Natural or alien artifacts? YOU BE THE JUDGE!

[tuftears]

Apparently miners in South Africa have been finding strange metal spheres with grooves etched around them... The kicker is that the layers they've been found in are Precambian -- billions of years old!

Comments

[anher.livejournal.com]

Bad HTML tags...

Really interesting subject matter though.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Fixed!

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

I've read and heard stories about this (finding OOPARTs*) before. Smart money says they're natural, but one can always hope!

* -- OOPARTs, Out-of-place Artifacts.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Have any links to other types of OOPARTS?

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

I mostly remember reading about them in various 'alternative reality' AKA weird stuff books over the years rather than online, so sorry, not really. The main other OOPART I can remember right now is the Antikythera device, a sort of 'clockwork computer' found in the wreckage of a Bronze Age Greek vessel.

Really, just look for any of the Bermuda Triangle/Atlantis books by Charles Berlitz and you'll find tons of these references.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

That would be the Antikythera mechanism. There are mentions of similar devices in records originating from that period, so while rare, it wasn't necessarily unique. Mostly it means that the ancient Greeks were better at clockwork than we'd been assuming (clockwork was known, but most mechanisms weren't this sophisticated).

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That'd be my thought too-- not enough to say 'omg time travelling Victorians visited ancient Greece' for me. };)

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was it, thank you for the link.

And Lynx, I also remember something about electroplating via small jars of some sort from ancient Babylon.