Out-of-place artifact

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[[Category:Ancient aliens]]
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[[Category:Cryptozoology]]
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[[Category:Creationism]]

Revision as of 04:16, 25 February 2013

An Out-of-place artifact or OOPart is a name given by cryptozoologists, creationists and fringe scientists for historical and archeological artifacts they feel could not have been created by a particular culture due to a lack of knowledge or materials. [1]

Supporters such as Zecharia Sitchin claim OOPArts are evidence that vanished civilizations possessed knowledge or technology far more advanced than our own, alien beings undoubtedly visited the earth millions of years ago, and mainstream science is overlooking huge areas of knowledge. [2] Adjectives like "mysterious" and "unexplainable" and "anomalous" are used freely to describe stuff like:

  • The Iron pillar of Delhi - said to have been constructed in 912 BCE of a highly advanced iron that cannot rust (but wait, it has some rust near its base).
  • The Wolfsegg Iron - an iron cube found buried in a 20 million year old coal seam, said to be a perfect cube (but no, it's not even close to perfect).
  • The Klerksdorp spheres - disc shaped pyrite found in 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits, said to be perfect spheres (but no again...not perfect).

Creationists often argue that these "anomalies" show that mainstream scientific chronologies and models of human evolution are all wrong, and all this mysterious stuff is proof that Noah really built that Ark. The Antikythera mechanism, a 1st century BCE mechanical computing device found in an ancient Greek shipwreck, is often used by fringe science promoters to make an overgeneralized argument that stuffy old mainstream science should never dismiss fantastic claims, because, uh, the Antikythera mechanism.[3]

See also

Footnotes

  1. http://s8int.com/page5.html OOPARTS & ANCIENT HIGH TECHNOLOGY: Evidence of Noah's Flood?
  2. Neil Freer; Zecharia Sitchin (1 May 2000). Breaking the Godspell: The Politics of Our Evolution. Book Tree. pp. 27–. http://books.google.com/books?id=v58INOM07F4C&pg=PA27. Retrieved 24 February 2013. 
  3. At the time of the mechanism's discovery in 1902, most scholars though it was too complex to have been constructed during the same period as other pieces found in the wreck. But by the 1970s, our more advanced technology was able to help identify it as a genuine mechanism based on the theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by the ancient Greeks.
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