In 1826, a well dug near the Ohio river in north Cincinnati failed to produce water, but did produce the unexpected. From a level 94 feet down, a buried tree stump was brought to the surface which showed the marks of an ax. The marks were deep and well-cut, indicating the use of a sharp and durable blade. The suspicion that the ax had been made of metal was confirmed when, embedded in the top of the stump, an advanced oxidized wedge of iron was found. The layer from which the stump came was estimated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years old - nearly 10 times the accepted age of the supposed first metal usage.
A letter kept in the Archives of Madrid and dated 1572, records the account of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artifact which came into his possession. In the year the letter was written, Indian miners removed from a subsurface layer of gravel a large conglomerate boulder, and broke it into pieces for easier disposal. As the mass shattered to the hammer blow, out of the center of it fell a perfect six-inch nail. The nail was later given to the Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it thoroughly examined, and verified its finding. The first mystery is that iron was unknown to the Peruvian Indians, so the nail did not originate with them. And the second mystery is that the rock from which the nail was freed was in the neighborhood of 75,000 to 100,000 years in age.
In the June, 1851 issue of Scientific American (volume 7, pages 298-299), a report was reprinted from the Boston Transcript about two parts of a metallic vase dynamited out of solid rock on Meeting House Hill, Dorchester, Massachusetts. When the two parts were put together, they formed a bell-shaped vase, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top and an eighth of an inch thick. The metal of the vase was composed of an alloy of zinc and a considerable portion of silver. On the sides were six figures of a flower in bouquet arrangements, inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver. The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some unknown craftsman - yet this curiosity was blown out of solid pudding stone from 15 feet below the surface. Estimated age - 100,000 years. Unfortunately, the vase was circulated from museum to museum, and then disappeared. It is probably gathering dust in some curator's basement, its identity or source long forgotten.
At Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois, in August of 1870, three men were drilling an artesian well, when - from a depth of over a hundred feet - the pump brought up a small metal medallion to the surface. One of the workmen, Jacob W. Moffit, from Chillicothe, was the first to discover it in the drill residue. A noted scholar of the time, Professor Alexander Winchell, reported in his book Sparks From a Geologist's Hammer, that he received from another eye-witness, W.H. Wilmot, a detailed statement, dated December 4, 1871, of the deposits and depths of materials made during the boring, and the position where the metal "coin" was uncovered. The stratification took this form: Soil - 3 feet; yellow clay - 17 feet; blue clay - 44 feet; dark vegetable matter - 4 feet; hard purplish clay - 18 feet; bright green clay - 8 feet; mottled clay - 18 feet; paleosol (ancient soils) - 2 feet; coin location; yellowish clay - 1 foot; sand, clay and water - 11 feet. The strange "coin-medallion" was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of a U.S. quarter of that period. It was remarkably uniform in thickness, round, and the edges appeared to have been cut. Researcher William E. Dubois, who presented his investigation of the medallion to the American Philosophical Society, was convinced that the object had in fact passed through a rolling mill, the edges showed "further evidence of the machine shop." Despite its "modern characteristics", however, Dubois plainly saw that, upon the object, "the tooth of time is plainly visible."
Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs, but these had not been metal-engraved or stamped. Rather, the figures had somehow been etched in acid, to a remarkable degree of intricacy. One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or headdress; her left arm is raised as if in benediction, and her right arm holds a small child, also crowned. The woman appears to be speaking. On the opposite side is another central figure, that looks like a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail frayed at the very end. Below and to the left of it is another animal, which bears a strong resemblance to a horse. Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are undecipherable glyphs - they are of very definite character, and show all the signs of a form of alphabetic writing.
In 1876, the medallion was presented by Professor Winchell to a meeting of the Geological Section of the American Association in Buffalo. There was much speculation, but few answers. One participant, a conservative historian, Professor J.R. Lesley, tried to explain the object as a "practical joke" dropped into a hole by a passing French or Spanish explorer. The professor even claimed to see the coin's figures as the astrological signs of Pisces and Leo, and read into the glyphs the date 1572. However, Winchell countered with these arguments against such an interpretation: 1. By no stretch of the imagination were the figures and glyphs decipherable in terms of any known symbology or script. 2. Who, as a practical joke, would have dropped a metal object into a hole and known that someone several hundred years later would happen to drill at that precise spot (within a 4-inch tolerance) and find it? The odds would be phenomenal. And 3. There is the very real problem of explaining the accumulation of 114 feet of deposit over the buried coin. Having examined all the evidence, Winchell was convinced the coin had indeed come from this depth. It had not fallen into a hole in the past - the sediments drilled through were uniform and undisturbed. And the amount of sedimentation was not what would have settled in only a few centuries. In fact, recent calculations based on uniform rates of alluvium deposition and radioisotope dates for this region estimate an age for materials from just below a depth of 100 feet to be between 100,000 and 150,000 years.
What conclusions can we draw about the mystery coin? A lost civilization once existed on the North American continent which worked in copper and other metals; possessed art and writing; attired themselves with crowns and other clothing; knew of and perhaps domesticated several animals including the horse; utilized acids for etching in a manner that is still not understood today; and perhaps the most disturbing, possessed forms of machinery for the cutting, rolling and processing of metal pieces.
As a sidelight, the enigmatic coin was not the only item that came from deep levels in Illinois. In 1851, in Whiteside County, another well-drilling bit brought up from a sand stratum 120 feet deep two copper artifacts: What appears to be a hook, and a ring. Their age is thought to be the same as that of the coin - about 150,000 years old.
On February 13,1961, three rock hunters - Mike Mikesell, Wallace Lane and Virginia Maxey - were collecting geodes about 12 miles east-southeast of Olancha, California. Geodes are spherical stones with hollow interiors lined with crystals. On this particular day, while searching in the Coso Mountains, they found one stone located near the top of a peak approximately 4,300 feet in elevation and about 340 feet above the dry bed of Owens Lake.
The rockhounds took it to be a geode, but later found it was not, because it bore traces of fossil shells. The next day when Mikesell cut the stone in half, he nearly ruined a ten-inch diamond saw in the process, for it did not contain crystals, but rather something totally unexpected. Inside were the remains of some form of mechanical device: Beneath the outer layer of hardened clay, pebbles and fossil inclusions is a hexagonal shaped layer of a substance resembling wood, softer than agate or jasper. This layer forms a casing around a three-quarter inch wide cylinder made of solid white porcelain or ceramic, and in the center of the cylinder is a two millimeter shaft of bright, brassy metal. This shaft, the rock hunters discovered, is magnetic, and after several years of exposure never showed traces of oxidation. Also, surrounding the ceramic cylinder are rings of copper, much of them now corroded. Embedded too in the rock, though separate from the cylinder, are two more man-made items - what look like a nail and a washer.
The puzzled rock hunters sent their find to the Charles Fort Society, who specialize in investigating things out of the ordinary. The Society made an X-ray examination of the cylinder object enclosed in the fossil-encrusted rock, and found further evidence that it was indeed some form of mechanical apparatus. The X-rays revealed that the metallic shaft was corroded at one end, but on the other end terminated in what appeared to be a spring or helix of metal. As a whole, the "Coso artifact" is now believed to be something more than a piece of machinery: The carefully shaped ceramic, metallic shaft and copper components hint at some form of electrical instrument. The closest modern apparatus that researchers have been able to equate it with is a spark plug. However, there are certain features - particularly the spring or helix terminal - that does not correspond to any known spark plug today. The rock in which the electrical instrument was found was dated by a competent geologist at 500,000 years old.
The rock strata appear to be full of metal "surprises." The Illinois Springfield Republican reported in 1851 that a businessman named Hiram de Witt had brought back with him from a trip to California a piece of auriferous quartz rock about the size of a man's fist, and that while showing the rock to a friend, it slipped from his hand and split open upon hitting the floor. There, in the center of the quartz, they discovered a cut-iron nail, six-penny size, slightly corroded but entirely straight, with a perfect head. the quartz was given an age of over one million years.
In 1865, a two-inch metal screw was discovered in a piece of feldspar unearthed from the Abbey Mine in Treasure City, Nevada. The screw had long ago oxidized, but its form - particularly the shape of its threads - could be clearly seen in the feldspar. The stone was calculated to be 21 million years in age.
Twenty years earlier, in 1844, Sir David Brewster made a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science which created quite a stir. A nail of obvious human manufacture had been found half-embedded in a sandstone block excavated from the Kindgoodie Quarry near Inchyra, in northern Britain. It was badly corroded, but identifiable nonetheless. The sandstone was determined to be at least 40 million years old.
In the fall of 1885, at an iron foundry owned by the sons of Herr Isidor Braun located in Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria, a workman named Riedl was breaking up a block of Tertiary brown coal that had been mined from the pits at Wolfsegg, near Schwannstadt, and was about to be used to heat the foundry's giant smelters. As the block disintegrated into several pieces, out dropped a strange cube-like object. In 1886, mining engineer Dr. Adolf Gurlt made a report to the Natural History Society at Bonn, Germany and noted that the object, coated with a thin layer of rust, is made of iron, measures 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches, weighs 1.73 Ibs., and has a specific gravity measurement of 7.75. Four of the iron "cube's" sides are roughly flat, while the two remaining sides - opposite each other - are convex. A fairly deep groove was incised all the way around the object, about mid-way up its height. Other early studies on the iron artifact were in scientific journals of the day as Nature (London; November 11, 1886, page 36) and L'Astronomie (Paris; 1886, page 463). A plaster cast was also made before the turn of the century -important because the original object subsequently suffered from handling, and from being disfigured by samples having been cut from it by investigators for research. The cast is kept in the Oberosterreichisehes Landesmuseum in Linz, Austria, where the original object was also exhibited from 1950 to 1958. The iron cube is presently in the custody of Herrn O.R. Bernhardt of the Heimathaus Museum in Vocklabruck.
In 1966-67, the iron "cube" was carefully analyzed by experts at the Vienna Naturhistorisehes Museum, using electron-beam microanalysis. They found no traces of nickel, chromium or cobalt in the iron - which means the object was not of meteoric origin. No sulfur was detected either, ruling out the chance of it being a pyrite, a natural mineral that sometimes forms geometric shapes. Because of a low magnesium content, Dr. Kurat of the Museum, and Dr. R. Gill of the Geologisehe Bundesanstalt of Vienna, are of the opinion that the object was made of cast-iron. In 1973, Hubert Mattlianer concluded from yet another detailed investigation that the object had been made from a hand-sculptured lump of wax or clay pressed into a sand base, this forming the mold into which the iron had been poured.
The final conclusion, then, is that the strange object is definitely man-made. What is not explained is what it was doing encased in coal dating to the Tertiary - 60 million years old.
In 1968, French speleologists Y. Druet and H. Salfati reported finding unusual metal nodules entombed in an Aptian chalk bed in a quarry at Saint-Jean de Livet. The nodules are reddish brown, wafer-shaped and hollowed at the ends, measuring from 3 to 9 centimeters long and 1 to four centimeters wide. The two investigators at first thought the nodules were fossils until they discovered their metallic nature. Next, they theorized they were residue from a meteor - but careful study showed the nodules were too uniformly shaped to be of natural origin. Chemical analysis showed a carbon content consistent with modern forging and casting techniques. But what had these man-made objects been doing in chalk beds dating toward the end of the Cretaceous - over 120 million years? As Druet and Salfati concluded, "These objects, then, prove the presence of intelligent life on earth long before the limits given today by prehistoric archaeology."
On June 9, 1891, Mrs. S.W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shoveling coal into her kitchen stove when a large lump broke in two and out from the center of it fell a gold chain. The chain was about 10 inches long, made of eight carat gold, weighed 8 pennyweight, and was described as being "of antique and quaint workmanship." The Morrisonville Times of June 11 reported that investigators were convinced the chain had not simply been accidentally dropped in with the coal: One portion of the coal lump still clung to the chain, while the part that had separated from it still bore the impression of where the chain had been encased. The Times could only comment, "Here is one for the student of archaeology who loves to puzzle his brain over the geological construction of the Earth from whose ancient depth the curious are always dropping out." In this case, the "curious" "dropped out" of a piece of coal from the Pennsylvanian era - over 300 million years old.
Similar events produced another metal object of even greater age. In 1912, two employees of the Municipal Electric Plant of Thomas, Oklahoma, were shoveling coal into the plant furnaces, using fuel which had been mined near neighboring Wilberton. One chunk of coal was too large to handle, so the workmen took a sledge hammer to it. Once it broke open, however, the workmen found that the chunk contained an iron pot, and upon its removal, the two coal halves bore the "mold" of the pot in its interiors. Both employees signed affidavits testifying to the authenticity of the discovery, and the iron pot was subsequently examined by several experts - every one of which was most reluctant to comment on the pot, and the circumstances surrounding its discovery. This was most understandable, since the object came from coal dated from 300 to 325 million years.
One more find that must be mentioned in the out-of-place metal category takes us - once again - to the deepest level of fossil life. On June 13, 1880, a reporter for the Inverness Courier named Walter Carruthers was vacationing near Loch Maree and Victoria Falls, in Scotland, and - being an amateur rock hunter - decided to explore the geology of the area. Between 300 and 400 yards above Victoria Falls, and immediately beside the last of the three lesser falls on the west side of the stream, Carruthers noticed peculiar impressions in the rock. The rock was a l6 x 16-foot exposed surface of Torridon Red Sandstone, placed in the Cambrian age. The impressions consisted of two continuous flat bands side by side, between 1 1/4 and 1 1/2 inches wide and about 1/4 inch deep, running unnaturally straight through the flat layers of sandstone in situ, and perfectly distinct for 16 feet, disappearing on the west side under the superimposed rock, and broken only where portions of the sandstone had been weathered out. A few weeks later the curious "bands" were also observed by a colleague of Carruthers, Mr. William Jolly, Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools for the region. Carruthers had thought the impressions to have been the creation of some highly unusual living creature, but Jolly recorded that "the continuous even breadth and square section of the bands would seem to render this impossible." Jolly further noted, "The double band resembles nothing more nearly than the hollow impression that would be left by double bars of iron placed closely together." Jolly's observation was corroborated years later when micro-specks of iron oxide were taken from the impression cavities. The superintendent thought, however, that perhaps the iron bands had at one time been inserted into the rock, "to clasp some structure to it" - but other findings discount this. First, the bands occur high above the Falls in an almost totally inaccessible place, where a "structure" would serve little purpose. Second, the bands are only one-quarter of an inch deep, so that anything "clasped" to them would not hold for long. Third, parallel on either side of each band are tin)? ripple marks in the sandstone, indicating the presence of the original iron bands had caused turbulence patterns in the sand during the time the sand had been laid down by water, and before it had turned to stone. Fourth, the sandstone in the impressions show tiny striations which are really the preserved grain marks of the iron - again, indicating the metal had been impressed in the primordial sand, before solidification took place. And finally, fifth, one portion of one of the bands bends back into the subsurface, and careful excavation revealed the presence of iron oxide totally encased by the surrounding sandstone.
Jolly also found other band impressions in the same locality: There is a third band that runs alongside the other two, but is much less distinct and is not continuous. Two more lines, about 2 feet lower down on the rock surface, are only 7 feet long, and two more are higher up, running 3 feet long. Jolly also saw still more bands on an outcropping of the same sandstone on the other side of the stream, again parallel to one another - one 3 feet, another 6 feet, and smaller portions of several others.
What purpose these iron bands served, we can only guess. What we do know, however, is that all the bands were very uniform in width and thickness, with squared edges, and the grain marks they left indicate they were rolled and cut - all of which points to precision manufacturing by machine production.
But this is totally impossible, if we are to believe the geologists, for the sandstone in which the bands occur is Cambrian - 600 million years old, by their own measurements. Who, pray tell, was running an iron mill at a time when there was supposedly only tiny invertebrate creatures ruling the world?
Out-of-Place Metal Objects
It is one thing to find evidence of human skeletal remains and footprints in the incredible past, but it is something else again to discover artifacts that prove the existence of advanced cultures in the strata as well. One of the characteristics of any high civilization is its ability to work metals. Conservative historians and archaeologists, who hold to the concept of linear cultural development, point to the ancient Middle East as the home of the very first metal production. Here, they claim, man began to melt and shape copper, iron, gold, and silver only 8,000 years ago. But unusual relics brought up from the depths of the rocky earth tell a different story.
[Source: Strange Relics from the Depths of the Earth - by J.R. Jochmans, Litt.D., 1979
- pub. Forgotten Ages Research Society, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA]
