Story 3: The Ancient Disc
Ancient anomalies, sometimes called "ooparts," have been tantalizing mysteries for hundreds of years. These are objects or artifacts dug up from the ground that, by current scientific understanding, could not possibly exist in the rock strata in which they were found: a gold chain encased in a chunk of coal; a nail in layers of ancient rock that dates back 1 million years; a spark plug-like object inside a geode dated to 500,000 years ago.
One such object was discovered in a coal mine in the Ruhr region of Germany in 1977. It remains one of the most puzzling and controversial artifacts ever found.
Workers for The Deutsche Steinkohle AG (DSK) mining company noticed the object as it was being dumped out of a truck with a full load of coal. The eye of one of the workers was caught by a shiny, silver object amid the black coal. Finding it, he saw what appeared to be a disc-shaped piece of metal about three-quarters encased in a chunk of the coal. Breaking the coal away, he and other workers saw that it was a disc of some silver-colored metal roughly the size of a hockey puck. On one side of the disk was etched or engraved some enigmatic symbols.
The mining company turned the disc over to the local authorities who in turn presented it to a university in Hamburg for analysis. The scientists there had a hard time believing that the disc was found inside a block of coal because it was obviously manmade, and the coal deposits were formed long before human civilization.
Tests concluded that the metal was a magnesium-silver alloy (with other trace metals), but the strange inscription on it wasn't deciphered until it was sent to linguistic experts in Bonn. As best they could tell, the symbols were similar to Sumerian cuneiform... and one expert translated them as expressing a single word: "market" or "marketplace."
Scientists dispute the age of the disc, of course, but it today resides on display at the mining company's corporate headquarters in Herne.
Next page > Story Four: The Ouija Message
