User:HelenCampbell/sandbox

(I'm trying to construct a more fleshed-out article on alleged out-of-place artifacts than the one we have, while including most of what's already there.)

Out-of-place artifact, sometimes abbreviated to OOPArt, is a pseudoscientific term for an object, structure or other find that appears to be impossible for its historical, geological, geographical or technological context. In an oft-mined quote from The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins gives a hypothetical example of a game-changing "out-of-place artifact" and its potential impact:

If a single, well verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million year old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed.

Because of this potential impact, out-of-place artifacts are a popular reference point for woo theories that cannot be taken seriously by science or academia as things stand. A genuinely out-of-place artifact with unquestionable provenance would be the ultimate short-cut to scientific validation for cryptozoologists, pseudoarcheologists, creationists and proponents of ancient astronaut or lost advanced civilisation theories. This has led to pretty much anything that looks a bit odd for the context in which it was discovered being heralded by fringe groups as just such a smoking gun, often in spite of being little more than urban myth, and to frauds and hoaxes such as Piltdown Man.

Firsthand sources can be difficult to find when reading about out-of-place artifacts and the claims associated with them. Erich von Däniken contributed his share in Chariots of the Gods and later books, claiming out-of-place status for artworks and architecture that support his ancient astronauts claims. In a sense, von Däniken creates many of his own OOPArts by first explaining that the cultures of prehistory were incapable of such achievements as the Nazca lines or the pyramids of Egypt. As Carl Sagan noted, von Däniken's 'principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies'. Nevertheless, some of the claims he made for the out-of-placeness of artifacts have taken on a life of their own. The iron pillar of Delhi is offered in Chariots of the Gods as evidence of extraterrestrial knowledge on the basis that it never rusts. It does in fact quite visibly rust, although it possesses impressive rust resistance. The pillar stands in a public location where anyone can go and check the claim, and von Däniken himself admitted the mistake in an interview, yet the 'rustless' claim remains in circulation and is often presented as fact in discussions of out-of-place artifacts.

Such misinformation tends to be repeated without basic fact-checking. The South African Klerksdorp spheres are reputed to be impossible to cut, metal, manufactured, perfectly balanced and perfectly spherical, and able to move about on their own. None of that is true and the only point of contact with reality is that some of the more photogenic finds are approximately spherical. The megalithic Diquis spheres of Costa Rica are also claimed to be perfectly spherical when they are not. The Wolfsegg Iron is alleged to be a perfect cube when it could really be generously described as a very rough cuboid.

The Wolfsegg Iron, also known as the Salzburg Cube after the museum where it was initially housed, is one of a number of artifacts which do appear to be genuinely 'out-of-place' and is one of the more visually striking examples. The thing just looks weird. The story of its discovery runs that a foundry worker was breaking up coal (Tertiary lignite) from the Wolfsegg, Austria seam when he discovered the iron object embedded within it. The find attracted some scientific attention, with mentions in the journals Nature in 1886 and L'Astronomie in 1888. It was assumed to be a fossil meteorite, but later laboratory analysis failed to find evidence to support the theory. It has been suggested that the find is the debris of iron working, perhaps deposited as ballast during the mining operation.

Objects described as being found inside lumps of coal are not uncommon. Almost always purely anecdotal, with at most a photograph of the recovered object surviving, the stories tell of gold chains, a screw and even living frogs being discovered embedded in coal. Without witnesses or strong documentary evidence of such a thing actually being removed from a seam or from within a piece of coal, the value of these stories as out-of-place artifacts is minimal. Nevertheless, the more unscrupulous creationists latch onto these as 'proof' that the mainstream understanding of geology is flawed. If an apparently modern object is found inside coal, they argue, how can the coal be 50 million years old? The answer, of course, is that the object was probably not deposited with the geology but got there later somehow, and that if a modern object were ever to be discovered sealed deep within the geology of the planet, its presence would challenge the creationist viewpoint as much as the scientific one.

(Coso artifact)

The Dorchester Pot is a Victorian decorative curio, supposedly blasted out of solid rock in 1852, which bears a striking resemblance to an ornate Indian pipe holder. One web site contains the statement that it is a pre-Flood artifact and possibly the work of Biblical artificer Tubal-cain, while others repeat the more generalised claim that the item itself has mysterious or ancient origins. Side by side comparison of the photograph with similar pipe holders show it to be an object contemporary with the rock-blasting and, notably, no-one ever claimed to have seen the thing emerge from inside the rock. It was found in the blast debris and presumed to have come from within the rock.