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When The Soil Takes Wing (Odd Soil Chunk Movements; Jordkast)

Xanatic*

Xanatic*

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I'm in a really good place right now.
I just read of a phenomena today that I don't recall having encountered before.
It is cases where people have found a section of soil has suddenly moved by it's own accord.
Imagine a giant picking up a flat piece of soil, and depositing it some meters away. It seems to have happened a few times of it's own accord, including pieces of soil weighing several tonnes.
It isn't described as having looking torn, instead the sides are very neat and flat and it seems to have been placed gently.
Not what you would expect from, for example, an underground explosion.
Anyone heard of this or know what it is referred as to in the literature?
 
Where did you read it?

As an archaeologist working with soil strata this is fascinating!!!!!!
 
Yes ... I've seen a few accounts of mysteriously moved chunks or patches of sod or turf. These have been scattered tidbits, usually peripheral to some other story or topic.

I ran across one such mention within the last month (on a dive down the recursive rabbit holes of the forum archives), but I can't locate it now. In that particular case, the scene was a graveyard, and the moved patch of soil / grass had originally covered an old grave.

I don't know of a particular name or label for this sort of thing.
 
humanoidlord said:
i remenber this stuff happening in hessdallen ...
Click to expand...

In this Reddit thread:

******* reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/8inola/the_persistent_mystery_of_the_hessdalen_lights/

... there's a post describing a documentary on the Hessdalen lights. It includes the following passage:

Also worth noting in the documentary where a large heavy area of turf was inexplicably cut with precision then lifted and placed nearby with no visible vehicle tracks in a remote area near Hessdalen, which would have required heavy lifting machinery to achieve, and this has also occurred before in the same vicinity with the earth being cut in the same precise shape.
Click to expand...

The documentary cited is accessible at: https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/portal-hessdalen-lights-phenomenon/
 
Would this perhaps be to facilitate theft of the bulbs of rare wild plants?

“Snowdrops, orchids and bluebells are being stolen to order in a worrying upsurge in thefts of Britain's favourite wild flowers, senior police officers and botanists have warned.

Criminal gangs and unscrupulous people in the garden trade are hiring thieves to dig up tons of wild flower bulbs and tear up acres of delicate mosses for a thriving black market in garden plants.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/envir...aling-wild-flower-bulbs-to-order-5352713.html

maximus otter
 
This isn't simple digging. This is whole square meters of soil being lifted away, sometimes with trees still on. Which can't be easy to do without it collapsing under it's own weight.
 
Xanatic* said:
I just read of a phenomena today that I don't recall having encountered before.
It is cases where people have found a section of soil has suddenly moved by it's own accord.
Imagine a giant picking up a flat piece of soil, and depositing it some meters away. It seems to have happened a few times of it's own accord, including pieces of soil weighing several tonnes.
It isn't described as having looking torn, instead the sides are very neat and flat and it seems to have been placed gently.
Not what you would expect from, for example, an underground explosion.
Anyone heard of this or know what it is referred as to in the literature?
Click to expand...
I couldn't comment on very large areas of neatly cut soil being moved but I can on smaller ones. I used to go to illegal raves in fields in the early 90's .. as well as the travellers taking copious amounts of drugs, they would also cut squares out of turf, lift those out then either use the holes as a toilet or instead as a fire hole to cook, afterwards putting the neatly cut turf back into the same hole they'd cut it from for nice environmental reasons.
 
In areas where 'imported' sod / turf have been laid down (e.g., lawns in suburbia) it's not uncommon for raccoons to pull up and peel away sections of such turf 'carpeting' to get at grubs underneath.

Photos of such peeled-back or rolled-back turf aren't hard to find. However, I couldn't find one in which the turf patch was completely moved away from its originally installed location.
 
In FT390, a case from 1984 is mentioned:
Details here

In a Washington field, a farmer discovered somehow a large piece of earth had been cut from the ground, apparently mechanically, and dropped a distance away, at a different angle. The block of earth had smooth sides, as if moved by machinery, but there was no machinery in the area to carry this out, and besides, why do it in the first place? There were mentions of strange lights in the sky, for a UFO connection, but nothing came of them. It remains a mystery, unless anyone here has an explanation.

The FT bit has a diagram on the same page. Sadly, I can't find a photo of the divot.
 
The 2015 article you cited provides a link to a 1989 local newspaper article about the incident and attempts to explain it during the 4 following years. Here's the article:

Timm-Divot-B.jpg
 
I find it strange that it's so hard to locate any photos of something that was widely mentioned and remained in place for a long time. Anyway ...

I finally located a reprinted newspaper article that included photos of the scene.

The article apparently appeared in the Wenatchee (Washington) World on 12 February 1989.

The version I found was apparently scanned and inserted into the April 1989 U.F.O. Newsclipping Service issue #237:

http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magaz...O Newsclipping Service - 1989 04 - no 237.pdf

The article appears to have been scanned, so the image quality isn't very good.

Here are the photos with their captions. These are screen captures that I've tweaked in an attempt to make them more "legible."

Timm-Divot-2-A.jpg


Timm-Divot-2-B.jpg
 
Much was made of the "clean" edges on the chunk of soil. I can't tell from these grainy photos how smooth the cut surfaces may be.

The article from which these photos were excerpted stated the hole was pear-shaped.
 
Brilliant, thanks! The diagram in FT390 shows a pear-shaped divot as well. The earthquake solution sounds farfetched, but I wonder if a force from below could be the explanation? Some kind of spontaneous waterspout, perhaps? Or would that have just made the dirt spray everywhere?

I think there's a man alongside the divot in the top photo for scale, it looks pretty substantial, but it's a little difficult to tell.
 
Xanatic* said:
That phenomena is known as "jordkast" around here.
I started a thread on it, which didn't really go anywhere.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that! I'm glad to learn I wasn't crazy when I thought I recalled this sort of thing being mentioned before, but couldn't locate it.

The "Wenatchee Divot" story makes a good follow-on extension to that earlier thread, so I've now combined them.
 
Some better imagery of the Washington / Wenatchee divot can be found in this YouTube video.

 
The March / April 1989 issue of William Corliss's Science Frontiers website includes a brief item concerning 4 such jordkast incidents in Norway:
The cookie cutter strikes again -- four times - in norway

Yes, the cookie-cutter phenomenon has left its mark again: more mysterious divots and holes in the ground. T. Jo nassen has sent us a study of the phenomenon published in Ottar, a publication of the Tromse Museum, in Norway. Even better, he has provided a translation, from which we quote a few paragraphs:


p062-09.gif

The divot from an Andøva moor
Click to expand...

FULL STORY: https://www.science-frontiers.com/sf062/sf062g09.htm
 

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The diagram below illustrates the details of the Wenatchee divot scene. I cannot locate the original source for this illustration, assuming it was somewhere / sometime earlier than its 2010 posting on a Russian paranormal forum.

NOTE: The Greg Behrens cited as the data source is / was a geologist associated with the Grand Coulee Dam who inspected the mystery divot site back in the 1980s.

WenatcheeDivotillo.jpg
 
Xanatic* said:
It translates as soil throw. Tis not a poetic language.
Click to expand...

I just knew this was going to be something Swedish with the word 'Jordkast' in the thread title :) And I knew what the word meant before I read your translation. I'm getting the hang of this wonderful language, definitely :joyf:

And it is a very interesting phenomenon.
 
When do tree spades date from? I doubt they'd be around in a Washington wheat field in 1984 without the farmer noticing.
 
Tree spades are attached to big vehicles. The Timm farm divot / jordkast scene shows no signs of such a heavy vehicle being involved, and neither do the photos of other jordkast scenes.

In any case, a tree spade is designed to dig a deep tapering hole so as to grasp a tree's root ball. None of the jordkast incidents I've reviewed involve a deep or a tapering hole.
 
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