What do you think about this?
High on a rocky butte in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, an ancient people left a clock made of stone and sunlight. In 1977, an artist named Anna Sofaer was recording rock art near the summit of Fajada Butte when she noticed something remarkable. Around the middle of the day, a thin blade of light slipped between three large stone slabs leaning against the cliff and fell precisely across a spiral carved into the rock behind them.
She had stumbled onto it at the summer solstice, and the dagger of light cut straight through the center of the spiral. When she returned at other times of year, the pattern changed with astonishing purpose. At the winter solstice, two daggers of light framed the spiral on either side. At the equinoxes, a smaller spiral nearby was marked as well. The slabs and the carvings together tracked the turning of the entire year, and even the longer cycles of the moon.
This was the work of the Ancestral Puebloans, a people with no written language and no metal tools, roughly a thousand years ago. Somehow they understood the sky well enough to build a marker that still keeps time today, in a spot so remote that it took chance and a sharp eye to rediscover it.
Makes you wonder how a culture we often picture as simple mapped the heavens with such precision, and how many other quiet instruments like it are still waiting on cliffsides we never climb.
Lucky accident of falling rock, or a deliberate calendar built by master astronomers? What do you think the Sun Dagger was made to do?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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