Those Enigmatic
Erratics
Out-of-Place Artifacts or Out-of-Whack Chronology
by Philip Rife
This author personally subscribes
to the catastrophic theory of history.
Namely, that one or more
times prior to our present recorded history, mankind
achieved a high level of civilization--only to have
nearly all traces of it obliterated by widespread
destruction, either natural or manmade.
However, some of the most
popular evidence traditionally marshaled in support of
such a scenario may in fact be suspect. The evidence in
question consists largely of apparently manmade objects
encased in pieces of coal or rock, and what seem to be
human footprints solidified in stone.
Consider, for instance,
the following item from the June 11, 1891 edition of the
Morrisonville, Ill. Times:
A curious find was
brought to light by Mrs. S. W. Culp last Tuesday
morning. As she was breaking a lump of coal
preparatory to putting it in the scuttle, she
discovered, as the lump fell apart, embedded in a
circular shape, a small gold chain about ten inches
in length of antique and quaint workmanship. At first
Mrs. Culp thought the chain had been dropped
accidentally in the coal, but as she undertook to
lift the chain up, the idea of its having been
recently dropped was at once fallacious, for as the
lump of coal broke...the middle of the chain became
loosened while each end remained fastened to the
coal. This is a study for the students of archaeology
who love to puzzle their brains over the geological
construction of the earth from whose ancient depth
the curious is always dropping out. The lump of coal
from which this chain was taken is supposed to come
from the Taylorville or Pana mines (in southern
Illinois) and almost hushes one's breath with mystery
when it is thought for how many long ages the earth
has been forming strata after strata which hid the
golden links from view. The chain was an eight-carat
gold and weighed eight penny-weights. (1)
Here are a few more
examples from the numerous other such cases that have
turned up over the years:
In the late 1870s
or early 1880s, an iron thimble emerged from a
piece of coal being burned in a stove in
Colorado.(2)
In 1912, a worker
feeding coal into a furnace at a power plant in
Thomas, Oklahoma split open a large piece of coal
and found an iron pot inside. "This iron pot
fell from the center," recalled the man,
"leaving the impression or mould of the pot
in the piece of coal. I traced the source of the
coal, and found that it came from the Wilburton,
Okla. mines."(3)
In 1937, a woman
in Pennsylvania discovered a large ceramic spoon
or ladle while removing the ashes of a large
chunk of coal she'd just burned in her stove. The
Smithsonian Institution was unable to determine
the article's origin.(4)
Coal isn't the only
material where erratic artifacts have been found:
In 1844, quarry
workers found a piece of gold thread embedded in
rock at a depth of eight feet in Rutherford
Mills, England.(5)
No fewer than
three "impossible" objects were found
encased in rock or widely separated parts of the
world in the year 1851. A piece of auriferous
quartz from California split open when it was
dropped, reaving a slightly corroded cut iron
nail that was "entirely straight and had a
perfect head."(6) Another nail was
discovered in a block of stone from Kingoodie
Quarry in northern England.(7) And a mystery
object of exquisite workmanship was unearthed by
workers in Dorchester, Massachusetts. An article
in the June 1851 issue of Scientific American
described the latter as a "bell-shaped
vessel 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the
base, 2 1/2 inches at the top, and about an
eighth of an inch in thickness. The body of this
vessel resembles zinc in color, or a composition
metal, in which there is a considerable portion
of silver. On the sides there are six figures of
a flower, or bouquet, beautifully inlaid with
pure silver, and around the lower part of the
vessel a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with
silver. This curious and unknown vessel was blown
out of solid pudding stone 15 feet below the
surface."(8)
In 1869, a piece
of feldspar taken from a mine near Treasure City,
Nevada was found to contain the oxidized remains
of a tapered, uniformly threaded iron screw in
its interior.(9)
Then there are what appear
to be human footprints impressed (not carved) into rock
surfaces at various sites:
In Southern California's Elysian Park, "a
distinct imprint in solid stone of a shoe worn by
a human being," was discovered, according to the Los Angeles Herald.
"The peculiar feature of this find is that the
owner of the foot wore a shoe of antique Mexican
fashion, with high, narrow heel and broad, flat
sole. The imprint is perfectly clear and looks as
though the owner had unwittingly put his right
foot into soft mud but a day or two ago and left
his mark. The fossil imprint was discovered by
laborers who were making a deep cut for the new
wagon road. It was cut out of solid rock, four
feet or thereabouts below the surface soil. The
stone is a fine-grained shale, impregnated with
lime" (from the Savannah Morning Star,
April 13, 1897).(10)
In 1927, what
seemed to be another fossilized shod footprint
was found in limestone in Pershing County,
Nevada. Microphotographs of the imprint revealed
double stitching with an extremely fine
thread.(11)
In the early
1930s, the head of the geology department of
Berea College investigated a series of ten
manlike tracks found in sandstone in Rockcastle
County, Kentucky. "Three pairs of tracks
show both left and right footprints," he
later told a Louisville newspaper. "The
position of the feet is the same as that of a
person. One pair shows the feet parallel to each
other, the distance between the feet being the
same as that of a normal human being." He
estimated the foot in question would take a size
7 1/2 EE shoe.(12)
The conclusion drawn by
most writers has been that if these are genuine
man-related artifacts (and not freaks of nature), they
provide compelling evidence that man has been on this
planet far longer than generally believed.
However, there's another,
less discussed series of finds that seems to suggest a
quite different possible answer to the puzzle. Namely,
that the Earth--or at least the portions of it where this
second group of artifacts have been found--may not be as
old as thought.
Consider, for instance,
the coin an Englishman found imbedded in a lump of coal
about 1900. It clearly bore the date 1397. Somehow, an
object little more than 500 years old wound up inside a
material supposedly formed millions of years ago.(13)
Of possible relevance, a
group of scientists who studied the aftereffects of the
massive 1980 volcanic eruption and deforestation of Mount
St. Helens discovered that peat deposits had developed in
an unexpectedly short time at the bottom of a nearby
lake. The team concluded that under the right conditions,
some coal beds could theoretically form in far less time
than conventionally thought.)(14) The fact that this
information comes from an organization with an agenda,
the imformation must be treated skeptically.
Or consider the unusual
"geode" picked up by a rockhound near Owens
Lake in California in 1961. It was encrusted with
fossilized shells, and a geologist who examined it
reportedly estimated its age as being at least half a
million years. However, when the object was X-rayed, it
was found to contain what appeared to be a common 20th
Century sparkplug at its center.(15)
No less an authority than
Charles Fort himself weighed in convincingly on the
subject of erratics that (in at least some cases) may not
be as ancient as we think. In The Book of the Damned,
he cites two cases that caused him to have second
thoughts. One involved quartz crystals reportedly formed
in a mine in what, because of the known circumstances,
could not have been more than 15 years. The other
involved sandstone that had formed at the site of an old
mill in only 12 years. Firmly locked inside the sandstone
was said to be a piece of wood with a nail in it.(16)
Of course, none of this
means there aren't some-perhaps many-erratics indicative
of prehistoric catastrophism. Only that all alternative
explanations need to be considered whenever one of these
"impossible" finds turns up.
Sources
1. INFO Journal,
Vol. 1 No. 3, pp. 47-48. 2. Ibid., #59, p. 31.
3. Brad Steiger, Mysteries
of Time and Space (New York: Dell Publishing Co.,
1976), p. 46.
4. INFO #59, p. 31.
5. John Keel, Our
Haunted Planet (Greenwich: Fawcett Publications,
Inc., 1971), p. 14.
6. Charles Fort, The
Book of the Damned (New York: Ace Books, Inc.), pp.
130-131.
7. Andrew Tomas, We
Are Not the First (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), p.
29.
8. Brad Steiger, Worlds
Before Our Own (New York: Berkley Publishing Corp.,
1978), photo section.
9. UFO Report,
Summer 1975, pp. 28-29.
10. World Before Our
Own, pp. 30-31.
11. Mysteries of Time
and Space, p. 31.
12. Worlds Before Our
Own, p. 97.
13. INFO #59, p.
31.
14. "Mount St. Helens
and Catastrophism," Impact #157.
15. Jacques Bergier, Extraterrestrial
Intervention (New York: New American Library, Inc.,
1975), pp. 12-17.
16. The Book of the
Damned, p. 131.
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