Our planet is strewn with mysterious stone spheres. Who made them? When? Where? Scientists cannot accurately answer these questions
North of the Irkutsk region. Village Boguchanka. The garden of the bus driver Anatoly Korotkov. There has recently been a stone ball about 60 centimeters in diameter. It looks like it was made by hand.
- Where did you get it from? - I am interested.
- I brought it from the coal mine, - the owner of the artifact does not hide. - Once I was driving by and saw. There are many such balls in old mine workings. I took a couple …
Guarded mystery
Anatoly Petrovich gave one of the balls to the local history museum of the city of Ust-Ilimsk.
“I can't believe that nature could create an object of such a perfectly round shape,” says the director of the museum, Natalya MESHALKINA.
But people couldn't either. Sharov scooped up an excavator bucket along with coal. That is, they were in it. And coal is several tens of millions of years old. People did not seem to live then.
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However, enthusiasts from the local branch of "Kosmopoisk" - a public organization engaged in the study of anomalous phenomena - managed to get into the protected area. We were convinced: there are plenty of other balls. And do not count. Photographed them.
- There are balls of different sizes, - says the leader of the Ust-Ilimsk anomalies Denis ALEKHNOVICH. - From 45 centimeters to one meter in diameter. They do not emit radiation - checked with instruments. We took a photo. Transferred to scientists at Irkutsk University.
The material of the balls is porous. Similar to pumice stone or sandstone - it absorbs water well. But very hard. At least it didn't work out with a hacksaw.
- It's strange, - says Denis. - Many of the balls that we saw in the coal mine were split into perfectly even halves. And came across and completely cut into slices. Inside - nothing special. Although some kind of pulsation emanates from the whole balls.
They roll uphill
Boguchansky balls do not pretend to be the most mysterious. For over 60 years, scientists have been puzzling over their more famous and massive counterparts - stone balls from Costa Rica (Central America) and other regions of South America. In the forties of the last century, they were discovered by workers who cut down thickets for banana plantations. Here you come across a placer of small balls 10 centimeters in diameter, and giant "statues" of three meters, which weigh about 20 tons. The material is different - from volcanic rock to granite.
At the time of discovery, some of the balloons looked as if they had recently been brought to the site. Others were partially buried. Or barely sticking out of the ground. Several specimens were found at a depth of two meters. Nobody dug deeper. Nevertheless, the impression was created that the balls were crawling out of the depths.
Later, by the way, stone spheres were found in Mexican silver mines, similar to the Costa Rican ones, only even larger. And in Guatemala, balls were found that "crawled" into the mountains - to a height of more than 2 thousand meters.
Balls for "divine" football
The proximity of mysterious civilizations and their places of worship like the pyramids naturally gives rise to supernatural hypotheses. Up to the point that the balls were made by aliens either from space or from Atlantis. Or at least under their guidance. Indeed, on some, in fact, traces of processing are found. And inscriptions. And some of the balls from Costa Rica were originally laid out with some kind of ornaments - as if their drawings corresponded to the arrangement of the constellations. However, now the finds have been rearranged, taken to private farmsteads and museums. And it is already impossible to restore the previous picture. The famous anomalous researcher and great dreamer Erich von Daniken generally dubbed the balls "balls played by the gods." He hinted at football. Although they are more suitable for playing golf or croquet.
Joke of nature
Geologists are not very surprised at the balls. But put forward different hypotheses of their occurrence.
“Aliens have nothing to do with it, of course,” says Aleksey KOROLKOV, associate professor of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Irkutsk State University. - Most likely, these are the so-called glandular nodules. They are formed during the compaction of sediments in coal deposits. In their center, organic residues, mineral or bacterial accumulations are often found, which serve as a "seed" for its growth.
Some scientists emphasize that the nodule turns into a ball and grows evenly when substances are deposited in a rock that is equally permeable in all directions. And the ocean floor is called the ancestral home of the balls. Like, they formed around the remains of shells, animal bones, algae in soft sediments. And they were on land when the seabed rose.
But the properties of the surrounding rock are such that the formations become discs. Or even cylinders up to several tens of meters long. Both can be easily mistaken for hand-made products. Cylinders, for example, can be counted as columns - the remains of structures that are supposedly many million years old.
Someone sees the reason for the "ball formation" in the crystallization of volcanic magma. Someone - in the filling of voids with a foreign substance - bubbles (similar to holes in Swiss cheese). And the appearance on the surface is in elementary weathering.
There is a hypothesis that balls appear in the pits and folds of the stone bed of mountain rivers. They say that there the current makes the boulders rotate quickly and, over time, processes them to a round state.
Miracle of technology
Archaeologists argue with geologists. Not all balls. Some of them, perhaps, really somehow created nature. But it is unlikely that she can handle huge specimens. Especially from granite or other material with increased hardness, made with precision, available only to modern technology.
At one time, Samuel Lothrop, a staff archaeologist at the Museum of Archeology and Ethnography at Harvard University, was the first to carefully measure some balls from Costa Rica.
“Obviously,” he wrote in the report, “the big balls were of the highest quality. And they are so perfect that measuring the diameters with a tape (in five directions) and a plumb line showed no difference.
The archaeologist found only surface irregularities of about 2 millimeters.
Scientists found ancient household items next to the balls. But they themselves were located away from habitats and possible manufacturing. And who and why dragged multi-ton stone spheres into the distance? Sometimes to the mountains? Riddle.
By the way, in the chronicles of Costa Rica, which have been going on since 1512, there is not a single mention of stone balls. Even if they once had a cult significance much earlier, what kind of cult was it? It is also not clear. So for now, these balls remain a mystery to us.
BTW
Spinning, spinning
At the beginning of the 20th century, people noticed that a stone ball weighing 1890 kilograms, located on a marble tombstone in the cemetery of Marion (Ohio, USA), slowly rotates around a horizontal axis. But it doesn't roll.
BALL RIDE
Where else were stone spheres found
In 1969 in Germany, in the Eiffel, during the explosion of a quarry, a perfectly round ball with a diameter of five meters and weighing more than 100 tons rolled out of the slope.
In Kazakhstan, during the development of a sand pit, several large stone balls were dug from great depths.
Balls of unique beauty were found along the sides of the Bukobay girder in the Sol-Iletsk district of the Orenburg region.
Several dozen more of these stones were found in a ravine five kilometers west of Zhirnovsk in the Volgograd region. In 2002 - 2003, unfortunately, the most beautiful and expressive of them were destroyed by local oil bulldozers, who had stretched several pipelines.
Full of balls (up to 2 meters in diameter) on the arctic Champa island in Franz Josef Land. However, there are also very tiny ones.
In October 2007, at a depth of 10 - 25 meters at the bottom of the Black Sea near Gelendzhik, the Kosmopoisk expedition found balls with a diameter of 0.7 to 1 meter. The smallest was raised and examined on the shore. Geologists and historians have concluded that the ball was machined artificially, and on its surface one can see a "side" and an X-shaped cut. Why such balls were made, which are too large for the most gigantic powder cannons, and for the largest catapults, is unknown.
Authors: Vladimir LAGOVSKY, Svetlana GOLUB ("KP" - Irkutsk ")