Out-of-place artifact

[chiggerbit]

While googling on sweet tooth's MOTM, I came across the Wiki on out-of-place artifact, thought I would start a separate thread on it.



Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOPArt

An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is a term coined by American zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson for a historical, archaeological or palaeontological object found in a very unusual or seemingly impossible location. The term covers a wide variety of objects, ranging from material studied by mainstream science, such as the Iron pillar in Delhi, to so-called 'forbidden archaeology' that is far outside the mainstream.

While occasional discoveries, such as the Antikythera mechanism, have forced scientists to reassess the technology of ancient civilization, most believe cases of OOPArt to be the result of mistaken interpretation or wishful thinking. Supporters regard them as evidence that mainstream science is overlooking huge areas of knowledge, either willfully or through ignorance.

OOPArts are often of interest to creationists and others who seek evidence that may refute the theory of evolution; they are also used to support religious descriptions of pre-history, ancient astronaut theories, or the notion of vanished civilizations that possessed knowledge or technology more advanced than our own. Many writers or researchers who question or challenge conventional views of human history have used purported OOPArts to bolster their arguments.[1]

OOPArt-type objects are also a common plot device in science fiction.....

.....Alleged OOParts

[edit] Artifacts alleged to come from recognized cultures, recovered in unexpected places
The Kensington Runestone purported to be a 14th century Viking artifact found in North America.
The Piri Reis map made by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis from a diverse range of sources; it supposedly contains an accurate map of Antarctica.
Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head - terracotta head found in Mexico that some say is of Roman origin.
The Fuente Magna, discovered in Bolivia. Ceramic bowl with writing in alleged Sumerian cuneiform.
The Gympie Pyramid in Queensland, Australia - said by some to be evidence that the Inca were in Australia before the Europeans.
The Saqqara Bird in Egypt, discovered in a tomb, claimed to be a 7-inch model of a flying machine.

[edit] Artifacts allegedly produced by unknown cultures or societies
The Baghdad Battery, dating from between 250 BC and 250 AD.
The Baigong Pipes, unexplained pipes found in a cave in China.
The Coso artifact, containing a spark plug from the 1920s.
The Crystal skulls claimed to have been found at Lubaantun, in Yucatan and in Belize.
The Dorchester Pot, Massachusetts, United States.
The Dendera Lamps, engraved into a relief in a temple dedicated to Hathor, Egyptian Goddess of the Milky Way.
The dropa stones, also known as the Bayan Kara Ula Disks; supposedly found near Nimu in the Chinese region of Sichuan, and claimed to be 12,000 years old.
The Iron Man (Eiserne Mann), dating to the 13th century.
The Lake Winnipesaukee mystery stone
The Wolfsegg Iron, a cubical block of metal in coal found in Austria.

[edit] Artifacts alleged to predate humanity
The Acambaro figures, from Acámbaro, Mexico, some of which are in the apparent form of dinosaurs.
The Ica stones, Peru, allegedly depicting anachronistic images such as dinosaurs and modern medical procedures.
The Kingoodie hammer, Scotland, dated from 460 to 360 million years ago.
The Klerksdorp Spheres, South Africa, dated 2.8 billion years ago - their regular shapes lead to claims that they were artificially created.
The mortar and pestle (or molcajete) set discovered in Table Mountain (near Jamestown, California), in a gravel deposit which a documentary version of Forbidden Archaeology claimed to be 55 million years old. [2]

[edit] Validated cases
The Maine Penny found in Blue Hill, Maine. An 11th century Norse coin found in an American Indian shell midden. Over 20,000 objects were found over a 15-year period at the Goddard site in Blue Hill. The sole OOPArt was the coin.[3][4] One hypothesis is that it may have been brought to the site from a Viking settlement in Newfoundland, not by Norsemen but by seagoing Indians.
The Iron pillar in India, dating around to AD 423.
The Antikythera mechanism, a geared device manufactured ca. 100 BCE, believed to be a device for predicting the motion of the sun, moon and planets i.e. an orrery.
Tablets and artifacts discovered in Glozel, France in the 1920s and '30s, some of which were inscribed with an unknown, undecyphered alphabet.

[edit] See also
Anachronism
Ancient astronaut theories
Charles Fort, researcher of anomalous phenomena
Fortean Times

[chiggerbit]

emad had this thread on 10 of them back in 05:

http://tinyurl.com/32qx42

[Jeff]

gallery of some examples

[Attack Ships on Fire]

That's a great link. There were a few OOPAs mentioned in their examples that I had never heard about like the labyrinth designs, the fossilized human hand and the golden mean metallic items from Russia. Quite a few new discoveries from the 1990s which is good since newspaper accounts from the 19th century always were suspect in my book.

[monster]

gallery of some examples

Great link!

Not sure about the giant human mummy, though.

I love OOPA's because I always think about humans hundreds of millions of years ago, and civilizations on Mars and also the planet that is now the asteroid belt.

There's got to be some history of the Solar System that we don't know about.

[judasdisney]

Forbidden Archaeology, a 900+ page book on this topic

Ignore the Amazon readers' rating. For the participants of this board, it's 4- or 5-star. Voluminous and dense with examples.

Even better:

All of the William R. Corliss Catalogues of Anomalies, in various branches of science, from Astronomy and Biology to Archaeology.

The Out-of-Place Artifacts volume is here.

None of the Corliss books are less than 5-star. Each are among the most amazing books you'll ever see. Unfortunately, most are rare or out-of-print, so check your local public library or nearby university library.

A note on the scoffing disbelief in human giants: http://www.varchive.org/itb/giants.htm

[vigilant]

great post, this should keep me busy for a while...

[slow_dazzle]

He has written about old maps that show ice-free poles and a lot on complex, ancient structures. The one with interlocking blocks shown in the link posted by Jeff is absolutely mind boggling. How people could place those blocks with such precision and without powered plant is beyond me.

I hope RI'ers post more interesting stuff in this thread.

[No_Baseline]

http://www.s8int.com

I'm bumping this '07 thread because I am obsessed with the content in the above-linked website.

First off I need to warn readers that the author is a fierce proponent of the literal translation of the bible and believes the earth to only be several thousand years old.

That aside however, this website is p-a-c-k-e-d with pages and pages of documented ooparts that, when taken together, are just impossible to ignore or forget.

Does anyone have any other theories for artifacts found in 300 million year old geologic formations, coal, etc.? I would love to hear them.

I know the Maya believed the Earth to be part of an endless cycle, with no beginning or end. Scientifically, however, no known species has ever survived for 300 million years.

[Simulist]

Since the author of s8int.com believes the earth to be only several thousand years old, I won't feel too awfully bad for engaging in my own bit of speculation.

Does anyone have any other theories for artifacts found in 300 million year old geologic formations, coal, etc.? I would love to hear them.

The fact that humans spend one-third of our entire lives asleep — a full third of our lives! — is so commonplace that few ever consider the possible mystery associated with this phenomenon.

Obviously, dreaming (or at the very least a state of consciousness that is significantly different than waking consciousness) is deeply rooted in the human condition. Human animals dream; in fact all intelligent creatures dream — and I think this is without exception.

If the universe is alive — and if it is intelligent, as I think it almost certainly is — then perhaps the universe also dreams.

That being the possible case, our experience "here" may be one simple scene of that vast dream. As in life, all kinds of shit happens in dreams.

"Out-of-place artifacts" are common features in dreams — even when the remainder of the dream is fairly consistent. Were we to believe while dreaming that our nighttime dream was real — and also to be able to remain lucid-enough inside our dream to be able actually to ruminate over the "out-of-placeness" of some of the "artifacts" inside it — we'd probably scratch our heads over these phenomena then, just as we're doing now.

[Nordic]

The laws of physics are overrated. That's my opinion.

I really think that the space-time continuum can get all wobbly and mixed-up when certain things happen. Like earthquakes, for example. A hammer could end up embedded in a 50 million year old chunk of rock during one of these "waves" that goes rolling through the continuum. Much like those ghosts in those abbeys in Europe who are only seen from the knees up because the floor they USED to walk on was two feet below the current one.

In some earthquakes, right when you feel them coming, before anything really starts to move, you sense that everything is turning liquid. Not just the floor under your feet, but everything around you.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Wow, when Lucas said "A long time ago..", he really meant A LONG TIME AGO!



Metallic spheres coming from Klerksdorp (South Africa), one has three parallel grooves scanalature around its equator. These spheres were found together with many others in a mineral deposit of the Pre-Cambrian, dated 2.8 milliards of years. Some have a thin shell about a quarter inch thick, when broken open are filled with a strange spongy material that disintegrates into dust upon contact with air. According to Roelf Marx (curator of the South African Klerksdorp Museum), the sphere he has on exibit rotates on its own, locked in a display case, free of outside vibrations.

[seemslikeadream]

I have been lost for a very long time



I do wish I could find the complete vid of this movie on line

Field of Homespun Dreams
By Brian Holmes
Brian Springer Unearths an American Obsession




Why would an audacious underground filmmaker choose the year 2007 to release a highly personal work about the missing memoirs of a nineteenth-century rural anarchist woman and the compulsive diggings of a Korean war veteran obsessed with hidden treasure? Where’s the relation between this allegorical tale and the author’s earlier work with satellite TV? And what’s really buried beneath the tranquil fields of southern Missouri? These are the questions that come to mind upon viewing Brian Springer’s new film, The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity.
Springer is known across the horizons of electronic media art for one good reason: the 1995 documentary Spin. The work is based on 500 hours of raw news feeds, captured with off-the-shelf satellite dishes at a time before the transmissions were encrypted. Springer blew the minds of a generation of media activists by documenting the 1992 US presidential campaign from between the scenes, while the cameras were still rolling during commercial breaks. Live interviews from the sky were new back then, and corporate PR-men were avidly selling advice on how to use them. “This is great, I love these,” confesses Bill Clinton with a puppy-dog grin. “Can we do any more?” he asks his technician between whistle stops on a satellite tour.
Spin pointed to the open window of technological and organizational change at a moment when the scramble for globalized markets left gaping holes in all kinds of security systems. Soon afterwards, activists in disguise like the Yes Men would step through those gaps and create their own public twists on world events, relying on a knowledge of complex networking processes that the corporate powers did not yet fully control. The montage structure of the film allowed Springer to weave an intricate portrait of America’s corrupted democracy just after the first salvos of the Revolution in Military Affairs had exploded in the Persian Gulf, ushering in the “New World Order” that was supposed to replace the outdated certainties of the Cold War. The material from the satellite dishes was seemingly infinite; but closure finally came through a focus on the doctored truths and outright lies of the campaign.
Revelations abound in this unique document, but the most telltale scene is probably the whispered dialogue between Larry King and Bush Senior about their favorite sleeping pills. It was a touchy subject for Bush, after his nightmare episode, deftly censored from the TV broadcasts, of vomiting on the Japanese prime minister while under a sedative. In between rounds of pre-broadcast applause, King explains that his brother has gotten wind of a new tranquilizer coming down the pipe. Bush says “Great” – and that’s all anyone knows about it. As though the much-touted “end of history” in the 1990s had left an unanswered question: What ruffles the chemical haze of the world-makers’ sedated nights? And do phantom spin-doctors whisper their lines to the unlaid ghosts of the American dream?
Tales of Subterranean Gold
The new film takes its name from the earliest American ballad-opera, written in 1767 as a satire on the twin colonial crazes of treasure-hunting and spiritism. The Disappointment was censored before its first performance, due to a climate of popular violence against the theater company. The 2007 version opens with a close-up on a strange syncretic sculpture, at once insect, reptile, amphibian and mammal. A halting, electronic, faintly British-accented female voice reads a database entry on this mysterious artifact. Speaking in the first person, the creature’s electronic voice then explains: “I have been lost for a very long time…”
The hybrid creature introduces us to the Springer family: the mother, Doris; the father, C.W.; and the two sons, Larry and Brian. Their story is a search for a Spanish explorer’s golden treasure and personal diary, supposedly buried in the limestone caves beneath a Missouri farm. But there is another main character: Kate Austin, a friend of Emma Goldman and an unsung heroine of American anarchism, who lived on that same farm in the late nineteenth century. Her personal papers disappeared at her death, leaving an aura of uncertainty around this rare bird, a rural woman anarchist. A satellite image of the Missouri countryside becomes a treasure map. A red dot on the site of the Austin farm connects to three others: the limestone cave, a mysterious hieroglyph carved in a rock, and the spot where the hybrid creature was found in the 1880s, before archaeologists called it a fake and it was “lost by the institutions of history.” With that, all the elements are in place for a plunge into a very personal story, and an excavation of the national unconscious.
Springer works with a marvelously fluid editing technique, layering a wide range of documents into the primary footage of his father and his family in the cave. Amid reflections from Emma Goldman on the willingness of patriots to drop bombs from flying machines and recollections of Ben Franklin’s fears that the craze for treasure-hunting might ruin the country’s fledgling economy, what gradually emerges is the story of an average man, C.W. Springer, who left the United States for one of America’s bloodiest and most thoroughly forgotten wars, the “Korean conflict.” His job was to operate in advance of the front lines, directing the extensive napalm bombing that killed hundreds of thousands and reduced much of the country to violet ash. Upon return from the war he could not speak for weeks; but he gradually came back to life and, as we learn from the distant, almost disbelieving voice of the electronic narrator, he “rose into the middle class, and purchased a home in eastern Kansas.” Years later he would teach the Springer family how to see ghosts, by staring at an image and then brusquely closing your eyes. In the early 1970s, they found that the strongest afterglow was produced by TV news anchors reporting on Vietnam… But then stories about buried treasure led C.W. and his family to Church Hollow in Missouri, the site of the Austin farm. The traumatic memories of Korea faded away into a seemingly endless quest to find the hidden gold.
The film reaches its enigmatic center with re-enactments of the automatic writing seances of Springer’s mother, Doris. She feels that her hand has been mysteriously injured, before realizing that what she can and must do with it is trace out the diaries of a Spanish priest who was killed by Indians in the cave, with the gold of an earlier empire in his possession. This “channeled” diary (the spiritist equivalent of spurious campaign promises?) is described by Springer as “a repressed retelling of her husband’s experience with wartime atrocity.” It becomes the blueprint for an endless, futile and increasingly dangerous quest in the cave, which the movie appears to be trying to exorcise on several levels. But what never does come to the surface are Kate Austin’s vanished writings: a possible blueprint to another political future, outside the nightmare of imperial history from which millions of credulous Americans are now struggling, for the most part unsuccessfully, to wake up in disbelief.
Elusive Closure
Just years before the country’s independence, a ballad-opera called The Disappointment tried to steer Americans away from their obsession with buried treasure. In 2007, an occupying army tries to secure dinosaur wealth beneath the desert sands of Iraq, while the subprime mortgage debacle thrusts the average man’s home-owning dreams into the gaping maw of financial crisis. Spin pointed the way to a decade of grassroots media activism, which would operate through the technological and organizational holes left open amidst the sudden expansion of the capitalist economy. Today, when that openness has become ancient history, the same filmmaker who looked upward at the stars is peering down into the networks of delusion beneath our feet, and asking what timely stories might emerge from them during the run-up to yet another presidential campaign. There are vital clues here for a future cultural activism that will have to deal not only with advanced technology but also with more obscure human motivations, and with the archaeology of an economic order that threatens to collapse into the myriad holes, blind tunnels and architectures of bluff that comprise its very foundations.
Once again, we are faced with a vast range of material; but the closure of the cave-mouth at the end of the film does not solve the larger conundrums, symbolized throughout by the strange, hybrid body and the electronic voice of the unbelievable narrator. Some viewers undoubtedly won’t be able to make any connection between this homespun historical tale and the technological breakthroughs of Spin, and they’ll leave the theater shaking their heads and waxing nostalgic for the good old days of media activism. But others will recognize a formidable underground vein – the kind that pulses with buried life, and that you can only mine deeply, at your own risk.

The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity (70 minutes). Directed, produced, and written by Brian Springer; distributed by the Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org.

[norton ash]

Thank you for this, SLAD. I want to see this film!

[seemslikeadream]

Thank you for this, SLAD. I want to see this film!

I saw it online a couple of years ago, it is really good, haunting, I'm gonna try and buy it.