[ColbiasVolk]

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?

Images and messages from the incredible past

Metal-working is by no means the only sign of advanced culture: Other characteristics include such developments as art, architecture and writing. Since we have already observed several examples of metal production encased in geologic rock, it should be no surprise to find examples of other cultural elements also entombed deep within the earth.

In 1921, an Arkansan named Rowlands was digging in one of the many gravel pits on a line of small hillocks known as Crowley's Ridge, located two miles north of Finch. At a depth of 10 feet, Rowlands' shovel suddenly struck something large and solid. The object appeared at first to be a boulder, but excavating around it, Rowlands soon discovered that it was a large rock-sculptured head of a man. It stood about 4 feet high, and the figure had a squared, protruding chin, small, tight-lipped mouth, a short nose, and a furrowed brow and stare accented by two flat "buttons" of inlaid gold for eyes. Two more gold discs ornamented the figure's ears, and a heart-shaped plug of copper was embedded in the chest. The top of the head was covered by a carved hood that draped down the nape, and attached to a piece around the neck. Near the head, and in the same layer, Rowlands dug up a number of smaller objects: a gold ring, a small coffer made of volcanic pumice (which does not exist in this region), and tiny carvings of men, animals, moons and stars.

The head and artifacts soon became a local attraction, and the newspapers dubbed the glowering figure "King Crowley." Several investigators authenticated the find, though they could not explain its presence in the ten-foot layer of gravel - geologically dated at 175,000 years. The head and objects were sent to the Arkansas Natural History Museum in Little Rock. The museum curators, who also examined the artifacts and had double-checked and documented their discovery, were confident in the findings' authenticity to place them on public display. At the same time, however, some of the small carving samples were mailed to the Smithsonian in Washington. The Smithsonian - being a far more conservative institution -described the carvings as truly "unexplained items," but could not reconcile the antiquity of the strata in which they had been brought to light. Finally, after fifteen years of vacillating on the subject, orthodoxy triumphed: The Smithsonian concluded that the Crowley Ridge artifacts could not be 175,000 years old as this contradicted established theory on the age of human civilization, and therefore declared the artifacts fakes. Conforming to this prestigious conservative pronouncement, the Little Rock museum promptly took the stone head and other objects off display, and eventually sold them to unnamed private collectors. The "King Crowley" had was shipped off to California, and the rest of the collection was similarly scattered to the four winds. Today, the location of even a single object is unknown.

One wonders how many other valuable out-of-place items, because they do not conform to "acceptable" schemes of history and geology, have been likewise thrown out or lost by Establishment institutions.

On June 27,1969, workmen cutting into a rock shelf situated on the Broadway Extension of 122nd Street, between Edmond and Oklahoma City, came upon a find that was to create much controversy among the experts. The find was an inlaid tile floor, found 3 feet below the surface, and covering several thousand square feet. Durwood Pate, an Oklahoma City geologist, commented on the floor in the Edmond Booster of July 3, 1969:

"I am sure this was man-made because the stones are placed in perfect sets of parallel lines which intersect to form a diamond shape, all pointing to the east. We found post holes which measure a perfect two rods from the other two. The top of the stone is very smooth, and if you lift one of them, you will find it is very jagged, which indicates wear on the surface. Everything is too well placed to be a natural formation."

Pate also discovered a form of mortar between the tiles. He believes now that the tile surface served as a common floor for several human shelters over a wide area. Delbert Smith, a geologist and president of the Oklahoma Seismograph Company, summed up the mystery concerning the tile floor in the Tulsa World of June 29, 1969: "There is no question about it. It had been laid there, but I have no idea by whom." Yet another facet of the mystery involved the question of age. There are some differing opinions as to the geology involved, but the best estimate places the tiles at 200,000 years old.

On August 1, 1889, a professional well-driller, M.A. Kurtz, was working near his home in Nampa, Idaho, along with two other crewmen, when their steam pump suddenly spat out a piece of brownish clay 11/2 inches long that was clearly humanoid in appearance. The discovery was also eye-witnessed by several prominent citizens of Nampa. What amazed these men was that the little clay "doll" had come from below a 15-foot layer of lava rock, 100 feet of sand, 6 inches of clay, 40 feet of more sand, then 165 feet composed of clay, sand, clay nodules mixed with sand, and coarse sand layers - a total of 320 feet.

The small "doll" is composed of half clay and half quartz, and according to at least one expert, Professor Albert A. Wright of Oberlin College, it was not the product of a small child or amateur, but was made by a true artist. Though badly battered by time, the doll's appearance is still distinct: it has a bulbous head, with barely discernible mouth and eyes; broad shoulders; short, thick arms; and long legs, the right leg broken off. There are also faint geometric markings on the figure, which represent either clothing patterns or jewelry -they are found mostly on the chest around the neck, and on the arms and writs. The doll is the image of a person of a high civilization, artistically attired.

The Nampa doll came to the attention of Dr. G.F. Wright of the Boston Society of Natural History, who sought to verify the depth at which it was found - and thus also establish its great antiquity. In an on-location examination of Kurtz's equipment, the hole drilled, and interviews with the witnesses, Dr. Wright became convinced the find was genuine. Kurtz demonstrated that the well had been tubed with heavy iron tubing 6 inches in diameter, so that there was no mistake about the occurrence of the artifact at the stated depth. Furthermore, the pump worked in only one direction - had the object fallen into the hole from above, it would have been destroyed by the pump. Wright concluded in a report to the Boston Society that, "There is no ground to question the fact that this image came up in the sand pump from the depth reported." In another study, fellow Bostonian Professor F.W. Putnam found through microscopic analysis that quartz grains under the doll's right arm had been cemented by iron molecules. This too - independent of the fact of the depth of the discovery - is indicative of a great age.

How old is the Nampa object? The lava rock layer through which Kurtz's drill penetrated is part of the prehistoric lava flows of the Columbia Plateau which occurred before the advance of the last Ice Age. And below this layer, the image was discovered another 300 feet down. The best modern geologic estimate puts the date for the layer in which the doll was found at over 300,000 years. Today, the Nampa doll is on exhibit at the Idaho State Historical Society in Boise.

Curiously enough, a second doll-like figure was discovered sometime before 1880 near Marlboro in Stark County, Ohio, by workmen drilling a well. The image - made of black variegated marble and standing 6 inches tall - was unearthed from a depth of only 120 feet, but was embedded in sand and gravel of a similar type and age as that of the Nampa doll. There were two things remarkable about the Ohio figure: First, the marble it is made of is not indigenous to Ohio; and second, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the image found at Nampa. One can see in it the same bulbous head, simple facial features, stocky frame and long arms and legs. Did the two, the Ohio and Idaho "dolls," come from the same enigmatic lost civilization? The evidence answers yes.

One of the most convincing signs of a high civilization is the written word. In the early spring of 1891, a farmer named J.H. Hooper was examining a wooded ridge on his property, located in Bradley County, 13 miles from Cleveland, Tennessee. A peculiar stone caught his attention, which he first took to be a grave marker. But digging around it, he soon discovered that the stone was only a surface projection of a subterranean structure that extended into the depths below. Hopper spent the next several weeks in an attempt to uncover his unusual find: A length of wall, traced for a thousand feet, on the average 2 feet thick and 8 feet high, with numerous projections - like the first one - spaced along the top every 25 to 30 feet. The wall ran roughly at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees east. The structure continues on beyond the section exposed, in both directions, following the crest of a ridge that extends from the Hiawassee river north of Chattanooga southward, where it dips beneath the Tennessee river. Its position dates it geologically to near the beginning of the Quaternary - well over a million years old.

The wall is composed of red sandstone blocks constructed in three courses, cemented together with a dark red clay mixed with salt, and in numerous places is plastered over with red, slate and yellow clays. Along one stretch of wall, near the northern end a distance of 16 feet, Hooper made without a doubt the most important discovery: Hidden beneath the outer clay plasterings, a number of the sandstone block surfaces were covered with the hieroglyphs of a lost language. The letters were arranged in wavy, parallel and diagonal lines, interspersed with small pictures of strange animals, many unidentifiable. there were other symbols too, of the sun and crescent moon, which appear to have some astronomical significance. All together, 872 individual characters were made out, many repeated - suggesting the script is a form of pictographic writing, like Chinese.

Despite the implications of the wall, and the challenge of the discovery of an unknown writing, the find was met by the scientific community with overwhelming apathy. A short notice on the Tennessee mystery wall appeared in the Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences (11:26-29), written by A.L. Rawson, who examined the structure and script first-hand, as well as published copies he had made of some of the glyphs and pictures. But that was all; no further study was ever made.

In 1936, Tom Kenny, a resident of Plateau Valley, a town located on the western slope of the Rockies in Colorado, was excavating for a winter cellar to store vegetables, when at a depth of 10 feet his spade hit a barrier. Clearing the covering material away, he unearthed a pavement made of tiles, each man-made and five inches square. The tiles were laid in mortar, the chemical composition of which later analysis showed was different from all materials found in the valley. The perplexing problem is that the strange pavement was found in the same layer containing the three-toed Miocene horse - upwards of 30 million years old.

In November, 1829, a block of marble measuring over 30 cubic feet was excavated from a depth of between 60 to 70 feet, from the Henderson quarry, located 12 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The block was sent to the Savage marble saw mill in nearby Norristown for cutting into slabs for construction. After taking off one slab about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, workmen noticed something strange: They had exposed an unnaturally straight-edged, rectangular indentation. Several respectable townsmen were called to the scene, and in their presence the rest of the block surface was carefully removed. Revealed were two sharply defined engraved letters, resembling an "I," and a "U" with a squared base. The indentations were 11/2 inches long and five-eighths of an inch in width. There was no way the letters could have been of recent origin - they were deeply embedded in the marble. More mysterious, the marble had come from a very old lime rock. Estimated age: About 65 million years.

The Los Angeles News of December 17, 1869 printed an account supplied to the paper by a correspondent of the Cleveland Herald, writing from Wellsville, Ohio. The account described how in the autumn of the year, at a coal mine operated by a Captain Lacey of Hammondville, a miner named James Parsons was loosening a large mass at a depth of 100 feet, when he suddenly exposed a smooth slate wall covered with strange alphabetic writing. The letters were raised and well defined. The coal that had covered the wall bore their distinct impression - which means the letters date to a time when the coal was in a vegetable state, and had molded itself against the wall. Each sign was three-quarters of an inch in size, and arranged in rows precisely spaced 3 inches apart. The first line of letters contained 25. Local teachers and ministers examined the find, but could offer no explanations. Unfortunately, just before a number of university professors arrived to verify the discovery, the slate surface disintegrated from exposure to air, and the script was lost. Nevertheless, the find was well-documented, and attested to by several reliable witnesses. But the most disturbing fact about the mysterious slate wall and its glyphs was their undeniable presence in coal - coal from the Carboniferous era, well over 200 million years old.

A naturalist named Isaac Lea reported in the American Journal of Science (volume I, number 1, page 155), in 1822, a find he had made in a stretch of sandstone located a quarter mile north of Pittsburgh, on the same side of the Monongahela river. Lea described it as the most singular specimen he had ever seen: An unusually flat rectangular surface, 3 feet long and varying from 5 to 6 inches wide. One end was cut off by a break in the rock - so there is no way of knowing the real length of the original impression. The other end terminated in the middle of the rock face in a straight, square line -as if a roll of paper had been torn off clean. On this flat surface were row after row of evenly spaced, perfect diamond shapes, each with an oblique, raised band across its center. Lea was mystified as to how to classify the impression, as belonging to the animal or vegetable kingdom. The answer is neither: The pattern is too precise to be natural, the diamond shapes too square to be designed by anything but an intelligent hand. Luckily, Lea had forethought enough to make accurate measurements and draw sketches of the impression, for when he returned to remove it for further study, he found that a quarryman had beaten him to it, and had done his work. The naturalist also took meticulous note of the position of the rock surface in relation to the geology of the surrounding area. The hill in which it existed is not high enough to take in the bed of carboniferous coal found in a horizontal stratum about 250 feet above the locality. In fragments of the impressed rock, Lea found fossils of primitive jointed plants - the type which made its appearance in the Devonian era, 400 million years ago.

What exactly was the mysterious pattern in rock? We do not know, but the fact remains that it bore the artistic and measuring hand of man. That hand was contemporary with purportedly the earliest plant life on earth.

[ColbiasVolk]

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.

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.

[NoelPuppet]

Pictures would help this thread immeasurably.

[weirdo111]

glad a scroll before i start to read, phew

[kasapin]

great stuff here..thanks for sharingc

[ColbiasVolk]

Originally Posted by NoelPuppet ↗

Pictures would help this thread immeasurably.

Bummer, that's why you have an imagination.

[spills]

Interesting read, but with no substantiation or proper references. Everything in it could be made up bollocks. (Which I suspect is the case!)

[johnleeknoefler]

Fossilized vehicle track found in Vernal Utah Dinosaur Park.
Originally it was very large photo but Picasso downsized it to what you see. It lost alot of detail. Unfortunately thieves stole my camera, computer, and memory chip and all I had left from that trip was a few photos I had uploaded to picasso to share with friends.

[johnleeknoefler]

Contribution to the thread by johnleeknoefler:

FossilTrack01.JPG

[bdjackass318]

All very interesting stuff. Thanks