

“Dragonflies are notoriously difficult to rear,” boasts VandenBrooks. “We are one of the only groups to successfully rear them to adulthood under laboratory conditions.”

According to a statement issued by the Geological Society of America:

There is no such thing as dragonfly chow. As juveniles they need to hunt live prey and in fact undergraduate students Elyse Muñoz and Michael Weed working with Dr VandenBrooks had to resort to hand feeding the dragonflies.
It’s to be hoped that the unfortunate undergrads escaped from the hyperoxia chambers with their hands and other body parts intact. Plenty more where they came from, no doubt.

Not content with his creation of huge flesh-eating Paleozoic hyper-dragonflies, VandenBrooks also sought to breed greatly enlarged cockroaches and other horrors using similar hypercharged breeding pens. However this time the experiments were a failure, even once the hyper-roaches had been blasted with incredibly powerful energy rays at a handy atom-smasher.

The disappointed prof, perhaps assisted by surviving members of his team, is to reveal details of his accomplishments at a convention in Colorado.

Yikes!

Giant Millipede.

Marine Life During the Carboniferous Period

With the extinction of the distinctive placoderms (armored fish) at the end of the Devonian period, the Carboniferous isn’t especially well known for its marine life, except insofar as some genera of lobe-finned fish were closely related to the very first tetrapods and amphibians that invaded dry land.

Falcatus, a close relative of Stethacanthus, is probably the best-known Carboniferous shark, along with the much bigger Edestus, which is known primarily by its teeth.

As in preceding geologic periods, small invertebrates like corals, crinoids, and arthropods were plentiful in the Carboniferous seas.

Plant Life During the Carboniferous Period

The dry, cold conditions of the late Carboniferous period weren’t especially hospitable to plants—but that still didn’t prevent these hardy organisms from colonizing every available ecosystem on dry land.

The Carboniferous witnessed the very first plants with seeds, as well as bizarre genera like the 100-foot-tall club moss Lepidodendron and the slightly smaller Sigillaria.

Lepidodendron trees. However, by most accounts they existed in dense forests with very thick and deep swampy undergrowth. So if you add that green boggy mess to the picture you would have a better idea of what the tree actually looked like.

The most important plants of the Carboniferous period were the ones inhabiting the large belt of carbon-rich “coal swamps” around the equator, which were later compressed by millions of years of heat and pressure into the vast coal deposits we use for fuel today.

Bruno, a fellow forum member and moderator of the naturalistes forum has a ton of plant fossil examples and reconstruction info over on that site..

Take a look at each page and you'll see the closeup detail of fossils of the genus Lepidodendron and lots of reconstructions that will help your cause. 

He's also got a wealth of info on the other major plant members of the forest in that website....days and days worth of fossil images and reconstructions. It is a treasure!

http://forums-naturalistes.forums-actifs.com/t2395-lepidodendron-sternberg-1820

Carboniferous period summary

During this period in time, there was one super continent on the earth. It had plentiful oxygen which permitted the evolution of insects to grow to enormous sizes and develop specialized intelligence’s over the years.

Most other creatures were still primitive and resembled proto-dinosaurs. These were smaller creatures that were just then finding their way on the food chain. There were NO apes, primates or humans.

Ancient Tracks

Yet…

Evidence for the existence of wheeled vehicles in antiquity has surfaced all over the world. They do so as petrified ancient tracks.

They are found in France, Spain, Italy, Malta, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and even North America.

Prehistoric “Cart ruts”

"I believe we’re seeing the indicators of the civilization which existed sooner than the vintage introduction of this global,” Dr. Koltypin mentioned. “All those rocky fields had been coated with ruts left thousands and thousands of years in the past…we don’t seem to be speaking about human beings. We are coping with some more or less automobiles or all-terrain vehicles.”

-Alienpolicy

A prehistoric site known formally as Misrah Ghar il-Kbir   meaning the Great Cave in Maltese (and commonly referred to as Clapham Junction), is located at Siggiewi, near the Dingli Cliffs in Malta.

It is at this now famous site that what have been termed ‘cart ruts’ cut into the limestone have mystified all that have visited the area.

Cart ruts suggestive of an axle connected pair of wheels.

Likewise, a number of unusual tracks in stone are also visible on the island of Sicily at the Greek amphitheater called the Great Theater of Syracuse.

Interestingly, and paradoxically, most archaeologists have suggested that the Maltese tracks were probably created by Sicilian settlers who traveled to Malta around 2000 BC at the start of the Bronze Age.

Yet more tracks are to be found in Turkey.

Some at Sofca cover an area roughly 45 by 10 miles (72.42 by 16.09 km), and also in Cappadocia, where several pockets of tracks can be seen.

The many ruts discovered around the world have caused a great deal of controversy as to their purpose, age, and origin.

These mysterious objects remain up for debate, but due to the association and close proximity with megalithic structures, in Malta particularly, and due to the fact that many tracks are now submerged below the sea in that region, many researchers have concluded that the fossilized lines show signs of great antiquity.

‘Cart rut’ tracks in Sofca, Turkey. (Author provided)

Bizarrely, considering the anomalous wheel print discovered in Ukraine that we have just discussed, a medieval city-fortress in the Crimean Mountains of Ukraine called Chufut-Kale lies in ruins, but also plays host to a number of cart ruts in stone like those at the nearby site of Eski-Kermen.

"We can think that ancient vehicles on wheels had been drove on comfortable soil, perhaps a rainy floor, and as a result of their weight the ruts had been so deep. Later those ruts – and all the floor round – simply petrified and secured all the proof,”

-Alienpolicy

Dr. Alexander Koltypin is a geologist and director of the Natural Science Research Center at Moscow’s International Independent University of Ecology and Politology.

He has spent a great deal of time visiting these sites and comparing them to one another in search of similarities.

“I first saw tracks in stone - fossilized car or terrain vehicle traces (usually called cart ruts) on Neogen plantation surface (peneplene in Phrygian) plain in May 2014 (Central Anatolia Turkey). 

They were situated in the field of development of Middle and Late Miocene tuffs and tuffites and according to age analysis of nearby volcanic rocks, had middle Miocene age of 12-14 million years,” wrote Koltypin.

This particular region which Koltypin has researched further is relatively unknown and the guide books offer nothing in the way of information.

Whilst orthodox researchers claim that the tracks are simply the remnants of old petrified cart ruts from the kind of wheeled vehicles which donkeys or camels would have pulled, Koltypin has other ideas.

“I will never accept it,” he explained when confronted with the standard explanations. “I myself will always remember . . . many other inhabitants of our planet wiped from our history.”

Raddet ir-Roti Cart Ruts, Xemxija Heritage Trail in St. Paul's Bay, Malta. (Frank Vincentz/CC BY SA 3.0)

Raddet ir-Roti Cart Ruts, Xemxija Heritage Trail in St. Paul’s Bay, Malta. (Frank Vincentz/ CC BY SA 3.0 )

Upon measuring the width and length of the tracks at the Phrygian Valley site, he is convinced that they were created by vehicles of a similar length to modern cars but with tires 9 inches (22.86 cm) wide.

With the depth of the impressions of the tracks in stone exceeding that which one would associate with small carts, Koltypin maintains that the vehicles responsible must have been much heavier.

"As a geologist, I will unquestionably inform you that unknown antediluvian (sooner than the flood) all-terrain vehicles drove round Central Turkey some 12-14 million years in the past. The technique of specifying the age of volcanic rocks may be very smartly studied and labored out,” 

-Alienpolicy

He theorizes that whichever civilization drove the heavy vehicles that created the tracks were most likely responsible for the many different but identical roads, ruts and underground complexes which are scattered around the entire Mediterranean, more than 12 million years ago.

Aware that the process of petrification can occur within a relatively short period, Koltypin insists that the heavy mineral deposits which coat the tracks and the visible erosion are suggestive of…

…of a greater antiquity;

…along with the surrounding underground cities, irrigation systems, wells, and more, which also show signs of being millions of years old in his view.

Koltypin wrote on his website,

‘We are dealing with extremely tough lithified (petrified) sediments, covered with a thick layer of weathering, that takes millions of years to develop, full of multiple cracks with newly developed minerals in them, which could only emerge in periods of high tectonic activity.’

It is evident that much research is needed to clarify the age and origin of the many tracks that are being discovered.

Discoveries which occur at multiple geographical locations, all over the world.

And yes, it is easy to simply state that they are the product of old carts which once trundled through these parts.

But actual investigation may well reveal far more complex and remarkable explanations which could well correlate with other things.

Other things, such as the mysterious remnants of an unknown ancient civilization as postulated by Alexander Koltypin.

The sheer presence of the fossilized wheel found in the Ukraine is certainly suggestive of the fact that the ancients may have had access to more technology and know-how than is currently accepted.

Especially when we KNOW that the world pretty much looked a little like this…

About the ruts

Don’t the ruts resemble trying to move carts through very marshy, muddy land? Just exactly the kind of terrain and environment that existed 300 million years ago?

Typical terrain 300 million years ago.

Conclusion

Dates are being bantered about of 300 million years, and 12 million years. In any event these dates pre-date apes, monkeys, primates and proto-humans.

Yet, we find the impossible.

Not only a wheel firmly embedded deep down inside a mine shaft, but ruts that take many centuries to harden into stone. Couple that with the discoveries of chains, metal lamps, bells, and other objects all pulled out of 300 million year old coal, it makes one wonder what is really going on.

Perhaps instead of trying to reationalize how these OOPART objects can exist relative to the history that is taught in school, perhaps we should realize that at signifigant points in time…

…in this case,

  • 300 million years ago
  • 12 million years ago

…that civilizations existed upon the earth. That these civilizations possessed tool-making ability, (as shown in other articles) metal forming ability, and the ability to work together in groups to create large megalithic structures that resemble boulders and rocks today.

And…

…instead of saying that mankind, or proto-humans created these objects, wouldn’t it be cleaner, more sensible, and easier to simply acknowledge that there must have been other civilizations, populated by other creatures living upon the earth at those far, far distant times.

A diminutive, and smaller than human, species… capable of living in a high oxygen content environment… where the oxygen made them grow to enormous sizes (though still smaller than humans). Capable of fabricating things out of wood, such as the Lepidodendron tree. And capable of metal working, which means that they had control over fire, and an understanding on how to mine ore.

And when we understand that point, we are truly able to see the insignificance of the human species on the grand scale of things.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my OOPARTs Index here…

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A metallurgical study of the aluminum locking pawl of Aiud a fine OOPART for investigative curiosity

Today I woke up at the crack of dawn, made my self a nice stout coffee (after I washed my face) and ate it with some buttered baguettes. It’s a nice little routine that I have, especially since I found a bakery that makes these kinds of bread instead of the soft and sweet “sponge cakes” (style breads) that are irritatingly common throughout China these days.

Sweet breads are not my favorite, though. Bagels are. And finding a proper bagel in China is an exercise in futility.

My old dog was snoring and barking in his deep doggie dreams. His little doggie paws were making padding moves and he was softly barking between his snoring.

It was a nice lovely and calm morning.

I sat down, fired up my computers, sat down (after I measured my blood pressure) and checked my email, as the dawn was lightening up. I could feel the fresh ocean breeze carry the fragrances of the local flowers, and the birds were singing their morning songs. It was calm and pleasant.

Uncle MM has left me some bars of gold…

What do you know!

My long lost great uncle Metallicman has died without any heirs. And I am the closest relative. Who would have figured?

What are the odds?

What’s more, he’s got a couple of billion dollars in the bank and I was contacted to see if I was his long, lost relative.

My goodness. Imagine that!

My name is Fabian Artoro, an asset management brokerage consultant. I am contacting you on behalf of my late client who worked as an independent engineering contractor in a gold mining company in my country, the Republic of Ghana. 

He was my client until his sudden demise on the 24th of April 2018, fatal car crash, his wife and their only daughter were all involved in that car crash along Kumassi express Road. 

Sadly, all occupants of the vehicle, unfortunately, lost their lives. My client had funds, a huge amount in one of the financial institutions here and it is in the process of being confiscated by the state as unclaimed funds...

I’m sure it is legitimate.

Don’t you?

Well, After checking my normal (tap, click and move on) websites, and finding out that they are all parroting the same-old, same-old nonsense, I moved on. You do get tired of the same spiel day in, and day out.

What am I talking about?

Well, I am talking about this…

First up, your daily dose of Anti-China…

It’s been a daily top-line item in my feeds since 2016.

Then, some stuff about guns…

Ai! You’ve just got to have something about guns. This is an American website, don’t you know.

Then you have your Washington DC political bullshit…

As if the entire nation (and world) actually cares…

Then some stuff on the Coronavirus…

Of course.

Then some words from “experts”…

Those “experts” are everywhere. Don’t you know know. They are thicker than flies. I’ll tell you what.

Some stuff that might be of interest to the folk in the “red states”…

You know, to keep the folk interested.

Prepping for yet more war!

But, you know, America is doing just great!

Some “bread and circuses for the masses…

With a dash of sex and religion…

And watch out! Aliens are going to enslave humans!

My goodness!

Reminds me of the movie “Battleship”. Nice CGI, by the way. And yeah, this was the entire plot and story line behind it. Don’t you know…

Well that was about as useful as giving a dolphin a pair of crutches.

So then it’s off to MM, and I check the comments. Ohhh baby!

MM Comment Section

Right there at the top of my comment “awaiting approval” list is this piece of insulting passive-aggressive bullshit.

I see you’re still doing the bidding of your new country comrade, it’s dishonest to hide the fact that you are a round-eyed Chinese operative…apparently there is no such thing as a retired intelligence officer.

I am too old for this nonsense.

  • I’ve lived in China for nearly two decades and no one has ever used the term “comrade“. I guess this jackass never got the memo. He’s probably still talking about how groovy the Mod Squad is, and fondling his “love beads”.
  • I’m dishonest? Even in prison they told me that I “couldn’t lie worth shit“. I can’t. So I just don’t try. I tell you it straight. You either take it or not. It really makes my life simpler. What you see is what you get.
  • Round eyes” sounds pretty fucking racist to me.

Idiots abound in this world.

Sometimes I wonder if they really believe what they say, or that they want to live inside a rotten world-line template. This “fellow” is certainly making his MWI topographical map “interesting“.

Here’s a MM secret; if you want to have a nice calm and happy life, make others happy. If you want to have a problem-some, and tumultuous life, then spend your time making others miserable.

Anyways, it’s 7am and I could use a beer.

Do you “feel” me?

Beer and pancakes.

The rest of the world is not my problem. You all will see what the fuck is going on in your little neck of the woods soon enough. Especially this piece of shit (will).

Anyways…

I am sorry that I have been so busy with all these other issues lately. But I do “feel” a need to start post more MAJestic related stuff, and that means OOPART stuff as well.

Which leads me to this mystery…

The Aiud Mystery in Transylvania

Yeah. Aiud is in the Transylvania region of Romania. It in the state of Alba. It’s that triangle shaped region in the map below.

The Transylvania region of Romania.

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Of all the hundreds of websites about this mystery object, not one single one bothered to look up Aiud on a map. They just cut and paste from other websites.

Slothful. Lazy.

Money-grubbing. Greedy.

“For-profit” oriented assholes.

Doesn’t anyone ever just do things because they WANT to do it? Jeeze!

Anyways, in 1974, in Romania, East of Aiud, (in Transylvania) a group of workers, on the banks of the river Mures, discovered three buried objects in a sand trench 10 meters deep.

In sand, near a river, implies that the river eventually covered these items and buried them in silt. Then later, when the river became smaller or changed it’s path, the silt remained as sandy soil.

Of the three items, two of the objects proved to be Mastodon bones. These dating from between the Miocene and the Pleistocene periods. The third object — the Aluminum Wedge of Aiud, also known as the Object of Aiud, is a mysterious wedge-shaped block of aluminum metal.

The mysterious aluminum object was discovered by chance in 1974 at a depth of 10 meters at a quarry by the banks of river Mures near the Romanian town of Aiud. The artifact weighs approximately 2 kilos (length: 21cm; width: 12.5 cm; thickness: 7cm). 

According to researchers and engineers it appears very similar to the feet fused on modern landing gear found on aircraft with vertical landing and take-off. 

For conventional investigators it appears as a hammer head. 

In its vicinity researchers found two mastodon bones(extinct large tusked mammal species that lived between 10,000 and 80,000 BC). Based on the findings next to the object it can be assumed that the object is at least 10,000 years old.

-HistoryDisclosure

Because it is out of place, it is considered an OOPART.

After all, contemporaneous belief is that Mastodons were unable to fabricate tools, let alone precision manufacture of aircraft components. They didn’t have opposing thumbs, don’t you know. Let alone the fact that those enormous tusks of theirs would get in the way of precision manufacturing…

That goes as well for the local humans at the time. They are considered to be primitive.

Early humans. (Romanticized.)

.

So what the heck is a pawl from a landing gear doing with some mastodon bones near a river in Romania?

Dating the object

According to conventional history the artifact should not exist since aluminum was discovered in 1807 and wasn’t produced in any usable form until after 1886.

A subsequent dating analysis (I haven’t been able to find details on the dating technique used) on the artifact indicated that it was at least 200,000 years old.

This date apparently came from the geological evidence where the bones and pawl were found. When the “front end loader” excavated the trench (or what ever equivalent did so in the 1970’s in Romania) the soil, and the mastodon bones indicated a very approximate date sometime within the Pleistocene.

Mastodon, (genus Mammut), any of several extinct elephantine mammals (family Mammutidae, genus Mammut) that first appeared in the early Miocene (23 million to 2.6 million years ago) and continued in various forms through the Pleistocene Epoch (from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago).

-Mastodon | Description, Distribution, Extinction, & Facts ...
Depending on the particular dating of the bones, we can assume that the pawl was contemporaneous with the bones in some way. Which could mean that the primitive humans picked up this pawl at some point in time, and were using it to smash open Mastodon bones for food.
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Obviously they weren't using it on one of their aircraft, or it just suddenly "fell off" some aircraft speeding along two million years ago, eh?
.
The dating (on the Mastodon bones) would be somewhere between 23 million years ago and 11,700 million years ago. Which is a (phew!) long span of time.
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So I’m not in agreement with the dating of the trench, the location, the bones, or anything else. Except to say that the aluminum predates the discovery, manufacture and utilization of aluminum in that form and shape. Thus making it an OOPART.

However, a conjecture…

Perhaps primitive man found this aluminum pawl, and found a use for it. It is very useful for cracking open bones to get at the marrow.

.

If we go ahead with the idea that perhaps a primitive human or pre-human picked up this aluminum pawl in it’s travels…

…and thinking that it is a nice “stone”, being light and easy to carry (5 pounds), with a nice pointed end…

…that shows abrasions on the pointed ends and sides…

…which makes this scenario likely…

…then we can date this part as used as a tool by the pre-humanoids in that region at that time.

The oldest handmade stone tools discovered yet predate any known humans and may have been wielded by an as-yet-unknown species, researchers say.

The 3.3-million-year-old stone artifacts are the first direct evidence that early human ancestors may have possessed the mental abilities needed to figure out how to make razor-sharp stone tools. The discovery also rewrites the book on the kind of environmental and evolutionary pressures that drove the emergence of toolmaking.

Chimpanzees and monkeys are known to use stones as tools, picking up rocks to hammer open nuts and solve other problems. However, until now, only members of the human lineage — the genus Homo, which includes the modern human species Homo sapiens and extinct humans such as Homo erectus — were thought capable of making stone tools. [See Photos of the Oldest Stone Tools]

Ancient stone artifacts from East Africa were first uncovered at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania in the mid-20th century. Those stone tools were later associated with fossils of the ancient human species Homo habilis, discovered in the 1960s.

-LiveScience

So…

This aluminum pawl could be 2.3 million years old.

Humans during the Pleistocene

Let’s have Caleb Strom explain what “humans” were like during this time. (From here.)

The evolution of anatomically modern humans took place during the Pleistocene. In the beginning of the Pleistocene Paranthropus species were still present, as well as early human ancestors, but during the lower Palaeolithic they disappeared, and the only hominin species found in fossilic records is Homo erectus for much of the Pleistocene.

-Pleistocene - Wikipedia

The Pleistocene epoch is a geologic epoch which began around 2.6 Mya (Million years ago) and came to an end around 11,700 BP (Before Present). It is characterized by lower sea levels than the present epoch and colder temperatures. During much of the Pleistocene, Europe, North America, and Siberia were covered by extensive ice sheets and glaciers. The Pleistocene was an important time because it was when the human genus first evolved.

The Pleistocene ( PLYSE-tə-seen, -⁠toh-, often colloquially referred to as the Ice Age) is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the world's most recent period of repeated glaciations. 

The end of the Pleistocene corresponds with the end of the last glacial period and also with the end of the Paleolithic age used in archaeology. The name is a combination of Ancient Greek πλεῖστος (pleīstos, "most") and καινός (kainós (latinized as cænus), "new".

-Wikipedia

The flora and fauna today also more or less reached their current form during the Pleistocene. Most Pleistocene animals and Pleistocene plants also exist in the Holocene. Furthermore, the Pleistocene epoch was the last geological epoch in which humans had relatively little impact.

While parts of the world were dryer – such as central Europe, which was mostly covered in tundra, other parts of the world were wetter and greener.

Many of the animals common today were also common in the Pleistocene. Deer, big cats, apes, elephants, and bears could all be found in a Pleistocene landscape. There were also animals that were common which have since gone extinct, such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths , and pre-human hominins .

Europe and Asia had significant populations of African fauna. Cave paintings and paleontological finds in Europe reveal that rhinoceroses, lions, and hyenas were all common at that time in southern Europe. The island of Sicily was also inhabited by a dwarf elephant species until surprisingly recent times. Northern Europe was covered in glaciers and inhospitable, while central Europe was tundra. Southern Europe, however, contained forests and was inhabited by numerous species of megafauna, most of which have since died out.

Another important development on the Pleistocene timeline was the emergence of the human genus: Homo. Humans probably evolved out of bipedal apes, such as the Australopithecines and Ardipithecus Ramidus . These early bipedal apes are classified as hominins. Hominins first evolved near the end of the Miocene epoch (25-5 Mya) in south and east Africa. Other than their upright posture and bipedalism, these hominins were not significantly more human than previous apes.

Their skeletons indicate that they resembled modern apes such as chimpanzees and their use of tools was limited or absent. At the beginning of the Pleistocene, however, a new type of hominin appeared. These hominins were taller, more dependent on upright locomotion, and had larger brains, which allowed them to excel in tool use over any previous hominin. These hominins belong to the genus Homo and hominins in this genus are simply called humans.

The earliest human species was Homo Habilis . The first examples of this species appeared about 2.3 million years ago. They used simple flake tools which were made by taking rocks and striking sharp flakes off other rocks – which could be used as cutting tools. Homo Habilis was more technologically inclined than its hominin predecessors, but it was still closer to earlier and more ape-like hominins than modern humans.

Homo Habilis

The next earliest human species is Homo Erectus . The first H. Erectus evolved around 2 million years ago and the last of them did not die out until sometime within the last 100,000 years. Archaeological and paleontological evidence suggest that they may have been the first humans to use culture as a wholesale approach to adapt to their environment. They were more advanced tool users and were also much taller than previous hominins, about six feet (1.83 meters) tall. They were also the first humans to leave Africa. By 1 million years ago, H. Erectus had spread to both Europe and Asia, bringing humans for the first time to these regions.

Homo Erectus

The earliest humans were universally hunter-gatherers. Their use of technology to interact with their environment made them very adaptative – so that humans eventually found their way into every possible environment on the planet: forests, grasslands, deserts, even tundra.

For most of the Pleistocene, humans did not significantly impact their environment. There were no more than a few hundred thousand individuals at a given time and their ability to transform the landscape was limited by primitive technology and limited social organization.

This all changed with the emergence of Homo Sapiens (modern humans) in Africa and Homo Neandertalensis (Neanderthals) in Europe.

Neanderthal

Anatomically modern humans first evolved in Africa around 200,000-300,000 BP. After the emergence of anatomically modern humans, something happened, perhaps a rewiring of the human brain , that led to the emergence of modern behaviors like art, blade production, long distance trade, and more efficient, organized hunting, among other abilities.

This change in behavior caused humans to have a significantly larger influence on their environment than in previous times. This can be seen in the fate of most megafauna, especially in the New World. Megafauna extinctions occurred around 40,000-50,000 years ago in Australia and around 13,000 years ago in North America. Both occurred shortly after the appearance of humans on these continents.

Obviously, Homo Neandertalensis (Neanderthals) are unlikely to have mined ore, smelted it, studied how to create alloys, formed it into aircraft components, and machines it for use in aircraft.

Thus we have an OOPART worthy of investigation.

Homo Neandertalensis (Neanderthals) are unlikely to have manufactured this aluminum pawl object.

An investigation ensues

So of course, if you are part of a construction crew and you dig up some bones, and other odd objects you call the authorities. And if the bones or objects look old, you call in the experts from the local museum, college or university to have a look.

Thus the object was sent to the archeological institute of Cluj-Napoca.

After the investigation and study, the block was donated to the History Museum of Transylvania, to be rediscovered and analyzed many years later. (I cover that later on.) Its weight turned out to be 5 pounds, and its approximate measurements are 20 x 12.5 x 7 centimeters.

There are two holes of different sizes.

The object has two arms like features.

Traces of abrasion can be seen on the sides of the object and at its lowest point.

Dr. Niederkorn of the institute for the study of metals and non-metallic minerals located in Magurele, Romania, concluded that the object is comprised of a alloy of an extremely complex metal.

He was not exaggerating.

Twelve different elements combine to form the Aiud Object. It consists of: 89% aluminum, 6.2% copper, 2.84% silicon, 1.81% zinc, 0.41% lead, 0.33% tin, 0.2% zirconium, 0.11% cadmium, 0.0024% nickel, 0.0023% cobalt, 0.0003% bismuth, and trace of galium.

Furthermore, this strange object is covered with a thick layer of aluminum oxide, which lends credence to its antiquity.

"After the analysis of this aluminum oxide layer, "specialists" have confirmed that the object is a minimum of 300 to 400 years old."

But that’s a bullshit guess.

The generation of aluminum oxide depends on the environment and the particular alloy that is being used. Unless you have that exact alloy of aluminum and put it though accelerated life testing, in the environment in question, it is IMPOSSIBLE to determine the age of anything.

Accelerated life testing

Accelerated life testing? What is that?

Well, it’s a common enough and fundamental aspect of engineering product design, but unknown to most other people. it is a way of estimating the life of a product due to environmental concerns. It’s a pretty handy and mature method for determine the life of a given object, or going backwards, the age of an object.

So here’s some basic links for the interested explorer…

But what we really want to determine is the accelerated life test due to corrosion. In that case similar, but more specialized tests must be conducted…

An accelerated corrosion test is a cyclic climate test for determination of the corrosion resistance of various types of coatings. In an accelerated corrosion test, corrosion, corrosion test, corrosion, degradation or failure of materials and products are induced without change in corrosion mechanism (s) in a shorter time period than under normal conditions.

-What is an Accelerated Corrosion Test (ACT)? - Definition ...

www.corrosionpedia.com/definition/1503/accelerated-corrosion-test-act

And some links…

Oxidation of Aluminum

Different alloys of aluminum oxidase differently. Some alloys are great for marine environments, while others are not that great, but have better strength characteristics. Further complicating the issue is the environment. Exposure to a dry environment is quite different from sitting with in a bog or sandy soil.

The ONLY way that you can accurately test for the oxidation characteristics of a new alloy is to perform extended life testing on a sample of the aluminum alloy within a simulated environment. Otherwise your estimates on aging through oxidation are all wrong.

Oxidation of Aluminum and it’s alloys.

It’s all pretty simple really.

The Aluminum Pawl

The Aluminum Pawl. Note the two holes clearly shown.

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Many people have things to say about this object and opinions on dating it.

No one is saying that the aluminum pawl is recent. Aside from making them look silly in the eyes of their contemporaries, it’s obvious that this chunk of metal is old. Really old. The level of corrosion on the object far exceeds any kind of contemporaneous aluminum corrosion. It’s just simply very extraordinary and unusual.

And because of this there are numerous statements being made…

The fact that this strange metal object was found alongside Mastadon bones does cause one to wonder and raises many issues. 

And...

Other specialists claim that the object could be 20,000 years old because it was found in a layer with mastodon bone. Perhaps this particular specimen lived in the latter part of the Pleistocene.

And...

Some researchers suppose that this piece of metal was part of a flying object that had fallen into the river. They presume that it had an extraterrestrial origin. Other researchers believe the wedge was made here on Earth and its purpose has not yet been identified.

Ah…

Some have speculated that this object is part of an Aircraft

It looks like a badly corroded locking latch from the retraction mechanism of an aircraft’s undercarriage, but that can’t be….surely?

Can it?

The retraction mechanism of an aircraft’s undercarriage.

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These mechanisms come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. But the closest thing to explain the operational features and functions of this aluminum pawl is the aircraft retraction mechanisms in contemporary aircraft.

I mean it’s more likely that this item was the part of some kind of landing gear mechanism than say a “frying pan”, a “pick axe”, a “railway train wheel”, a metal frame for a window”, a “water pipe” or an “anvil”.

Which makes one wonder what is one doing 2.5 million years ago, being used to break up the bones of a mastodon.

Primitive man would use stones and heavy objects to break open the bones of hunted animals to obtain the marrow inside of the bones.

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Could it have ended up down amongst bones that were deposited thousands of years ago by chance? It just happened to fall off an aircraft, that just happened to be flying a few million years ago, and it just happened to fall into the remains of a dead mastodon.

I guess it could.

Anything is possible.

And while it is possible, it is not probable.

The simplest explanation is probably the closest to the truth.

Whilst it is likely that the philosophy was posthumously attributed to him, as it was based upon common medieval philosophy, it seems to be a result of his minimalist lifestyle. 

Occam's razor is more commonly described as 'the simplest answer is most often correct,' although this is an oversimplification. The 'correct' interpretation is that entities should not be multiplied needlessly.

Researchers should avoid 'stacking' information to prove a theory if a simpler explanation fits the observations. 

Occam's razor is the process of paring down information to make finding the truth easier.

In science, it is getting rid of all the assumptions that make no difference to the predictions of the hypothesis. If you have a few hypotheses that could explain an observation, it is usually best to start with the simplest one.

-How Occam's Razor Works | HowStuffWorks

Or in other words, look for the simplest explanation, and then go from there. You add and include or discount and discard theories that fit or don’t fit the investigation that you are performing.

Landing gear.

Names on a landing gear

I call it a pawl. But who knows what it’s actual role was.

pawl. (pôl) n. A hinged or pivoted device adapted to fit into a notch of a ratchet wheel to impart forward motion or prevent backward motion. [Perhaps variant of pale or pole, or from French pal (from Old French; see pale1 ).]

-Pawl - definition of pawl by The Free Dictionary

It’s actual use name would be better described differently.

The specific names used on the various elements of an aircraft landing gear mechanism.

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Perhaps instead of a pawl, I could refer to it as a “drag strut to trunnion link walking beam“. Do you think that it would make things clearer?

Aiud in Romania

Ok, well let’s review where it was found. maybe some of you might want to hop on a plane and investigate for yourselves. You know, like Anonymous Jane did regarding the fuselage in The Fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.

If you do, I would be more than happy to post some of your pictures and info here. This is, after all, a collaborative effort.

Location of Romania. (This is for you Americans out there. The rest of the world pretty much knows where Romania is on a map.)

Map of Europe.

As far as where the town is, you need to look on a map. Here is a Romanian political map showing the location of Aiud. It is in the Alba (or Alba Lulia) state, which looks like a triangle.

A map of the various political regions of Romania.

And within this state we can find the location of Aiud in Romania.

A map of Alba, within Romania clearly showing the location of Aiud. “X” marks the spot.

Romania in the Miocene and the Pleistocene

Of course, a few thousand to a few million years ago Romania didn’t look like it does today. There was a lot of water there. With the Carpathian mountains creating a line of islands that interrupted a much larger Black Sea. If the dating was a million years ago, then we can say that the proto-humans who found and used this pawl were not all that far from the shorelines or feeding rivers to the Black Sea.

Palinspastic map for the Late Miocene with indication of palaeobiogeographic units (modified after Popov et al., 2004). Pannonian area emended after Magyar et al. (1999).

Outlines are drawn after palaeogeographic reconstructions or sediment distributions.

Faunas of freshwater systems fringing the Eastern Paratethys and the Italian 'Lago-mare' assemblage do not form a homogenous palaeogeographic entity. They are based on too many localities to be clearly indicated on the map. The Illyrian Region is only poorly supported by the analysis and represents the expiration of the Middle Miocene faunas of that region. Its incorporation into the present framework is only tentative.

Abbreviations: CPMCentral Peri-Mediterranean Dominion; NA-North Aegean Dominion; CA-Central Aegean Dominion; SAA-South Aegean-Anatolian Dominion; 1-Lower Tagus (w); 2-São Teotónio (l); 3-Duero (l); 4-Madrid (l); 5-Teruel (fl); 6-Baix Llobregat (b); 7-Alcalà de Xivert (u); 8-Cabriel (l); 9-Ayora (u); 10-Valencia (u); 11-Granada (l); 12-Spanish 'Lagomare' (b); 13-Palma (b); 14-Bresse-Valence (f); 15-Lower Rhône (m); 16-French 'Lago-mare' (b); 17-Torino hills (b); 18-Volterra (b); 19-Casino (b); 20-Velona (l); 21Cinigiano-Baccinello (l); 22-Sicilian 'Lago-mare' (b); 23-Bełchatów (l); 24-Turiec (l); 25-Pannon (b); 26-Dacia (b, l); 27-Kherson-Odessa region (b); 28-Black Sea depression (b); 29-Rioni Bay (b); 30-Kura Gulf (b); 31-Jazvina (l); 32-Kamengrad (l); 33-Posušje (l); 34-Sarajevo (l); 35-Kosovo (l); 36-Metohia (l); 37-Skopje (l); 38-Stanintsi (w); 39-Katerini (b); 40-Thessaloniki (b); 41-Strimon (b); 42-Limni (w); 43-Markopoulo (l); 44-Athens (l); 45-Gythio (b); 46-Kythira (b); 47-Naxos (u); 48-Heraklion (l); 49-Rhodos (l); 50-Kefalos (fl); 51-Kos (east) (l); 52-Mytilini (fl); 53-Denizli (b); 54-Cumaovası (l); 55-Dumlupınar-Siçanli (u); 56-Behramkale (u); 57-Marmara (f).

Environments are characterised as: b-brackish; f-fluviatile; fl-fluvio-lacustrine; l-lacustrine; m-marginal marine; w-wetlands; u-unknown.

History of Aluminum

This pawl is puzzling because pure aluminum was not readily obtainable until the middle of the 19th century.

Aluminum is not found freely in nature, but is combined with other minerals.

The manufacturing process requires 1,221°F (660.32°C) degrees of heat. Only in the last 100 years or so has the technology existed to successfully separate the materials from the mineral bearing ore.

From NPR

For decades after it was first identified by British chemist Sir Humphry Davy in the early 1800s, scientists and tinkerers tried, and mostly failed, to find a good method for separating aluminum from everything else that stuck to it.

France’s Emperor Napoleon III was an early proponent of aluminum. He hoped the lightweight metal could be used to produce weapons and armor, giving his soldiers an edge in battle. The emperor funded the work of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, who found a chemical method for obtaining pure aluminum, but it was still a slow process. An often repeated story goes that Napoleon III, frustrated with progress on aluminum, had much of France’s stock melted down and turned into cutlery. He and his honored guests used aluminum utensils, while everyone else at the imperial dinner table made do with gold.

In 1884, when the Washington Monument was completed, it was capped with a large casting of aluminum. The capping ceremony and the dedication of the monument “were given front-page publicity in the nation’s newspapers and the aluminum point or apex was creditably described,” according to a 1995 article published in the journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. “Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who had never before even heard about aluminum now knew what it was.”

At the time, a pound of aluminum was worth $16 ($419 in today’s dollars).

Two years later, a commercially viable method for extracting aluminum from ore was discovered, and by 1889 the price had fallen to $2 per pound. Within 10 years of commercial refining, it plummeted to just 50 cents a pound.

The modern method of obtaining aluminum was discovered simultaneously by two young scientists working independently on different continents.

In 1886, two men, both 22 years of age — one working in Ohio and the other in northwestern France — developed the modern method for producing aluminum metal.

American Charles Martin Hall went to work after being inspired by a lecture at Oberlin College in which his chemistry professor pronounced that the discoverer of a practical way to produce aluminum “will bless humanity and make a fortune for himself.”

Frenchman Paul Héroult was working on the same problem.

At nearly the same time, the two men hit upon the same answer: electricity, and lots of it.

Still used today, this is how their method works: Alumina from bauxite is dissolved in another mineral, cryolite, at 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. The molten mixture is poured into a specially designed vat, and vast amounts of electricity are passed through it. The process causes aluminum metal to condense at the bottom of the vat.

The two men fought over ownership of the process they developed to smelt aluminum from bauxite ore. Héroult filed for his patent six weeks before Hall, but the American was able to prove (thanks possibly to notes kept by his sister, Julia Brainerd Hall) that he had actually made the discovery a few weeks before his rival. Ultimately, the two men settled their dispute and became friends.

In 1888, Hall co-founded the Pittsburgh Reduction Co. to produce aluminum. The company later became the aluminum giant Alcoa. The following year, Héroult scaled up the process in France.

The two men died the same year, in 1914, both age 51.

The development of the Hall-Héroult process, as it came to be known, was a major milestone in the Industrial Revolution. But it has also carried an environmental cost: The electricity needed produces large quantities of greenhouse gases. Aluminum production alone is responsible for about 1% of global emissions, according to estimates.

The availability of aluminum at the turn of the 20th century spurred on the age of flight and the Space Age.

Uses for Aluminum

The strength and light weight of aluminum is perfect for aerospace applications.

Aluminum allows designers to build a plane that is as light as possible, can carry heavy loads, uses the least amount of fuel and is impervious to rust. In modern aircraft manufacture, aluminum is used everywhere. The Concorde, which flew passengers at over twice the speed of sound for 27 years, was built with an aluminum skin.

-History of Aluminum in the Aerospace Industry | Metal Super

From Monroe Aerospace

27% of all aluminum consumed occurs in the transportation industry, according to Aluminum Leader. This chemical element in the boron group is characterized by a silver-white color and soft, ductile texture. While it’s used in many different applications, one of the most common is aerospace. In fact, aluminum is one of the most common materials used in the construction of airplanes. So, why is aluminum used for this purpose instead of steel or other materials?

Some of the first airliners weren’t made of metal, but instead were made of wood. Although cheap and readily available, wood has a serious flaw that made it hazardous in airplanes: it rotted. There was one instances in which a wooden airliner crashed, killing everyone on board. The cause of the crash was later found to be rotten wood. This prompted manufacturers to quickly phase out wood in favor of metal.

Aluminum is the perfect material to use when manufacturing airplanes, thanks in part to its unique properties and characteristics. It’s strong, lightweight, predictable and inexpensive. Steel and iron are both stronger than aluminum, but strength alone isn’t enough to justify its use in aerospace manufacturing. The problem with steel and iron is its weight. Both of these metals are much heavier than aluminum — and too much weigh restricts an airplane’s ability to takeoff and fly.

It’s estimated that up to 80% of the materials used in modern-day aircraft is aluminum. The Wright brothers used a steel engine in their early-model Flyer plane, which was not only heavy but lacked the power necessary for takeover. As a result, they acquired a special engine made of cast aluminum, which allowed their Flyer-1 to takeoff with ease.

There are several different types of aluminum used in aerospace engineering, some of which include the following:

  • Aluminum 2024
  • Aluminum 3003
  • Aluminum 5052
  • Aluminum 6061
  • Aluminum 7075

Note: the number refers to the aluminum’s “grade.”

Of course, aluminum isn’t the only metal used to manufacture airplanes. Carbon-alloy steel is often used for his application as well. When carbon is added to steel, it becomes stronger and more resistant to rust and corrosion. Titanium is another metal that’s commonly used in aerospace engineering. It’s strong, lightweight, and naturally resistant to corrosion. Some companies alloy titanium with iron or manganese to construct the frame and engines for airplanes. These use of these metals, however, is typically less than that of aluminum. Aluminum isn’t the strongest metal, but it maintains a perfect balance of strength and low weight that make it ideal for airplanes.

The metal used and subsequent study

The object was taken to the Archaeological Institute of Cluj-Napoca for metallographic analysis where it was discovered that it was made from a complex alloy consisting 12 different elements.

It was then taken to a laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, to verify its composition, showed that the artifact was constituted mostly by aluminum (89%), with the minor participation of 11 other metals in specific proportions.

The thick layer of oxide of a millimeter of thickness that covered of even form to the block helped to date the antiquity of this in about 400 years. However, the geological layer in which it was found (Pleistocene) suggests that it already existed some 20,000 years ago in the past.

Florin Gheorghita,  had the opportunity to examine the report and the analysis carried out under the direction of Dr. Niederkorn of the Institute for the Study of Nonmetallic Metals and Minerals (ICPMMN), located in Magurele, Romania, stressed in that it is composed of an extremely complex metal alloy.

Gheorghita states that the alloy is composed of 12 different elements, of which the percentage of aluminum volume (89%) has also been established. It also identified the presence of copper (6.2%), silicon (2.84%), zinc (1.81%), lead (0.41%), Laguna (0.33%), zirconium (0, 2%), cadmium (0.11%), nickel (0.0024%), cobalt (0.0023%), bismuth (0.0003%), silver (0.0002%), and gallium (in trace amounts).

People! these are extremely odd material and unusual combinations to have in an aluminum alloy. To say that it is unique is putting it mildly. What kind of mad scientist thought up this combination?

As I have often stated previously, factories don’t just throw what ever alloy of aluminum together and use it. Like steel, copper, bronze and zinc there are specific alloys that are regulated world-wide and used for certain purposes. Thus, by comparing the alloy composition of this object with available alloys “on the books” we can identify many aspects of this object.

  • We can identify it’s function.
  • We can identify what nation made it.
  • We might even be able to identify what smelter factory made the billet.

Isn’t industrial forensics fascinating?

Aluminum-Copper Alloy

The first thing that we note is that it’s most important alloying element is copper.

And from from this we can help determine what the possible function of the pawl was.

Copper has been the most common alloying element almost since the beginning of the aluminum industry, and a variety of alloys in which copper is the major addition were developed.

Most of these alloys fall within one of the following groups:

  • Cast alloys with 5% Cu, often with small amounts of silicon and magnesium.
  • Cast alloys with 7-8% Cu, which often contain large amounts of iron and silicon and appreciable amounts of manganese, chromium, zinc, tin, etc.
  • Cast alloys with 10-14% Cu. These alloys may contain small amounts of magnesium (0.10-0.30% Mg), iron up to 1.5%, up to 5% Si and smaller amounts of nickel, manganese, chromium.
  • Wrought alloys with 5-6% Cu and often small amounts of manganese, silicon, cadmium, bismuth, tin, lithium, vanadium and zirconium. Alloys of this type containing lead, bismuth, and cadmium have superior machinability.
  • Durals, whose basic composition is 4-4.5% Cu, 0.5-1.5% Mg, 0.5-1.0% Mn, sometimes with silicon additions.
  • Copper alloys containing nickel, which can be subdivided in two groups: the Y alloy type, whose basic composition is 4% Cu, 2% Ni, 1.5% Mg; and the Hyduminiums, which usually have lower copper contents and in which iron replaces some of the nickel.
In most of the alloys in this group aluminum is the primary constituent and in the cast alloys the basic structure consists of cored dendrites of aluminum solid solution, with a variety of constituents at the grain boundaries or interdendritic spaces, forming a brittle, more or less continuous network of eutectics.

Wrought products consist of a matrix of aluminum solid solution with the other constituents dispersed within it. Constituents formed in the alloys can be divided in two groups: in the soluble ones are the constituents containing only one or more of copper, lithium, magnesium, silicon, zinc; in the insoluble ones are the constituents containing at least one of the more or less insoluble iron, manganese, nickel, etc.

The type of soluble constituents formed depends not only on the amount of soluble elements available but also on their ratio.

Available copper depends on the iron, manganese and nickel contents; the copper combined with them is not available.

Copper forms (CuFe)Al6 and Cu2FeAl7, with iron, (CuFeMn)Al6 and Cu2Mn3Al20 with manganese, Cu4NiAl, and several not too well known compounds with nickel and iron. 

The amount of silicon available to some extent controls the copper compounds formed. 

Silicon above 1% favors the FeSiAl5, over the iron-copper compounds and (CuFeMn)3Si2Al15, over the (CuFeMn)Al6 and Cu2Mn3Al20 compounds.

Similarly, but to a lesser extent, available silicon is affected by iron and manganese contents. With the Cu:Mg ratio below 2 and the Mg:Si ratio well above 1.7 the CuMg4Al6 compound is formed, especially if appreciable zinc is present. When Cu:Mg > 2 and Mg:Si > 1.7, CuMgAl2 is formed. 

If the Mg:Si ratio is approximately 1.7, Mg2Si and CuAl2 are in equilibrium. 

With the Mg:Si ratio 1 or less, Cu2Mg8Si6Al5, is formed, usually together with CuAl2. 

When the copper exceeds 5%, commercial heat treatment cannot dissolve it and the network of eutectics does not break up. Thus, in the 10-15% Cu alloys there is little difference in structure between the as-cast and heat treated alloys.

Magnesium is usually combined with silicon and copper. Only if appreciable amounts of lead, bismuth or tin are present, Mg2Sn, Mg2Pb, Mg2Bi3 can be formed.

The effect of alloying elements on density and thermal expansion is additive; thus, densities range from 2 700 to 2 850 kg/m3, with the lower values for the high-magnesium, high-silicon and low-copper alloys, the higher for the high-copper, high-nickel, high-manganese and high-iron contents.

Many of the cast alloys and aluminum-copper-nickel alloys are used for high-temperature applications, where creep resistance is important. Resistance is the same whether the load is tensile or compressive.

Wear resistance is favored by high hardness and the presence of hard constituents. Alloys with 10-15% Cu or treated to maximum hardness have very high wear resistance.

Silicon increases the strength in cast alloys, mainly by increasing the castability and thus the soundness of the castings, but with some loss of ductility and fatigue resistance, especially when it changes the iron-bearing compounds from FeM2SiAl8 or Cu2FeAl7, to FeSiAl5.

Magnesium increases the strength and hardness of the alloys, but, especially in castings, with a decided decrease in ductility and impact resistance.

Iron has some beneficial strengthening effect, especially at high temperature and at the lower contents (< 0.7% Fe).

Nickel has a strengthening effect, similar to that of manganese, although more limited because it only acts to reduce the embrittling effect of iron. Manganese and nickel together decrease the room-temperature properties because they combine in aluminum-manganese-nickel compounds and reduce the beneficial effects of each other. The main effect of-nickel is the increase in high-temperature strength, fatigue and creep resistance.

Titanium is added as grain refiner and it is very effective in reducing the grain size. If this results in a better dispersion of insoluble constituents, porosity and nonmetallic inclusions, a decided improvement in mechanical properties results.

Lithium has an effect very similar to that of magnesium: it increases strength, especially after heat treatment and at high temperatures, and there is a corresponding decrease in ductility. Zinc increases the strength but reduces ductility.

Hiduminium

The Hiduminium alloys or R.R. alloys are a series of high-strength, high-temperature aluminium alloys, developed for aircraft use by Rolls-Royce (“RR”) before World War II.

They were manufactured and later developed by High Duty Alloys Ltd..

The name HiDu-Minium is derived from that of High Duty Aluminium Alloys.

In 1934 the Reynolds Tube Co. began production of extruded structural components for airframes, using R.R.56 alloy supplied by High Duty Alloys. 

A new purpose-built plant was constructed at their works in Tyseley, Birmingham. 

In time, the post-war Reynolds company, already known for its steel bicycle frame tubes, would attempt to survive in the peacetime market by supplying Hiduminium alloy components for high-end aluminium bicycle cranks and brakes.

The Duralumin alloys had already demonstrated high-strength aluminium alloys. Y alloy‘s virtue was its ability to maintain high strength at high temperatures. R.R alloys were developed by Hall & Bradbury at Rolls-Royce, partly to simplify the manufacture of components using them. A deliberate heat treatment process of multiple steps was used to control their physical properties.

Hiduminium Alloy range

A range of alloys were produced in the R.R.50 range. These could be worked by casting or forging, but they were not intended for rolling as sheet or general machining from bar stock.

R.R. 50 General-purpose sand casting alloy
R.R. 53 Die-cast piston alloy
R.R. 56 General-purpose forging alloy
R.R. 58 Low-creep forging alloy for rotating impellers and compressors
R.R. 59 Forged piston alloy

The number of alloys expanded to support a range of applications and processing techniques. At the Paris Airshow of 1953, High Duty Alloys showed no less than eight different Hiduminium R.R. alloys: 20, 50, 56, 58, 66, 77, 80, 90. Also shown were gas turbine compressor and turbine blades in Hiduminium, and a range of their products in the Magnuminium alloy series.

R.R.58, also Aluminum 2618, comprising 2.5 copper, 1.5 magnesium, 1.0 iron, 1.2 nickel, 0.2 silicon, 0.1 titanium and the remainder aluminum, and originally intended for jet engine compressor blades, was used as the main structural material for the Concorde airframe, supplied by High Duty Alloys, it was also known as AU2GN to the French side of the project.

Later alloys, such as R.R.66, were used for sheet, where high strength was needed in an alloy capable of being worked by deep drawingThis became increasingly important with the faster jet aircraft post-war, as issues such as transonic compressibility became important. It was now necessary for an aircraft’s covering material to be strong, not merely the spar or framing beneath.

R.R.350, a sand-castable high temperature alloy, was used

In terms of composition, Y alloy typically contains 4% of copper and 2% of nickel. R.R. alloys reduce each of these by half to 2% and 1%, and 1% of iron is introduced.

More Links on Aluminum-copper alloys

And what the brief overview tells us…

So in comparison with the Pawl, we see that it’s composition in not a Y-alloy in the Hiduminium alloy family. The material used in the Pawl is an “aircraft structural grade aluminum alloy“,  but it is not in common use as far as I can determine.

The copper percentage used, and the other alloying elements tells us that the material selection of this part migrated towards the need for ease of machining and finishing.  And a look at the complex shape of this part, with curved, and convex surfaces, reinforces this conclusion. This part was cast, and then machined to exacting tolerances to match it’s complex geometry.

This particular grade of material is designed for high temperature applications. And since it is designed to pivot inside a mechanical mechanism, it appears that it is associated with either an engine component or landing gear.

So at least we know what it is not. It is not a hammer or utility part from a tractor. These parts tend to be made out of steel, or iron.

And we know what it is; it is a part used in an aircraft. It’s unique and complex geometry tells us that this was a structural component that fit within a mechanism with other precision parts. The presence of a machined hole tells us that there was a pivoting function of this item, and the presence of the second hone on the concave surface indicates that it mated with another part in some kind of sub-assembly geometry.

Abrasions on the surface

In 1995, a Romanian researcher, Florian Gheorghita, came across the artifact in the basement of the History Museum of Transylvania. The wedge was tested once more. This time in two different laboratories: the Archaeological Institute of Cluj-Napoca and an independent Swiss laboratory.

The tests confirmed the results reached by Fischinger and Niederkorn.

Gheorghita wrote in the Ancient Skies publication where he asked an aeronautical engineer about the artifact’s studies.

The engineer pointed out the configuration and hole drilled in the wedge and claimed that a pattern of abrasions and scratches on the metal led him to believe that it was part of an airplane landing gear.

For the Statists

Since this pawl is evidently an aircraft part, and the use of aluminum in aircraft began in the 1930’s, it is possible that this is part of a contemporaneous aircraft strut that somehow found it’s way to Romania over the years.

And somehow, it aged unusually rapidly, with surface corrosion of a substantial amount to a substantial degree by sandy soil.

And the design of the strut was somehow very elaborate and unusual for the aircraft pointing to some kind of advanced experimental design, for after all it wasn’t until the 1990’s that custom aluminum forgings of complex curved geometry started to find it’s way into mass production.

And it was truly a coincidence that it wound up in a batch of mastodon bones.

You can believe this narrative if it makes you feel better.

Conclusion

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck and tastes like a duck… it’s a duck. The only thing is that the particular species of a duck is new and unknown.

A machine, probably an aircraft, lost a part of it’s retractable landing gear around one million years ago near the Black Sea. The local proto-humanoids at that time, probably a species similar to Homo Habilis found the part and decided that it made a great hand tool. They used it to smash open the bones of the  mastodons that they hunted at the time, and in the excitement of eating and engorging themselves forgot about the item and left it with the carcass.

Then, sometime in the 1970’s, the remains of the meal with the aluminum pawl was unearthed together during the construction of a road.

Who flew the aircraft, or what it was doing when it lost it’s part is unknown.

I do not know if it was “little green men”, articulated mastodons, or an unknown species of proto-humans who manufactured this part. What we do know is that they knew their metallurgy, they were able to design, and machine adeptly, and had the ability to fly in aircraft that encountered high temperature extremes.

Do you want more?

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