2023-06-03 16:07:00
By the second half of the 20th century, reports of mysterious findings began to emerge in the mines near the town of Ottosdal, in south africa. The artifacts found were some spheres, polished and with perfectly carved lineswhich were very similar to a cricket ball.
To the naked eye, it seemed that these objects, no more than 10 centimeters in diameter, they had been carved by a human hand and were part of the archaeological heritage of an ancient civilization.
However, what is surprising is that the balls had been discovered inside a pyrophyllite rock formed about 2.8 billion years ago. That is, when the Earth was still very young to host intelligent life.
The spheres were taken to the town of Klerksdorp, in the north of South Africa, to be studied and later put on display in the main museum of the city. For this reason, they became known as Klerksdorp spheres.
However, in the early 1980s, articles began to circulate in popular pseudoscience journals that They assigned the stones an alien origin and pointed out that they were “proof of the extraterrestrial presence” on Earth before the appearance of humans.
One of those articles was signed by a researcher named Michael Cremo and was published on a news portal. “These publications appeared due to the lack of geological studies that would explain the true origin of those stones”, he tells BBC Mundo South African geologist Bruce Caircorne, from the University of Johannesburg.
Cairncross points out that the spheres are far from being a mystery, much less a possible vestige of the passage of extraterrestrial beings on our planet.
“It was believed that there was no need to explain something that seemed obvious: that the stones had been extracted from rocks that were formed billions of years ago,” said the geologist. “Although it can be understood that they attract attention, these types of spheres are very common within pyrophyllite formations.” But how did they get that shape?
As pointed out by the portal IFLScienceduring the 80s various articles, with little scientific basis, began to point out that the Klerksdorp spheres had been made by “a superior civilizationa civilization prior to the great flood of which we know practically nothing.
As noted in other reports, such as the magazine Lapidary Magazinesome media went further and added that the spheres rotated by themselves inside the display case where they had been placed.
For this reason, a society known as the Society for the Rational Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena sought the collaboration of Cairncross to refute the arguments that were gaining more and more followers.
“The basic explanation was not enough: that they had emerged from a formation of more than 2.8 billion years, but we had to go deeper and explain how they had formed”, points out the academic. For that, he explained that the stones were found in a formation known as the “dominant group.”
“The main characteristic is what forms this conglomerate, with several layers of volcanic lava that were deposited on top and, after a lot of pressure and heat, turned into pyrophyllite, which is what covers the spheres,” he said.
The geologist himself indicates that the peculiarity of the stones is due to the fact that they have remained millions of years under the pressure and heat that are formed within a larger rock that somehow “houses” them, and have been exposed to water erosion.
“Spheres are known as concretions: spherical, elliptical, or oblate objects composed of different minerals that are in the host rock. And they are quite common, thousands having been found all over the world”, notes the geologist.
These concretions, adds the expert, They are found in fine-grained rocks, such as the pyrophyllite that abounds in that region of South Africa..
Cairncross said that one of the reasons he decided to give a broader explanation of what was happening with the spheres was because the pseudoscientific publications were being very credible.
The geologist refers to a magazine that indicated that the spheres had been taken to the United States Space Agency (NASA, for its acronym in English) and cited a report indicating that they had been made in “a place with zero gravity”.
But the expert accepts that the Klerksdorp spheres have a particularity that may not be seen in all similar spheres that have been found in the world: the parallel lines that cross them, those that give it a cricket ball appearance.
“Actually they are not lines, but layers”, says the geologist. “That’s a product of the tracks left by the host rock, which have built up in layers over a long, long time, creating the effect that you can see now,” he says.
*By Alejandro Millán Valencia
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