Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Evidently the "groovy spheres" are indeed a naturally occurring phenomenon -- and not a terribly uncommon one at that, if my source isn't having me on. The "grooves" are apparently due to pyrite's crystalline structure.*

So my Hoagland-esque Iapetus link appears to have gone up in smoke . . . although I'm still awaiting an explanation for the strange "spongy" substance reportedly found inside at least some of the spheroids.

*A small voice insists that mineralogists faced with such evident weirdness would be forced invent a prosaic explanation, in which case there's a slim case the spheroids are more than geological curiosities. The "mainstream" can be wrong; Occam's Razor isn't always the final word.

Accuse me of "wanting to believe" if you like; I suppose I'm just inherently skeptical -- and that includes harboring a level of healthy skepticism toward the skeptics.
Posted by Mac at 10:59 PM

8 comments:

The Andy-Christ said...

I haven't seen photos or heard any better description of the "spongy" material in some of the spheres, but my son found what looked like a geode a few months ago. Oddly, it also was marked by an "equitorial wall" around its midsection. We decided to crack it open and found it was filled with what looked like tightly packed sandy clay, red around the edges where water had caused the iron-containing shell to stain the sand with rust. This startled me, as I assumed all geodes contain crytals of some form. A little research showed that some geodes do indeed contain sandy clay. I wonder if the "spongy material" might actually be some form of clay or other natural mineral deposit.

7:44 AM
W.M. Bear said...

"At least 200 have been found, and extracted out of deep rock at the Wonderstone Silver Mine in South Africa, averaging 1-4 inches in dia. and composed of a nickel-steel alloy that doesn't occur naturally."

What about that nickel-steel alloy that doesn't occur naturally? Yeah, what about that?

9:29 AM
Mac said...

"What about that nickel-steel alloy that doesn't occur naturally? Yeah, what about that?"

The nickel-steel composition cited might be in error; if not, maybe it *can* be produced naturally and the person who wrote the article didn't know any better.

That said, it doesn't appear compatible with naturally occurring pyrite nodules.

11:32 AM
infotheorem said...

could a naturally occuring process like this be scaled up to something the size of Iapetus as part of a larger planet?

12:56 PM
Anonymous said...

Anyone who has seen Sir Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's film, or read Sir Arthur's novel, "2001: A Space Odyssey" will remember that in the opening sequence, titled "The Dawn of Man", early ape men in AFRICA encounter an alien artifact which endows them for the first time with truly human intelligence, and this in turn eventually leads Modern Man, via another artifact found on the Moon, to the ultimate star gate artifact, which is orbiting Saturn in the film and located on the surface of Saturn's moon Iapetus in the novel. In the film, the artifacts (which are, of course, intended to be manifestations of Von Neumann probes) are depicted as being large black oblong monoliths, but this "design" was arrived at for mainly technical cinematographical reasons after many others, including an octahedron (thank God it wasn't a tetrahedron or Hoagland's stock really would be going through the roof) favoured by Kubrick, were tried. I don't know if any of them were balls or spheres, but one thing that has struck me is the similarity between the appearance of Iapetus itself (which doesn't actually figure at all in the film, because Kubrick thought it too difficult to create realitically with the special effects of the time) and that of the spherical "head" of the spacecraft, the USSS Discovery, which takes the astronauts to the Saturnian artifact/star gate. (Unfortunately, I can't post a picture to prove the point.)

I doubt (to a literally astronomical degree, in fact) if this marked ball found in Africa is THE (or even AN) alien artifact - although, as a true sceptic, I can never totally dismiss any hypothesis - but it does seem to me that there just might be some kind of wierd, possibly meaningful, synchronicity going on in all of this.

11:21 PM
Mac said...

You're right -- the Discovery craft in "2001" has a "grooved sphere" thing going on ... neat.

Actually, the original design for the Monolith was a black tetrahedron (!), as described in "The Lost Worlds of '2001.'" They ditched the idea because they thought it might become associated with the Pyramids of Egypt and "pyramidology."

And yes, Hoagland loves to mention this ;-)

11:42 PM
Anonymous said...

I wrote my last comment above before following up your previous post on this topic. Having seen the other examples of these balls and what was written about them, I am now less dismissive of the possibility of them being of alien (or at least non-natural) origin. The trouble is how do you know that anything you read on the Internet is true? A ball that keeps spinning on its own? That is perpetual motion is it not? Wouldn't you think that scientists would be beating a path to the museum's door to examine it (and the "Amazing" Randi to debunk it)?

1:16 AM
W.M. Bear said...

Anyone who has seen Sir Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's film, or read Sir Arthur's novel, "2001: A Space Odyssey" will remember that in the opening sequence, titled "The Dawn of Man", early ape men in AFRICA encounter an alien artifact which endows them for the first time with truly human intelligence, and this in turn eventually leads Modern Man, via another artifact found on the Moon, to the ultimate star gate artifact, which is orbiting Saturn in the film and located on the surface of Saturn's moon Iapetus in the novel.

The ape-man (australopithecus kubrickclarkeiensis?) whacking the crap out of something with a bone is "being endowed with truly human intelligence"? (Well, considering the war in Iraq, maybe! 8-)

Minor correction, though: the Stargate is orbiting Jupiter in the film, not Saturn, an interesting switch of planets to my mind. Interesting too that Clarke really nailed Iapetus in the book long before the closeups. Hoagland's right. The guy is just too freaking prophetic!

2:16 PM