In the past few centuries gold artifacts have reportedly been found in coal mines.
Gold artifacts have reportedly been found in coal mines. The artifacts, called out-of-place artifacts (OOPArts), are items such as gold that can be dated to a certain era but are found in formations that scientists claim are millions of years old. There are people who disbelieve that the report of the find is accurate, and those who look for answers as to how such a thing could have occurred.
Gold
One of the most written about incidences of gold being found in coal is one dating back to June 1891 reported in the Morrisonville Times. The Times in Illinois reports that a local woman, Mrs. S. W. Culp, was breaking a lump of coal to place in the scuttle and found within it "a small gold chain about ten inches in length of antique and quaint workmanship." The coal the gold chain was said to be embedded in was taken from either the Taylorville or Pana mines in southern Illinois.
Other Items
Items other than gold have also been mysteriously "placed," according to reports. Man-made items found in coal are problematic because their existence in the place where they are found is anachronistic. In 1944, a boy in Upshur County West Virginia dropped a lump of coal that had been taken from a coal deposit estimated to be 300 million years old and found a brass bell inside. The bell was dated back to the antediluvian period. The University of Oklahoma laboratory found that the bell contained a mix of metals unknown in modern alloy production.
Other Strata
Strange, unexplainable finds have been made in items other than coal. Many reported OOPArts have been found in rocks, fossils and other geologic formations that are dated back to a period before humans are thought to have existed. A fossilized hammer, which was verified as authentic, was found in cretaceous rock in Texas. Dozens of incidences of people finding manmade tools such as drills or nails in the 18th through 20th centuries are reported in magazines and science journals such as The American Journal of Science and Arts.
Possible Explanations
Despite the difficulty of explaining the phenomenon, there are some who have made the attempt. In his article "Out-of-Place Artifacts or Out-of-Whack Chronology," Philip Rife suggests that sometime before our present recorded history, perhaps another civilization advanced and was then obliterated. In his article "How Solid Matter Can Pass through Rock," Ted Twietmeyer promotes a theory about temporary altered states of objects, and "A Critical Presentation," Tim McGuinness contends that the finds are fantasy or fraud.
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