Greetings

Ooparts

Ooparts ? What are Ooparts? That stands for Out of Place Artifacts. Things that show up where they shouldn't, a piece of
gold chain found in a coal seam, what appears to be a sparkplug embedded in rock that is thousands of years old and what
appears to be a bullet hole in the skull of a mastodon.
These things are ooparts.

A Gold Thread

Workmen quarrying stone near the River Tweed below Rutherford, Scotland in 1844, found a piece of gold thread
embedded in the rock of the quarry eight feet below ground level. A small piece of the thread was sent to the offices
of the local newspaper, the Kelso Chronicle, "for the inspection of the curious."
(The Times, London, June 22, 1844)

The Coso Geode

Geodes resemble ordinary stones from the outside, usually spherical, or elliptical in nature, and sometimes hollow, but their
cavities can contain a wonderful display of crystal structures and minerals. When sawn in half they reveal their wonderful displays,
and are highly sought after by rock collectors.  I have about 40 of them, cut and uncut and I never tire of looking at the patterns within.

In 1961 a fossil encrusted geode (although this one was not hollow) was picked up in the Coso Mountains, six miles northeast
of Olancha, California, near the top of a 4300' peak overlooking the dry bed of Owens Lake by some rockhounds. What was
discovered after it had been cut in half, ruining a diamond saw blade in the process, is something that has caused much debate
over the years, and continues to this day.

The geode as it was found.

In the middle of the geode was a metal core approximately .08" in diameter. Encircling this was what appeared to be a ceramic
casing which was also surrounded by a hexagonal sleeve of wood, which had become petrified. This was encased by the outer
layer of the geode which was made up of hardened clay, pebbles, and bits of fossil shell, and two nonmagnetic metallic objects
resembling a nail and a washer. A fragment of copper still remaining between the ceramic material and the petrified wood
indicates that possibly the two may have been separated by a copper sleeve.

This what the rockhounds saw when they cut it in half.

X-rays of the objects were taken and examined by Paul Willis, then editor of INFO Journal who noticed a startling similarity
between it and a modern spark plug. An unnamed geologist in the original report of the find came up with an age estimate
of 500,000 years based on the fossils contained in the matrix (note-this would not indicate what date the accretion was formed).

Xrays of the Coso Geode

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/coso.html
http://www.eskimo.com/~pierres/coso/cosopreview.html

A Chain in Coal

Mrs. S. W. Culp, of Morrisonville, Illinois, was breaking coal into smaller lumps for her scuttle, one day in 1891, when
she noticed a chain in the midst of the coal. When she reached down to pick it up, she saw that the two ends of the
chain were firmly embedded in two separate pieces of coal that had clearly been a single lump only moments before.
(The Morrosonville Times, June 11, 1891)

The Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull    

Another great oopart is THE crystal skull discovered in Mayan ruins called "Lubaantun", City of Fallen Stones, in
British Honduras, Now called Belize. The skull was discovered in 1924 by Anna Le Guillon Mitchell-Hedges
daughter of  F.A. Mitchell-Hedges who was in charge of the digs at Lubaantun. The story goes that his daughter,
Anna, was exploring inside some ruins thought to have been a temple, when she found the exquisitely carved
crystal skull which was then missing the jawbone. The missing jawbone was found three months later, about
25 feet away from where the top part of the skull was found.

Evidently the story of the skull's discovery is a fabrication. There are supposedly documents in The British
Museum that prove it was bidding against Mitchell-Hedges for the artifact at a Sothebys auction in London in
1943.

Be that as it may, we are still left with the problem of the skull itself.

The Mitchell-Hedges skull is made of clear quartz crystal, and both cranium and mandible are believed to have
come from the same solid block. It weighs 11.7 pounds and is about five inches high, five inches wide, and seven inches
long. Except for slight anomalies in the temples and cheekbones, it is a virtually anatomically correct replica of a human skull.
Because of its small size and other characteristics, it is thought more closely to resemble a female skull -- and this has led
some to refer to the Mitchell-Hedges skull as a "she."

The Mitchell-Hedges family loaned the skull to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories for extensive study in 1970. Art
restorer Frank Dorland oversaw the testing at the Santa Clara, California, computer equipment manufacturer, a
leading facility for crystal research. The HP examinations yielded some startling results.

Researchers found that the skull had been carved against the natural axis of the crystal. Modern crystal sculptors
always take into account the axis, or orientation of the crystal's molecular symmetry, because if they carve "against
the grain," the piece is bound to shatter -- even with the use of lasers and other high-tech cutting methods.

To add to the enigma, HP could find no microscopic scratches on the crystal which would indicate it had
been carved with metal instruments. Dorland's best hypothesis for the skull's construction is that it was roughly
hewn out with diamonds, and then the detail work was meticulously done with a gentle solution of silicon sand
and water. The exhausting job -- assuming it could possibly be done in this way -- would have required man-hours adding
up to 300 years to complete.

Under these circumstances, experts believe that successfully crafting a shape as complex as the Mitchell-Hedges skull is
impossible; as one HP researcher is said to have remarked, "The damned thing simply shouldn't be."

The skull remains in the possession of Anna Mitchell-Hedges. She resides in Canada and displays the skull on
frequent tours. Anna has maintained for all these years that she discovered the skull, even though there is reason to doubt
that she was present at the Lubaatun expedition at all.

Ancient Indian City Irradiated From Atomic Blast

There is an area in Rajasthan, India with a layer of radioactive ash covering a three square mile area ten miles west
of Jodhpur. The radiation is so intense that the area is considered dangerous. Scientists are investigating the site which
was being developed into a housing development.

It was established that the area had a high incidence of birth defects and cancer while the area was under construction.
The levels of radiation have measured so high on instruments that the Indian government has now restricted access to
the area.

Scientists discovered an ancient city at the site which shows evidence of and atomic blast which the experts date back
to between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago. The blast destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people.
One researcher has estimated that the blast was comparable to one of the bombs dropped over Japan during W.W.II

The Mahabharata, an ancient Indian document, describes a devastating explosion that shook the continent.... "A single
projectile charged with all the power in the universe...An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000
suns, rose in all its splendor...it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which
reduced to ashes an entire race...the corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair fell out, pottery broke
without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected. To escape from
this fire, the soldiers threw themselves in the river."

Historian Kisari Mohan Ganguli says that Indian sacred writings are full of such descriptions, which sound like an atomic
blast as witnessed in Japan in 1945. References in the ancient writings also mention fighting sky chariots and the final
weapons. "An ancient battle is described in great detail in the writing titled the Drona Pavra, which is a section of the
Mahabharata. The passage tells of combat where explosions of final weapons decimate entire armies, causing crowds
of warriors with steeds and elephants and weapons to be carried away as if they were dry leaves of trees," says Ganguli.

Archeologist Francis Taylor says that etchings in some nearby temples he has managed to translate suggest that they
prayed to be spared from the great light that was coming to lay ruin to the city.

The radioactive ash seems to add credibility the these ancient Indian records that describe atomic warfare thousands
of years before our current (re)discovery of the atom.

Construction has halted while a five member team conducts an investigation of the site.

The Bell-Shaped Vessel of Dorchester

During blasting work at Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1851, the broken halves of a bell-shaped vessel were thrown by
the force of an explosion from the vessel's resting place in solid rock. The vase, about 4 1/2" high, is made of an unknown
metal and embellished with floral inlays of silver - the "art of some cunning workman," according to the local newspaper
report.

The editor of Scientific American gave as his opinion that the vase had been made by none other than Tubal-cain, the
biblical father of metallurgy. In response, Charles Fort - a lifelong connoisseur of anomalies and a dedicated opponent
of scientific dogma - said "Though I fear that this is a little arbitrary, I am not disposed to fly rabidly at every scientific opinion."
(Scientific American, 7:298, June 5, 1852)

An Iron Nail in Quartz

In 1851, Hiram de Witt, of Springfield, Massachusetts, accidentally dropped a fist sized piece of gold bearing quartz
that he had brought back from California. The rock broke apart in the fall, and inside it de Witt found a 2" cut iron nail,
slightly corroded. "It was entirely straight and had a perfect head," reported The Times of London.
(The Times, London, December 24, 1851)

Another Nail

A nail partially embedded in a block of stone taken from Kingoodie quarry in Scotland was described at a meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1845, Sir David Brewster, who gave the report, said that about
an inch of the nail was embedded, the rest lying along the stone and projecting into a layer of gravel, where it had rusted.
The depth from which the 9" thick block of stone bearing the nail had been removed is not on record, but the quarry was
said to have been worked for about twenty years prior to the discovery.
(Charles Fort, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, pg. 133)

An Object in Coal

An "iron instrument" apparently resembling the bit of a coal drill, was found inside a lump of coal taken from an excavation
in Scotland in 1852 (Scotland again!). It was at first supposed that a miner had broken his drill while working the seam and
had left the piece of metal embedded there. But the surface of the coal was unbroken: it showed no signs of drilling or any
present or former opening by which the drill might have passed into it's interior. If such a thing were not quite impossible,
according to every date in the geology text books, observers would have to believe that the coal would somehow have
formed around the mysterious piece of metal.
(Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1:1:121, December 13, 1852

Tools in Rock

Extensive quarrying was done near the city of Aixen -Provence, France between 1786 and 1788, to provide the large
quantities of limestone needed for the rebuilding of the Palace of Justice. In the quarry from which the limestone was taken,
the rock strata were separated from each other by layers of sand and clay, and by the time the workmen had removed
11 layers of rock they had found they had reached a depth of some 40 feet or 50 feet from the original level of the area.

Beneath the 11th layer of limestone they came to a bed of sand and began to remove it to get at the rock underneath.
But in the sand they found the stumps of stone pillars and fragments of half worked rock, the same stone and rock that
they themselves had been excavating. they dug further and found coins, the petrified wooden handles of hammers, and
pieces of other petrified wooden tools. Finally they came to a large wooden board, seven or eight feet long and an inch
thick. like the wooden tools, it had also been petrified into a form of agate and it had been broken into pieces. When
the pieces were reassembled, the workmen saw before them a quarryman's board of exactly the same kind they
themselves used, worn in just the same way as their own boards were, with rounded, wavy edges.

How a stonemason's yard equipped with the kind of tools used in France in the late18th century, had come to be
buried 50 feet deep under layer of sand and limestone 300 million years old is a question even more vexing today than
at the time of the original discovery. For we now know, thanks to advances in geological and anthropological dating, that
such a thing is absolutely impossible. And yet it does seem to have happened.
(The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1:145-46, 1820)

A Child's Jaw in Coal ?