In 1930, Archaeologist Flinders Petrie excavated the tomb of a boy in ancient Egypt and was surprised to discover what appeared to be the full kit for a game of ten-pin bowling – the earliest evidence of the game.
However, the more recent discovery of a number of perfect, grooved spheres found by miners in South Africa have led many people to suspect that extra-terrestrials may have been flying in on their UFOs for a game of bowls back when we were plancton.
Over the past several decades, hundreds of the spheres, called the Klerksdorp Spheres, have been found by miners. There are two types – one made of a solid bluish metal, and the other with a white spongy centre – and reports claim that “at least one” has three parallel grooves around it. The spheres appear to be man-made. Trouble is, mineral deposits date the spheres back 2.8 billion years – a time when the we were nothing more than squirming bacteria trying to get a hang of photosynthysis – significantly predating the Egyptian find.
Roelf Marx, curator of the museum of Klerksdorp, South Africa, where some of the spheres are housed, reportedly said: “The spheres are a complete mystery. They look man-made, yet at the time in Earth’s history when they came to rest in this rock no intelligent life existed. They’re nothing like I have ever seen before.”
However, Marx is notiously mis-quoted, and other Klerksdorp Sphere supporters lack the expertise required to make such a grand theory fly. Gun-toting celeb Charlton Heston offered his penny’s worth in NBC documentary ‘The Mysterious Origins of Man‘: “In Klerksdorp, South Africa, hundreds of metallic spheres were found by miners in Precambrian strata said to be a fantastic 2.8 billion years old. The controversy centers around fine grooves encircling some of the spheres. Lab technicians were at a loss to explain how they could have been formed by any known, natural process.”
Local John Hund, noticing that the lumpy sphere was actually surprisingly well-balanced, sent an example off to NASA to be looked at. According to Hund, NASA scientists were baffled by the incredible balance of the sphere (as well as, presumably, the metric system):
‘”The stone is balanced to within one-hundred thousandths of an inch from absolute perfection,” explains Hund. One NASA scientist reportedly told Hund that they do not have the technology to create anything as finely balanced as this. He said the only way that either nature or human technology could create something so finely balanced would be in zero gravity.’
After scanning a 1982 article in Weekly World News (the only reliable news), Michael Cremo, cult author of Forbidden Archaeology, reports his conclusion of the issue: ‘In the absence of a satisfactory natural explanation, the evidence is somewhat mysterious, leaving open the possibility that the South African grooved sphere–found in a mineral deposit 2.8 billion years old–was made by an intelligent being’.
Sadly, wikipedia collates a lot of damning evidence to suggest that the spheres are plausibly naturally-occuring. Spoilsports.