OOPAs are Out-Of-Place Artifacts—objects found in places where they really don’t belong. Scientists can’t explain how they got there. Researchers are puzzled. Some people think OOPAs are indications that Earth has been home to some very advanced civilizations—more advanced than we are. What do you think?
1. ELECTRON TUBES IN EGYPT
In chamber 17 of the Temple of Hathor in Egypt there is a wall of engravings that look like bundles of electrical wires. According to Alfred D. Bielek, an engineer, these ancient engravings look exactly like modern engineering illustrations. In other crypts, the engravings show the electron tubes with people sitting underneath them. Were ancient people zapped with a kind of electrical radiation treatment? As far as we know, there was no electricity in ancient Egypt, so how could that be?
2. PILLAR OF IRON IN INDIA
In Delhi, India, there is a solid iron pillar that is 1,600 years old. It is over 23 feet high and weighs nearly six tons. In India, where the monsoon rains, winds, and temperatures are so extreme, any other mass of iron like this would have been reduced to rust long ago. Yet this pillar is still smooth and polished. The techniques used to make the pillar are far beyond the abilities of the people of the fifth century, when it was supposedly built. Who were the ancient metallurgists who made this pillar? What happened to their civilization?
Q: Who has more bones, a cat or a human?
Dr. Messiha was in the Cairo Museum of Egypt looking at bird figurines, when he found a small winged object in a box marked “Miscellaneous Items.” Dr. Messiha quickly realized that this little artifact—which came from an ancient Egyptian tomb—was actually a model airplane. Of course, we all know that the ancient Egyptians didn’t have airplanes, but this model had perfectly straight wings and a tail like a modern plane. Ancient Egyptians often built small models of things from their daily lives and placed them in their tombs. Could that mean that somewhere, buried deep beneath the desert sands, there are the remains of a life-size aircraft?
JET IN SOUTH AMERICA
Imagine finding a model of a high-speed aircraft over 1,000 years old. This is exactly what happened to Dr. Ivan Sanderson, in Colombia, South America. He discovered a two-inch-long “plane,” probably worn on a necklace. But it looks like the Stealth bomber. It even has an insignia on the left side of the rudder, precisely where modern airliners place their ID marks. And the insignia is early Hebrew for the letter B. Did ancient jets fly to Colombia from the Middle East?
A: A cat. Cats have 244—38 more than humans.
Off a small island in Greece, at the bottom of the ocean, sponge divers discovered the remains of an ancient ship. The artifacts found an the ship were dated between 85 and 50 B.C. Among them was one object of great mystery: Inside a lump of corroded bronze and rotted wood were the outlines of a series of gears like you’d find in a clock. When a scientist reconstructed the machine, he discovered that it was used to calculate the annual movements of the sun and the moon. The device could show the positions of the stars in the past, present, and future…just like a computer. Ancient Greek culture was certainly advanced, but was it that advanced?
CRYSTAL SKULL IN MEXICO
On top of a ruined temple in an ancient Mayan city in Mexico, Dr. F. A. Mitchell-Hedges and his daughter, Anna, found an unusual artifact: a crystal sculpture of a skull. The skull, believed to be about 3,600 years old, is made from a single block of clear quartz. It is about the size of a small human skull and has almost-perfect detail. So what’s the mystery? The skull was carved against the natural grain of the crystal. Carving against the axis would normally make the crystal shatter. And there are no signs that it was carved with metal tools. In fact, by all appearances, the crystal was carved using rough diamonds with repeated applications of water and silicon-crystal sand. But if that’s true, then it would have taken 300 years of round-the-clock carving to complete! And there weren’t diamonds in Mexico at this time. So who carved it and how?
Far-sighted: The Hubble Space Telescope can view newspaper print from 1 mile away.
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MOVIE TRIVIA: BEHIND THE SCENES
• In the movie Spider-Man, is it actor Tobey Maguire in the red-and-blue suit, a stunt man, or a computergenerated crime fighter? Says director Sam Raimi, “When Spidey is in a close-up, it’s Tobey. When it’s a wide shot of him swinging in, it’s a stunt man. When it’s Spider-Man soaring 50 stories above Manhattan, it’s a computer-generated image.”
• Tobey Maguire had never read a Spider-Man comic book before accepting the role as Peter Parker.
Bad place for a cruise: Most of the Arctic Ocean is covered by ice 14 feet thick year-round.
