Strange Spheres Still a Mystery

One of the strangest mysteries in archaeology are the huge spherical stones of Costa Rica. In the 1930s, banana plantations started here, and workers clearing the forests found over 300 perfectly round stones that range from a few inches to over 8 feet in diameter. The large ones weigh many tons. They are made of solid granite. No one knows how they were cut and polished to such a high luster. There are no Pre-Columbian monuments or ancient cities in Costa Rica, yet someone had to have been there to make these strange spheres. And if they were capable of doing this, why didn’t they create buildings and pyramids, like the Aztecs and Mayans?

Banana planters have moved almost all of the spheres from their original locations?only 6 of them are still where they were originally found. In the 1940s, Samuel K. Lothrop studied the spheres and thought they might have been placed in ?astronomically-significant? alignments, but since the stones have all been moved, this evidence is lost.

The only place the stone could have been quarried is at the summit of the Talamanca mountain range, but no unfinished spheres have ever been found there, which is unusual. Unfinished pyramid blocks have been found in ancient Egyptian quarries and incomplete statues have been found on Easter Island. The Costa Rican quarry was more than 50 miles away from the final resting place of the spheres, which IS usual?ancient civilizations somehow managed to move giant monoliths for miles.

Every time anomalies are discovered, there are scientists who insist they must be natural formations. The underwater Bimini Road was once claimed to be natural, the way the underwater formations off the Japanese island of Yonaguni are today.

Some scientists speculate that the spheres are stones that were ejected from Talamancan volcanoes, but why such spheres would appear in only one volcanic environment in the world is not explained. Another idea is that glacial ice sheets somehow shaped the rock into these smooth, round shapes. However, there is no record of glaciation in the area, and, again, no other site on earth where ice has had a similar effect.

Sometimes skeptics? explanations for these anomalies, which are found all over the world, no more far-fetched than the idea that extraterrestrials made them all. We don?t seem to be able to face the fact that past civilizations, while not capable of feats, for example, of electronic technology, had some capabilities even greater than ours.

To hear Robert Schoch discuss lost civilizations, click ?Listen Now? on our masthead. (Link good until March 1, 2003)

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