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OOPArts: Out Of Place Artefacts & Archaeological Erratics

harlequin2005

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Aug 3, 2001
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I wondered if anyone had any thoughts on whether of not the author Rene Noorbergen had an agenda when he wrote 'Secrets of the Lost Races'. If so what was it?

For those who've not read it:-

The structure of the book uses biblical legend (flood etc), Hindu (flying craft) , along with other world legends to argue a case for an ancient, global, pre-ice age civilisation that had some form of high techonolgy and were wiped out in some global cataclysm, leaving a few artifacts and legends amongst the dregs left (Sound familiar people?) The usual suspects are in there; the arabian battery, the greek astronomical computer, vitrified forts, buildings made of huge stones. Pretty well written and undeservedly (IMHO) neglected

I first read the book in about 1978, and it was, for a long time, the only book I saw arguing that man was a lot older than current orthodoxy thought, rather than us getting a leg up by the greys (or fish men from Sirius).

These days we have Cremo (Vedic), Hancock (left field and tending toward space gods even as I type) et al, yet I've not seen a reference to Noorbergen among them, nor any opinion ventured about his motives, be they creationist, fundamentalist, just plain odd or a lover of mysteries.

Over to you guys

H 8¬)
 
Secrets of the lost races was the first book of that 'genre' I ever read. I must say it kicks arse compared to flipping "Chariots of the gods" man (whose name I can't remember). I got the impression his ideas evolved and changed as the book went on, getting farther from the 'norm' as it went along. But he does a damn fine job at pointing out the amazing similarities between ancient flood lore. If I'd just read the other guy's work first I'd never of gotten interested at all in the "ancient civs" arguement. Plus that guy lied a lot... That's a baaaaad man...
X-COM
 
Erich Von Daniken - Myth maker to the gentry...

I agree about the Flood legends, its one of the best cosolidations of global flood mythology I've seen in that genre, since it included Indo- Chinese myth at some depth.

H8¬)
 
I remembered reading this book about 20 yrs ago, and hunted it out to see if I would still be as impressed now as I was then.
The answer is, unfortunately, no.
I haven't re-read all of it yet, but the 'this might be possible' to 'if that happened' to 'we have seen that this did happen' type of argument that I was suckered by in my youth now, quite frankly, annoys me.
Then there's the circular arguments: eg, the Bible says Noah used pitch to waterproof the Ark, but Creationist geologists say that the petrochemical deposits we nowadays use for pitch, engine oil, plastic, etc. were created by the flood, so could Noah have used pitch? Yes, of course, it says so in the Bible! So therefor pre-flood man had a thriving hydrocarbon industry, plastics, etc......

Noorbergen's 'agenda', I suspect, was to add to the published data regarding the ark, and thereby raise funds for another jaunt up Mount Ararat.
Or just raise funds ? ;)

(BTW, as is common with every inundationist I've read, he doesn't explain where all the water came from - or went)

However, although I don't find the book as impressive as 20 yrs ago, I'll still finish re-reading it - it is actually quite interesting, despite it's faults!
 
DerekH said:
However, although I don't find the book as impressive as 20 yrs ago, I'll still finish re-reading it - it is actually quite interesting, despite it's faults!

That's what we'll say about a brief history of time in 20 yrs time ;)
 
I confess, I've not read the book cover to cover these past 10 years, although I have dipped in for reference.

This thread has confirmed one thing, RN wasn't (overtly) creationist. Did he get to the funding for subsequent searches for the Ark of Noah. From memory, the 'sacred mount' wasn't Arrat. Alas I can't currently check this, the book being on loan at the moment, and Turkish mountains are not a strong point. Did RN ever follow up the book?

Can anyone remember any other works of the same vintage that espoused an more ancient date for technological civilisation, without invoking Space Gods?

H 8¬)
 
harlequin said:
From memory, the 'sacred mount' wasn't Arrat.

There's an interview with an 'old Armenian' called George Hagopian (about 5 pages worth) where Hagopian talks about the trips he made to the ark in 1902 and 1904 with his grandfather. In this, the 'holy mountain' is called both Ararat and Massis.
Elsewhere in the book, the name of the mountain (where given) depends on the local legend/language.
This means that the 'sacred mount' has several names!

P.S. How come none of the arks ever settled on top of Everest? I mean, world entirely covered with water, level eventually drops, what bit of terra firma appears first? :confused:
 
OOPArts

[Emp edit: threads merged to make on on OOPArts - Out Of Place Artefacts.]


odd world

In one of the other threads I read about a "booted footprint with a trilobite crushed into the heelprint", there was also mention of an English coin (old) found enclosed in limestone.

I have heard these stories before, and there are many more like it.
Anomalies that can't be explained.

Does anyone know of any other similar "impossibilities" or otherwise have an explanation for any of the above!

DK
 
Yeah I remember reading (in some old reader's digest tome!) about a finding in Texas (I think) of dinosaur and 'human' foot prints lying adjacent to each other in a river bed - unfortunately the tracks were lost in a flood back in the late '70's. If true it certainly raises a few questions!!
 
Falls of frogs and fish are always ones I'd class under the "seemingly impossible" catergory.

And there was, as I've mentioned in another thread somewhere, a seal that was found halfway up a mountain.
 
Seals up mountains

The seal found half way up the mountain was one of many found along with fish and other sea creatures, all of which were found in an area ( where exactly escapes me for the moment ) that was once under water but since had been pushed upwards in a geological shoft of some sort.

Moggadon
 
people are finding sea shells and crap on top of mountians around where i live. i explain in by the great flood in the bible
 
stephen.x said:
Yeah I remember reading (in some old reader's digest tome!) about a finding in Texas (I think) of dinosaur and 'human' foot prints lying adjacent to each other in a river bed - unfortunately the tracks were lost in a flood back in the late '70's. If true it certainly raises a few questions!!

I was shown a picture like this (dinosaur footprint beside 'human bootprint') in the 70's by a guy who believed that the Bible was absolute truth, and that this was evidence that man walked the earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.

When I asked him why he thought the tread pattern was very similar to the footprints that the Apollo astronauts left on the moon, and surely a 'civilisation' with moonboots would have left some sort of pictorial evidence of dinosaurs (along with the cave paintings of elk, bison, etc), he changed the subject. ;)
 
Michael Cremo in his Forbidden Archeology lists literally thousands of anomalies. Most are misinterpreted bones, but some, gold chains found in coal, iron pots found in rocks millions of years old make for some very interesting reading, if a little dry, it's a very academic book. He also appeared on Jeff Rense's radio program. You can find it in the archives, the format is Real Player.

I don't think it proves the Bible is correct, but it does give one food for thought. Ancient civilizations? Time travellers? Teleportation? Very interesting...

Michael.
 
Footprint

I've a copy of the book 'Ancient Traces' by Michael Baigent (Penguin Books 1999) which covers this, and other similar cases. The majority frustratingly vague (aren't they always?). According to Baigent, the footprint and trilobite were found in 1968 in Utah,
while the dinosaur and human prints were from the Paluxy river, Texas. Does anyone out there have any more up to date information on either of these two finds?

Keep on searching.

Sthedaw
 
The Dinosaur and human footprints I have heard of. apparently the reains were found, examined by the "usual" paleontologists, and no human footprints were discovered. Later, "scientists" from the Creationist Institute or similar visited and... discovered the footprint that no-one else noticed!

I was given a very interesting (and almost impartial) lecture on Creationist Science during a course on Evolution for my degree. The articles in F-T 148/149 about believers vs sceptics are very relevent to their frame of mind. Some of their scientists are very well qualified, which is a shame and a waste of good expertise (in my opinion of course).
 
At the risk of sound like I'm a narrator from a HP LoveCraft story...


I have been re-reading Baigent's 'Ancient Traces' and it occurs to me that there is minimal evidence of the tracks being human. Humanoid, yes but why human? If the genesis of species is quite rapid, then a human-type intelligent species may have evolved numerous times, from different root species, caused by the same stimulus that caused a chimp species to lose its hair and walk upright (Homo Sapiens, Homo Sapiens Neanderthalenis, Cro Magnon being an example of a parallel emergance, although there is minimal evidence that the latter species shared as much of the chimp genome as modern humans do) 350 million years is a hell of a long time to play with, it seems a little arrogant to assume, looking at the time scale that we are either the first or the best

Just a thought

H 8¬)
 
Re: Seals up mountains

Moggadon said:
The seal found half way up the mountain was one of many found along with fish and other sea creatures, all of which were found in an area ( where exactly escapes me for the moment ) that was once under water but since had been pushed upwards in a geological shoft of some sort.

Moggadon

Close to the top of Corney Fell on Cumbria's west coast, a short distance from the road, there lies the skeleton of a 4 ft long conger eel.

It didn't get there through Fortean means, however, nor through teleportation or by Thunderbird; in actual fact it was being transported in a car owned by a certain person who lives nearby when the car left the road and turned over on its roof. The unfortunate beast died at the scene, as you might expect, and has been there ever since. I've been expecting it to be found and reported in FT under the heading Cumbrian Death Worm Skeleton Discovered...

Just thought I'd mention it. The seal thing got me thinking.
 
OOPARTS

OOPARTS (Out of Place Artifacts) have always been of great interest to me. Here's a LINK to the Coso artifact. I used to have a very good link to a website that had tons of examples but unfortunately I can no longer find it. If anybody else has OOPART links let me know................
 
Here's one site , with the well-known Baghdad Batteries and other bits.

It also carries this snippet:

"...the Egypt Exploration Fund, was established in Britain in 1891, and on the very first page of its Memorandum and Articles of Association it is stated that the Fund's objective is to promote excavation work 'for the purpose of elucidating or illustrating the Old Testament narrative'." !!!

Some more sites of interest:
http://atlantisrising.com/issue5/ar5topten.html top ten ooparts (All over the web, this one!)

http://www.cawreckdivers.org/Preservation.htm preservation

http://www.catchpenny.org/light.html tomb lighting

http://homepages.msn.com/SpiritSt/s8int/phile12A.html Ooparts (creationist view)
 
Time Team

I don't know if Time Team is aired in the US, but there was an absolutely brilliant one last winter in the UK.

The team went to somewhere in Wales where some bloke had brought them in to do an archiological dig in his huge back garden. No local amateur archeologist would touch this place with a barge pole. Anyway, at the end of the first day they found a sword, from Switzerland!, and various other stuff. It appears that someone had been burying objects either as a hoax or to confuse the hell out of archeologists.

Just because it's in the ground, doesn't mean it's been there for hundreds of years.
 
I remember vaguely a few years back seeing a picture in FT of a giant metallic screw that got washed up on a beach somewhere in Wales. Shipping experts had said they had never seen anything like it and it hadn’t come from a boat / submarine this thing was massive. I think there was a man in the picture to give scale. Does anyone remember this?
 
Erk! Did anyone else notice the similarity between the last of the top ten OOPArts on that list (Millions of year old manufactured metals) and the Lovecraft story "The Colour Out Of Space"? Scary biscuits.

The question that I do find myself asking, time and again, is why no-one seems to investigate these things in greater depth- most of the descriptions seem to be either totally credulous, or skeptical to the point that they would never accept an unorthodox or orthodoxy-threatening approach to it. Where are the open minded yet reasonably skeptical archaeologists and researchers who are prepared to look at both sides of the coin, not to push a personal agenda but to find out what was going on?
 
Just wanted to state that 8. WHO SHOT NEANDERTHAL MAN? from the top-ten bears a scary resemblance to the age-old time travel scenario. Sounds like someone got a hold of his enemy's family tree then went WAY back to get the job done. Ok, either that or the poor Neanderthal actually invented the rifle, then accidently shot himself while cleaning it....
 
The whole "Ancient Robot" thing smells suspiciously of herring... After all we'rer not given any real photos only computer-graphic "re-creations".

I want better evidence than that thank you very much.

Niles "Trying to remove the Skeptic Hat" Calder
 
mike_legs said:
Just wanted to state that 8. WHO SHOT NEANDERTHAL MAN? from the top-ten bears a scary resemblance to the age-old time travel scenario. Sounds like someone got a hold of his enemy's family tree then went WAY back to get the job done. Ok, either that or the poor Neanderthal actually invented the rifle, then accidently shot himself while cleaning it....
Is it possible this could have been done with some kind of slingshot, after all they can be quite lethal at close range.:confused:
 
p.younger said:
Is it possible this could have been done with some kind of slingshot, after all they can be quite lethal at close range.:confused:

According to some quick research, a missile requires a velocity of about 200-250 kmph to penetrate a human skull. Since the skull is concave from the orientation of the entrance, and convex from the orientation of the exit, I'd guess it can be going slower than 200 kmph and still make a safe exit. Even so, I'd guesstimate the missile would have to be going somewhere around 350-450 kmph to get all the way though. I've read that crossbow bolts could rarely go straight though helmet AND skull on the way in and the way out. But I'd also guess that's still a bit faster than anything they supposedly had back when Mr. Neanderthal was about. Continuing my wild speculation, I'd say the thing would have to have been going even faster to make such a clean entrance as is claimed in the report. Anyway, sorry if I'm treading off thread. I was just intrigued by this one.
 
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