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Racetrack Playa

added28 August 20262014

A dry lakebed in Death Valley where stones move by themselves, leaving long trails behind them. The puzzle was only solved in 2014: thin sheets of ice push the rocks along under a light wind.

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36.68130, -117.56270

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The Sailing Stones of Racetrack Playa

On the dry lake of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, stones weighing up to three hundred kilograms leave furrows hundreds of metres long, sometimes parallel, sometimes turning at right angles. Since 1948 magnetic fields, hurricanes, algae and human interference had all been proposed; nobody had ever seen one move. In 2011–13 Richard and James Norris put GPS units on the stones and a weather station with time-lapse cameras beside them. On 20 December 2013 they watched it happen: after rain the playa freezes over a few millimetres thick, the ice breaks by day into floating panels, and a wind of four or five metres per second is enough for the floes to push the stones at walking pace.

0 km away

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The Coso Artifact

On 13 February 1961 three rock dealers from Olancha, collecting geodes in the Coso Mountains, cut open a concretion and found a ceramic cylinder inside with a metal shaft down the middle and a copper sheath. Geologists they consulted put the rock at half a million years, and the find entered the literature as an extraterrestrial spark plug. In 1999 Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich showed X-rays of it to the Spark Plug Collectors of America: the members identified a Champion plug of the 1920s, with its characteristic thread and ceramic insulator. Concretions of clay and rust grow around iron in decades, not epochs.

60 km away

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Bob Lazar and the S-4 Facility

In November 1989 Bob Lazar told KLAS in Las Vegas that he had worked as an engineer at a facility called S-4 by Papoose Lake, south of Area 51, where nine alien craft stood in hangars running on element 115. He described himself as a graduate of MIT and Caltech. The registrars of both institutions reported that no such graduate exists, and he appears in no class list or student publication of those years. His one confirmed employment is a short contractor's stint at Los Alamos. Element 115 was synthesised at Dubna in 2003: moscovium, which lives for fractions of a second and is not a fuel.

160 km away

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