Sermon Tone Analysis

| *The 10 Most Puzzling Ancient Artifacts* |

*Over the last few hundred years, many perplexing artifacts have been unearthed that do not fit the currently excepted theories of geology and the history of man.*

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*T*he Bible tells us that God created Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago, by some fundamentalist interpretations.

Science informs us that this is mere fiction and that man is a few million years old, and that civilization just tens of thousands of years old.

Could it be, however, that conventional science is just as mistaken as the Bible stories?

There is a great deal of archeological evidence that the history of life on earth might be far different than what current geological and anthropological texts tell us.

Consider these astonishing finds:

*The Grooved Spheres \\ *Over the last few decades, miners in South Africa have been digging up mysterious metal spheres.

Origin unknown, these spheres measure approximately an inch or so in diameter, and some are etched with three parallel grooves running around the equator.

Two types of spheres have been found: one is composed of a solid bluish metal with flecks of white; the other is hollowed out and filled with a spongy white substance.

The kicker is that the rock in which they where found is Precambrian - and dated to 2.8 /billion/ years old!

Who made them and for what purpose is unknown.

*The Dropa Stones \\ *In 1938, an archeological expedition led by Dr. Chi Pu Tei into the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains of China made an astonishing discovery in some caves that had apparently been occupied by some ancient culture.

Buried in the dust of ages on the cave floor were hundreds of stone disks.

Measuring about nine inches in diameter, each had a circle cut into the center and was etched with a spiral groove, making it look for all the world like some ancient phonograph record some 10,000 to 12,000 years old.

The spiral groove, it turns out, is actually composed of tiny hieroglyphics that tell the incredible story of spaceships from some distant world that crash-landed in the mountains.

The ships were piloted by people who called themselves the Dropa, and the remains of whose descendents, possibly, were found in the cave.

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*The Ica Stones \\ *Beginning in the 1930s, the father of Dr. Javier Cabrera, Cultural Anthropologist for Ica, Peru, discovered many hundreds of ceremonial burial stones in the tombs of the ancient Incas.

Dr. Cabrera, carrying on his father's work, has collected more than 1,100 of these andesite stones, which are estimated to be between 500 and 1,500 years old and have become known collectively as the Ica Stones.

The stones bear etchings, many of which are sexually graphic (which was common to the culture), some picture idols and others depict such practices as open-heart surgery and brain transplants.

The most astonishing etchings, however, clearly represent dinosaurs - brontosaurs, triceratops (see photo), stegosaurus and pterosaurs.

While skeptics consider the Ica Stones a hoax, their authenticity has neither been proved or disproved.

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*The Antikythera Mechanism \\ *A perplexing artifact was recovered by sponge-divers from a shipwreck in 1900 off the coast of Antikythera, a small island that lies northwest of Crete.

The divers brought up from the wreck a great many marble and and bronze statues that had apparently been the ship's cargo.

Among the findings was a hunk of corroded bronze that contained some kind of mechanism composed of many gears and wheels.

Writing on the case indicated that it was made in 80 B.C., and many experts at first thought it was an astrolabe, an astronomer's tool.

An x-ray of the mechanism, however, revealed it to be far more complex, containing a sophisticated system of differential gears.

Gearing of this complexity was not known to exist until 1575!

It is still unknown who constructed this amazing instrument 2,000 years ago or how the technology was lost.

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*The Baghdad Battery \\ *Today batteries can be found in any grocery, drug, convenience and department store you come across.

Well, here's a battery that's 2,000 years old!

Known as the Baghdad Battery, this curiosity was found in the ruins of a Parthian village believed to date back to between 248 B.C. and 226 A.D. The device consists of a 5-1~/2-inch high clay vessel inside of which was a copper cylinder held in place by asphalt, and inside of that was an oxidized iron rod.

Experts who examined it concluded that the device needed only to be filled with an acid or alkaline liquid to produce an electric charge.

It is believed that this ancient battery might have been used for electroplating objects with gold.

If so, how was this technology lost... and the battery not rediscovered for another 1,800 years?

*The Coso Artifact \\ *While mineral hunting in the mountains of California near Olancha during the winter of 1961, Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell found a rock, among many others, that they thought was a geode - a good addition for their gem shop.

Upon cutting it open, however, Mikesell found an object inside that seemed to be made of white porcelain.

In the center was a shaft of shiny metal.

Experts estimated that, if this was a geode, it should have taken about 500,000 years for this fossil-encrusted nodule to form, yet the object inside was obviously of sophisticated human manufacture.

Further investigation revealed that the porcelain was surround by a hexagonal casing, and an x-ray revealed a tiny spring at one end, like a spark plug.

There's a bit of controversy around this artifact, as you can imagine.

Some contend that the artifact was not inside a geode at all, but encased in hardened clay.

The artifact itself has been identified by experts as a 1920s-era Champion spark plug.

Unfortunately, the Coso Artifact has gone missing and cannot be thoroughly examined.

Is there a natural explanation for it?

Or was it found, as the discoverer claimed, inside a geode?

If so, how could a 1920s sparkplug get inside a 500,000-year-old rock?

*Ancient Model Aircraft \\ *There are artifacts belonging to ancient Egyptian and Central American cultures that look amazingly like modern-day aircraft.

The Egyptian artifact, found in a tomb at Saqquara, Egypt in 1898, is a six-inch wooden object that strongly resembles a model airplane, with fuselage, wings and tail.

Experts believe the object is so aerodynamic that it is actually able to glide.

The small object discovered in Central America (shown at right), and estimated to be 1,000 years old, is made of gold and could easily be mistaken for a model of a delta-wing aircraft - or even the Space Shuttle.

It even features what looks like a pilot's seat.

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*Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica \\ *Workmen hacking and burning their way through the dense jungle of Costa Rica to clear an area for banana plantations in the 1930s stumbled upon some incredible objects: dozens of stone balls, many of which were perfectly spherical.

They varied in size from as small as a tennis ball to an astonishing 8 feet in diameter and weighing 16 tons!

Although the great stone balls are clearly man-made, it is unknown who made them, for what purpose and, most puzzling, how they achieved such spherical precision.

Debunking the "Mystery" of the Stone Balls

*The stone balls of Costa Rica have been the object of pseudoscientific speculations since the publication of Erich von Däniken's /Chariots of the Gods/ in 1971.

More recently, they have gained renewed attention as the result of books such as /Atlantis in America: Navigators of the Ancient World/, by Ivar Zapp and George Erikson (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1998), and /The Atlantis Blueprint: Unlocking the Ancient Mysteries of a Long-Lost Civilization/, by Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath (Delacorte Press, 2001).

These authors have been featured on television, radio, magazines, and web pages, where they do an incredible disservice to the public by misrepresenting themselves and the state of actual knowledge about these objects.*

*Although some of these authors are often represented as having "discovered" these objects, the fact is that they have been known to scientists since they first came to light during agricultural activities by the United Fruit Company in 1940.

Archaeological investigation of the stone balls began shortly thereafter, with the first scholarly publication about them appearing in 1943.

They are hardly a new discovery, nor are they especially mysterious.

In fact, archaeological excavations undertaken at sites with stone balls in the 1950s found them to be associated with pottery and other materials typical of the Pre-Columbian cultures of southern Costa Rica.

Whatever "mystery" exists has more to do with loss of information due to the destruction of the balls and their archaeological contexts than lost continents, ancient astronauts, or transoceanic voyages.*

*Hundreds of stone balls have been documented in Costa Rica, ranging in size from a few centimeters to over two meters in diameter.

Almost all of them are made of granodiorite, a hard, igneous stone.

These objects are not natural in origin, unlike the stone balls in Jalisco, Mexico that were described in a 1965 /National Geographic/ article.

Rather, they are monolithic sculptures made by human hands.

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*The balls have been endangered since the moment of their discovery.

Many have been destroyed, dynamited by treasure hunters or cracked and broken by agricultural activities.

At the time of a major study undertaken in the 1950s, fifty balls were recorded as being /in situ/.

Today, only a handful are known to be in their original locations.*

Stone Ball Photo Gallery

*All Images Copyright ©2001 John W. Hoopes.**

All rights reserved.*

*Stone Ball in Plaza at Palmar Sur, Costa Rica*

*Stone Ball /in situ/ Under Cacao Trees*

*Author with Largest Known Ball*

*Archaeologist Ifigenia Quintanilla with Stone Ball /in situ/*

*Ball in Ravine Near Golfito, Costa Rica*

*Ball in Plaza, Palmar Sur, Costa Rica*

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Frequently Asked Questions

*/Where are the balls found?/*

*They were originally found in the delta of the Térraba River, also known as the Sierpe, Diquís, and General River, near the towns of Palmar Sur and Palmar Norte.

Balls are known from as far north as the Estrella Valley and as far south as the mouth of the Coto Colorado River.

They have been found near Golfito and on the Isla del Caño.

Since the time of their discovery in the 1940s, these objects have been prized as lawn ornaments.

They were transported, primarily by rail, all over Costa Rica.

They are now found throughout the country.

There are two balls on display to the public in the U.S.  One is in the museum of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.

The other is in a courtyard near the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.*

*/How big are they?/*

*The balls range in size from only a few centimeters to over two meters in diameter.

It has been estimated that the largest ones weigh over 16 tons (ca.

15,000 kg).*

*/What are they made of?/*