Strange discoveries
The world is full of strange things. In some parts of the world unusual objects, traces and remains have been found in the past years, which seem to come from unknown places and times. It is not known how they landed in our world.
The strangest of all are those anomalies contradict not only science but also history: that is, the recorded, codified, incontrovertible facts, etched in the immutable order of past events. There are a lot of such things: more numerous and bizarre than we think.
Mysterious Footprints
In 1817, in St. Louis, Missouri, along the Mississippi River, two perfectly outlined human footprints were found in a clay layer from the Carboniferous, when mammals had not yet developed. Ethnologist Henry R. Schoolcraft made a drawing of them, which was sent to the most important scientific journals of the time. The footprints were 35 centimeters long. The toes-scribed Schoolcraft in his report-appeared rather spread apart, and the soles of the feet were flat, as is the case in those who habitually walk without shoes. They appeared remarkably natural, and showed with precision the details of the musculature and the reliefs of the heel and base of the firms. The geological layer from which the find came is 270 million years old. The first hominids who walked upright - according to official science - appeared on earth four million years ago.
In 1882, the footprints of human feet shoehorned into flat, heel-less sandals were found in a clay deposit near Carson City, Nevada, during work on a quarry. The footprints proceeded in a line, were about 50 centimeters long and their "stride" was nearly a meter wide: The "owner" must have been some kind of giant, at least three and a half meters tall. All around, in the same geological layer, were imprinted traces similar to those of various animals: horses, bears, deer, wolves. The sediment dated back two or three million years, when no one on our planet wore shoes of any kind.
The imprint of a leather shoe imprinted in a layer dating back to the Triassic was found in 1927 in a Nevada canyon (an area evidently favored for out-of-time walking).
Microscopic examination of the cast revealed stitching work, by means of regularly spaced stitches. According to geologists, the soil that received the impression was between 180 and 225 million years old.
The most famous of the anomalous footprints, however, is probably the one found in June 1968 by a fossil collector near Antelope Springs, Utah. Apparently, it shows a shoe sole, equipped with a heel, crushing a trilobite, a small crustacean that lived between 300 and 600 million years ago. The small animal, little larger than a cockroach, is perfectly embedded in the heel, as if it had been the victim of a voluntary "crushing". The sole is 36 centimeters long and 8 wide, perfectly outlined, with the protrusion of the heel clearly visible. When news of the find spread, published in several newspapers, the area was invaded by several other amateur researchers, one of whom in July of the same year, reported the discovery, in the same geological layer, of a child's bare footprint. A month later, in August, two more footprints or sandals were found. Next to one of them was found a fossil of another trilobite. Who wore shoes, on earth, before dinosaurs were even born?
Humans-not-humans
Human skulls with horns were found in an Indian burial mound at Sayre in Pennsylvania, in 1880. The horns were about 7 centimeters long and protruded from the forehead, just above the eyebrow arches. Otherwise the skeletons were perfectly normal, except for their height: about two meters. They were buried around 1200 A.D., and it is not known to which lineage they belonged.
In 1837, a group of skeletons were discovered near Coshocton in Ohio. They belonged to creatures 90 to 120 centimeters tall, and were buried within wooden coffins in what was apparently a cemetery of their people. According to accounts of the time, the number of burials indicated the presence of a center inhabited by a rather dense community of pygmies of unknown origin. In the surroundings, however, no artifacts belonging to the "little people" were found.
He was seated cross-legged within a small cave carved into the granite of a Wyoming mountain. With his torso erect and his arms resting on his knees, he seemed almost to be meditating. Perfectly mummified, he exhibited brown, wrinkled skin, a flat nose, narrow forehead and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. His height, when standing, must have been no more than 45 centimeters. It was discovered in 1932 by a prospector. Examined by X-ray at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the find was considered authentic and was estimated to belong to an individual who died at about 65 years of age. Legends of the Indian peoples of the area speak of the existence of a people of pygmies living hidden in caves in the mountains.
In 1911, miners who were extracting guano from a deposit near Lovelok in Nevada unearthed some Indian artifacts. Digging deeper, they found the mummy of an individual more than six feet tall, with "scarlet red" hair. According to the traditions of the Paiute Indians, a race of red-haired giants, the Si-te-cah, long contested the domination of the territory to various Native American tribes, who banded together to defeat and exterminate them. Subsequent archaeological investigations in the area unearthed other artifacts, but no human remains. In 1924, however, a new prospecting uncovered a femur of unusual length: the individual it had belonged to must have been between three and three and a half meters tall. Later still, a skull emerged that was completely out of proportion to the average human: almost half a meter wide from the mandible to the top of the skull. The remains are now preserved in several American museums.
In 1935 in an ancient desiccated well near the town of Vadnagar in India the fossilized body of a human-looking creature, fifty centimeters tall (quite similar, in appearance, to the Wyoming gnome) was found. Initially it was considered a mystification, but later, in the same spot, the remains of a pygmy cow, less than eighty centimeters tall, were found. Many legends, all over the world, tell of tiny populations surrounded by domesticated animals that were also small.
Misplaced artifacts
During earthworks in a quarry in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1851, miners set off a charge whose explosion split a large block of rock in two. Among the fragments projected around, a metal vessel of strange shape emerged, adorned with strange decorations. It was divided into two pieces and had been cast in a metal of unknown nature. Some of the ornamental designs were made of a second metal, similar to silver, welded to the surface of the vessel. The object was about forty centimeters high, and appeared perfectly preserved, with the decorations, very well executed, perfectly visible. The rock in which it was imprisoned was granite formed at least a billion years ago. News of the find was published in Scientific American, whose editors wrote that such an object could only be attributed to Tubal-Cain, the biblical "father" of metallurgy.
In 1851, also in Massachusetts, a mineral collector accidentally dropped a fist-sized block of quartz he had just unearthed. The block split in two and an iron nail emerged, seven inches long, slightly corroded but perfectly straight and with a clearly distinguishable head.
In Bearcreek, Montana, in 1926, a block of mineral was found in a coal mine in which was embedded a human tooth, specifically a second lower molar, now entirely fossilized, identical to the tooth of a man of our time. According to geologists, the coal contained in the mine had been formed around ten million years ago.
Geodes are crystalline formations that on the outside do not appear dissimilar to ordinary pieces of rock, but which, when cut, show various compositions of minerals and multicolored crystals. They are highly wanted by collectors because very beautiful ornamental objects can be made from them. In 1961 in the Coso Mountains in California a decidedly exceptional geode was found. Divided in two, it revealed a structure embedded among the crystals inside, which was virtually identical to a modern spark plug. It consisted of a cylindrical metal core about a millimeter wide, enclosed in a circular ceramic "jacket" and a copper coating, all set in a kind of octagonal bolt. The object is currently on display in a museum. The crystals of which the Coso geode is made up date back, according to estimates, to half a million years.
A fragment of steel identical to a drill bit was found in Scotland, in 1852, encased in a block of fossil coal. The object shows itself in appearance, much more "modern" in workmanship than the drill bits in use at the time. The coal dates back at least eleven million years.
The building material intended for the construction of the courthouse in Aix-en-Provence, France, was taken almost entirely from a quarry near the city. During the extraction work, a layer of sand came to light, at a depth of about thirty meters, in which fragments of columns and other apparently worked stone blocks were found. Continuing to dig, the workers found, to their surprise, a pile of coins of unknown origin and bearing incomprehensible symbols, and the fossilized remains of hammer handles and other tools. A wooden plank, perfectly squared, two and a half meters long and three centimeters thick, fossilized, also emerged. The masons judged it to be identical to those they themselves used to erect scaffolding. The geological layer of the find is three hundred million years old.
New Caledonia is a Pacific island between Australia and New Guinea. About sixty kilometers from its lower tip emerges from the sea a small island of modest size known by the name "Pine Island". On it rise several hundred mounds of conical shape, up to three meters high and with a greatly enlarged base. In 1960 four of them were excavated. In the center of three of them four concrete columns were found; the fourth mound of columns enclosed two of them, side by side. Around them there were no other remains of any kind, neither bones, nor tools, nor pottery. The columns were about three meters high and sixty centimeters wide. The concrete of which they were formed contained fragments of shells, which allowed them to be dated by radiocarbon, discovering that they were about eleven thousand years old. Throughout the island there are no other traces of human settlement.
