What do you think about this?
In 1936, a German archaeologist named Wilhelm Konig was working at a museum in Baghdad when he found something in the basement collection that did not belong to any catalogued period of Mesopotamian history.
It was a clay jar, about five inches tall, sealed with bitumen. Inside the jar was a hollow copper cylinder. Inside the cylinder was an iron rod, suspended so it never touched the copper walls. Traces of acidic residue, possibly vinegar or wine, lined the inside of the jar.
Drop an acid into that arrangement and you have a galvanic cell. A battery. The same basic design Alessandro Volta is credited with inventing in 1800, almost two thousand years later.
The jar was dated to the Parthian period, somewhere between 250 BC and 224 AD.
When the design was reconstructed by modern engineers, including at MIT and on multiple television programs, it produced between half a volt and a full volt. Enough to electroplate small objects in gold or silver. Some researchers have pointed out that ancient Iraqi silversmiths produced gilded pieces that look, under a microscope, exactly like electroplated work.
Mainstream archaeologists have proposed it was a scroll storage vessel. They have not, in ninety years, explained the copper cylinder, the suspended iron rod, the bitumen seal, or the acid traces.
The original jar was looted from the Baghdad Museum in the chaos of 2003 and has never been recovered.
What if a working battery existed in the ancient Near East two thousand years before our textbooks say it did, and the knowledge of how to make it was simply lost?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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