A loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me what I knew about a strange geological oddity called "Klerksdorp spheres," which are round-ish objects with a metallic sheen, often with two or three parallel grooves at the equator, most commonly found near Ottosdal, South Africa. They're a prominent feature in the arguments of the Ancient Astronauts crowd, where they're often claimed to have been dropped here on Earth during an alien visitation billions of years ago, only to be unearthed today.
His email said:
I'm not saying I agree with them -- in general I don't just accept far-fetched explanations -- but I've seen lots of photos of these things and they're peculiar. It's hard for me to imagine how they could form naturally. They're all over the place on webpages about "out of place artifacts," and a lot of people think they're evidence that we were visited by aliens in the distant past, or at least that early civilizations had a lot better technology than we thought was possible. At least I thought I'd ask you what you think, and whether there's any chance these things aren't natural.
Well, first of all, thanks for asking. To me, even if you lean toward weird or paranormal or non-scientific explanations, you can go a long way toward avoiding drowning in the Great Swamp of Woo simply by admitting that you don't know for sure.
The thing is, though, the paragraph from the email is basically the argument from incredulity -- "I can't imagine how this could happen" = "it must be aliens/magic/the supernatural/God." (Intelligent design creationism is really nothing more than a religious version of the argument from incredulity.) The proper response to "I can't imagine how this could happen" should be one of two things: (1) "... so I simply don't know the answer," or (2) "... so I'll try to find out more scientifically credible evidence about it."
As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it -- in this case, referring to UFOs -- "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for. It stands for 'unidentified.' Well, if something is unidentified, it means you don't know what it is. If you don't know what it is, that's where the conversation should end. You don't then go on to say that 'therefore it must be' anything."
Anyhow, I chose option #2 and did a bit of looking into the question posed by the writer. I won't argue that the Klerksdorp spheres are odd-looking:
If I found something like this, my first thought would certainly be to wonder if it was some sort of human-made artifact. The thing is, they've been found in a three-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposit in South Africa -- not somewhere you'd expect to find modern ball-bearings.
Here's the problem, though. Rather than doing any kind of sober analysis, the Alien Manufacture cadre has perpetually misrepresented the actual facts about the spheres. One of the worst is the "Vedic creationist" Michael Cremo, author of the book Forbidden Archaeology, who believes (amongst other things) that humans in more or less their present form have been around for millions, possibly billions, of years. Here are a few of the verifiable facts that Cremo and others get wrong:
- The objects are "perfect spheres." Anyone with intact vision can see from the example shown that they're relatively symmetrical oblate spheroids, but are far from perfect spheres.
- They're made of a nickel-steel alloy "only known from human manufacture." In fact, detailed analysis found them to be composed of a combination of hematite (Fe2O3) and wollastonite (CaSiO3).
- The objects, once placed on a shelf in a "vibration-free case" in a museum in Klerksdorp, "rotated by themselves." This seems to have been a misquotation of the museum curator, Roelf Marx, who stated that the spheres had been jostled by tremors caused by underground blasting in gold mines, and that maybe the cases weren't as vibration-free as they needed to be.
- They're "far harder than tempered steel." In fact, the ones tested are around 5.0 on the Mohs scale of hardness. For reference, that's a bit softer than window glass.
- They even get the nature of the mine wrong; the Wonderstone Mine, where most of the Klerksdorp spheres were found, has been repeatedly called a "silver mine" even though silver has never been mined there. It's a pyrophyllite mine -- a silicate mineral with a multitude of industrial uses, including as an additive to clay in brick-making.
I've nothing against speculating; sometimes shrewd guesses lead to productive lines of scientific inquiry. But fer cryin' in the sink, at least don't lie about the facts. Nothing is gained by misrepresenting the actual verifiable data, except possibly to destroy every vestige of credibility you had.
In fact, the Klerksdorp spheres -- odd-looking though they admittedly are -- are almost certainly concretions, sedimentary rocks that start out with a grain of something (probably in this case wollastonite), and then have repeated deposits of additional minerals, creating concentric layers in exactly the same way pearls form in oysters. (In fact, Klerksdorp spheres that have been cut in half show the internal onion-like layers you'd expect in a concretion.) The grooves seem to be the external manifestation of lamina, parallel internal sheets that are indicative of the objects' orientation when they formed.
In other words: they're entirely natural. They're not alien ball bearings or artifacts from a three-billion-year-old human civilization. They are not "out-of-place artifacts;" they are, in fact, found exactly where they should be.
So to the original reader who emailed me; honestly, thanks for asking, and keep asking questions like that. There's nothing wrong with being puzzled, and even (for a time) wondering if something strange is going on. As long as you don't stop there, you're on the right path. The argument from incredulity isn't a problem until it becomes a solid wall.
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