Sphere itself

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:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Robert Huggett]

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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A miscalculation of scale

In the first pages of Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, a woman out walking her dog in rural Maine stubs her toe on an object protruding from the ground, and when she kneels down to see what it is, she sees that it is a curved bit of metal that can't be pried loose.  It seems to extend indefinitely as she digs away the loose soil around it.

It turns out to be [spoiler alert] the upper edge of an enormous spaceship that crash landed on Earth millions of years ago, embedding itself nose-downward, and eventually being buried by geological processes until only a little bit of it was above ground.

Kind of an interesting mental picture, isn't it?  A spaceship collides with Earth, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (or random people walking their dogs) ages later.  It does, however, bring to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the Roswell incident: "A super-intelligent alien species knows how to cross the galaxy, but then they can't even land the damn spaceship?  If they're that incompetent, maybe they should just go home."

I bring all this up because of a discovery in Russia I found about because of a loyal reader.  Some coal miners, working at a mine in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia, unearthed a strange object that they claim is an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  Boris Glazkov, who found the object, said, "have to say it wasn't hard to see as it was really distinctive and large.  I've never seen anything like this object, which is obviously not natural, out here in the middle of nowhere before.  It is a real mystery."

The Kuzbassrazrezugol Mining Company, Glazkov's employer, confirmed discovery of the object, saying it was discovered at a depth of forty meters.  And everyone associated with the find is in agreement; what we have here is a crashed flying saucer.

So without further ado, let's take a look:

Pretty strange, eh? You can see why I thought of The Tommyknockers.  Imagine this thing making a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, carrying its panicked alien crew hurtling toward the Earth, then burying itself deep in the ground, killing all that were aboard.

But then the object's discoverers provided a second photograph, one that gave us perhaps a little more information than they intended:

Interesting how big it looks when you have no way of knowing how big it actually is.

And this reminded me of a second book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the brilliant Douglas Adams.  In particular, I recalled a passage about a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy... 

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

So the miners who discovered this thing must believe that alien races are really tiny, if that's their spaceship.  Makes you wonder what we've been so afraid of, all this time.  If the aliens show up, waving around their itty-bitty laser pistols, we could just step on 'em.

Or, failing that, hire a small dog.

And of course, there's a completely natural explanation for this thing.  It's what's called a "concretion" -- a symmetrical glob of sedimentary deposits that have become cemented together.   They can look pretty peculiar:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe/AWI, Concretion-PS2119 hg, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But that doesn't mean they're evidence of aliens.

Also, if this was a "flying saucer," wouldn't it be made out of something other than rock?  But maybe this was a Stone Age spaceship.  Maybe instead of laser pistols, the tiny aliens inside brandished clubs and flint knives.

Of course, we could still step on 'em.

So that's our latest non-evidence for aliens out of Siberia.  Kind of a pity, really.  It would have been cool if it had been real.  However, I'd prefer it if such a discovery wasn't followed by what happened in The Tommyknockers.  Without giving away any more of the plot, let me remind you that it's a Stephen King novel.  Suffice it to say that Bad Shit Happens.  So maybe we should all be glad that what the Russian coal miners discovered was just a big round rock.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]