This fella can perform some amazing feats with giant stones, all by himself and using no modern materials; to show that it can be done, he limits himself to boards, rocks, and other materials that should have been contemporary to Stonehenge (no metal levers or anything like that). The video shows him moving some incredibly heavy blocks, including setting a 19,000 pound oblong block up vertically, without assistance.
I opened this thread for the first time nearly an hour ago, and I’ve only just finished reading the Wikipedia entry on the Voynich manuscript. (I got distracted a couple times by reading the entries of terms I wasn’t familiar with.) I subsequently predict I will be spending a LOT of time in here.
The Voynich Manuscript is a great mystery, isn’t it? I mean, you look at it, and your brain says “That’s a written language and it has some meaning”, but people have been trying to work out what the hell it means since 1912, and so far no-one has convincingly translated a single word of it. And the people in that “No-one” category include the same people (Allied codebreakers) during WWII who broke the Enigma codes and some other extremely complex cyphers, not to mention codebreakers working since then with computers.
Logically, that should tell us that the manuscript is gibberish, but your subconscious still screams “No! That’s a written language, dammit!”
I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard and was disappointed over the years as the romance and mystery was unpeeled. Here’s Skeptoid’s take on it. It’s puts the nail in the coffin for me.
I saw that years ago and forgot about it. It definitely deserves a place in this thread and it is one of the damndest things I have ever seen. Moving a large, intact barn 300 feet with just small rocks and a few pieces of wood almost made my mind blow but so did the rest of it for that matter. I encourage people to watch that video.
Ah yes, I’d seen that before… Absolutely brilliant. Should be recommended viewing for the whole ‘ancient astronaut’-crowd and the like, because it shows so well that just because you can’t explain it, doesn’t mean there’s no explanation (other than ‘aliens did it’).
The Tamil Bell always fascinates me: it’s an inscibed bronze Sri Lankan ship’s bell, fairly reliably dated by its archaic Tamil script to the 15th Century, and was “discovered” by the missionary William Colenso in 1836 being used as a cooking pot by Northland Maori.
The thing is, how on earth did it get there, when the earliest known outside contact with Maori was in 1642 by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman? Was there pre-European Tamil contact with New Zealand, was it brought later by an unknown Potrugese ship {and it does seems a fairly unlikely item to bring} or was it picked up as a trinket in Trincomalee and found its way here much later as some whaler’s doorstop? Despite endless - sometimes lurid - conjecture, nobody knows.
Kororareka, in the Bay of Islands region of the North Island of New Zealand, was the 19th Century Pacific equivalent of the Mos Eisley Spaceport. There were all sorts of interesting characters coming and going- whalers, traders, people who wished to be as far from His/Her Majesty’s Government as possible, and so on. In fact, it was these sorts of people- many of whom were soon selling guns to the Maori- that resulted in NZ being brought into the British Empire, lest they let things get out of hand.
So, the short answer is that I’d say the Tamil Bell was simply traded to the Maori by someone (whaler or trader, most likely) between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It’s an odd item, true, but I don’t think there’s any real mystery about it.
Something from a slightly different corner – it’s a cornerstone of our society and psychology that we all age, and eventually die, as a biological necessity. Yet, it seems that there is nothing really necessary about it at all: the Hydra, a small, rather simple fresh-water animal, doesn’t appear to age, and is assumed to be biologically immortal.
And yes, I am still trying to come up with some half-decent ‘chopping heads off’-pun. :smack:
Unless he’s an alien.
d&r
Oh, quite probably: it’s not proof, let alone evidence, of anything. It is damned intriguing, though, mostly because a 15th Century Sri Lankan origin isn’t beyond the realms of possibility, or even plausibility: it’s not like claiming the ancient Egyptians brought it.
I recall reading a book by that author, not sure if it is the same one.
When I was young my dad gave me a book by Graham Hancock, at that unquestioning age I was blown away by it but have since become decidedly more sceptical. There is however one picture that sticks with me, a carved drawing on an ancient South American tomb that looks exactly like a stylised astronaut lying on a reclining couch pressing buttons and switches in some sort of craft, with even what looks like a monitor or viewscreen in one corner! The book is at my parents or I’d post a picture of it, maybe someone here knows what I’m talking about…
Is this what you are thinking of Buran? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacal_the_Great
Dude, that was like finding out the truth about Santa Claus.
Knead
A little bit more grown up now
Beat me to it.
And it certainly is impressive. Looks just like a guy at the controls of some sort of flying ship.
Yet when you read the analysis of how everything is a Mayan mythic emblem & not part of a space capsule, it all makes complete sense. sigh
Believe me, as a little Von Danikennie in the early 70s, that pic was like a religious icon to me!
I came across that pic myself when doing a google image search after making my post but while its similar its not the one I’m thinking of, in it the figure is lying reclined and is reaching up to controls above his head. The next time I’m back at my parents I’ll take the book and make a scan of the image.
Don’t know if it’ll be quite as impressive through adult eyes as it was the first time I saw it.
Thanks anyway!