What do you think about this?
Sometimes a single object refuses to fit the timeline we have built for it. Collectors call them out of place artifacts, things that turn up where, by every rule we know, they should not exist.
Take the London Hammer. In 1936, near London, Texas, a couple walking a creek bed found a chunk of rock with a piece of wood and iron poking out of it. Cracked open, it held an iron hammerhead on a wooden handle, the stone seemingly formed around it. The rock it sat in was far older than any blacksmith. Skeptics say the hammer itself is maybe a century or two old, and that minerals in the hard local water cemented ordinary rock around it quickly, no mystery required.
Then there is the Coso artifact, found in California in 1961 inside what looked like a geode. Sliced open, it revealed a metal core wrapped in ceramic, and believers claimed it was hundreds of thousands of years old. A closer look showed something stranger and more ordinary, a 1920s spark plug, its casing crusted over with rust and clay.
The honest answer is that most of these objects, examined carefully, turn out to have simple explanations. And yet they keep surfacing, and the questions keep coming.
Makes you wonder how we would even recognize a truly out of place object if we found one, when our first instinct is always to explain it away.
Genuine anomalies, or just nature and rust playing tricks on us? What do you think these objects really are?
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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