M.J. Rose

DEJA NEWS – Vintage News

The following item appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on

February 16, 1947 (and was repeated by Ivan T. Sanderson in the

January 1970 issue of his magazine, Pursuit):

When the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico, the desert

sand turned to fused green glass. This fact, according to the

magazine Free World, has given certain archaeologists a turn.

They have been digging in the ancient Euphrates Valley and have

uncovered a layer of agrarian culture 8,000 years old, and a layer

of herdsman culture much older, and a still older caveman culture.

Recently, they reached another layer of fused green glass.

It is well known that atomic detonations on or above a sandy desert will melt the silicon in the sand and turn the surface of the Earth into a sheet of glass. But if sheets of ancient desert glass can be found in various parts of the world, does it mean that atomic wars were fought in the ancient past or, at the very least, that atomic testing occurred in the dim ages of history?

This is a startling theory, but one that is not lacking in evidence, as such ancient sheets of desert glass are a geological fact. Lightning strikes can sometimes fuse sand, meteorologists contend, but this is always in a distinctive root-like pattern. These strange geological oddities are called fulgurites and manifest as branched tubular forms rather than as flat sheets of fused sand. Therefore, lightning is largely ruled out as the cause of such finds by geologists, who prefer to hold onto the theory of a meteor or comet strike as the cause. The problem with this theory is that there is usually no crater associated with these anomalous sheets of glass.

Brad Steiger and Ron Calais report in their book, Mysteries of Time and Space, that Albion W. Hart, one of the first engineers to graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was assigned an engineering project in the interior of Africa. While he and his men were travelling to an almost inaccessible region, they first had to cross a great expanse of desert.

“At the time he was puzzled and quite unable to explain a large expanse of greenish glass which covered the sands as far as he could see,” writes Margarethe Casson in an article on Hart’s life in the magazine Rocks and Minerals (no. 396, 1972). She then goes on to mention: “Later on, during his life he passed by the White Sands area after the first atomic explosion there, and he recognized the same type of silica fusion which he had seen fifty years earlier in the African desert.”

The Antikythera device has been an incredible mystery that has boggled people for a very long time –

Now, the next question is, what other advanced technologies existed hundreds or thousands of years before they were supposed to according to traditional history? My personal theory is that advanced human civilization has existed a lot longer than anyone supposes.

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved

Ian Sample, science correspondent

The Guardian

A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck

has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of

how the sophisticated device works.

The machine was lost among cargo in 65BC when the ship carrying it

sank in 42m of water off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera.

By chance, in 1900, a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered

the wreck and recovered statues and other artifacts from the site.

The machine first came to light when an archaeologist working on the

recovered objects noticed that a lump of rock had a gear wheel

embedded in it. Closer inspection of material brought up from the

stricken ship subsequently revealed 80 pieces of gear wheels, dials,

clock-like hands and a wooden and bronze casing bearing ancient Greek

inscriptions.

Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the

device, which is now known to be an astronomical calendar capable of

tracking with remarkable precision the position of the sun, several

heavenly bodies and the phases of the moon. Experts believe it to be

the earliest-known device to use gear wheels and by far the most

sophisticated object to be found from the ancient and medieval

periods.

Using modern computer x-ray tomography and high resolution surface

scanning, a team led by Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth at Cardiff

University peered inside fragments of the crust-encased mechanism and

read the faintest inscriptions that once covered the outer casing of

the machine. Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests it dates back

to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the

movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses

and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon. The motion, known

as the first lunar anomaly, was developed by the astronomer Hipparcus

of Rhodes in the 2nd century BC, and he may have been consulted in the

machine’s construction, the scientists speculate.

Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which

was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century…

For the rest, click here.

UFO sitings, as they happen.