Our land is fraught with many interesting things. Mysterious objects now and then become the property of archaeologists who study rocks of millions of years of age. The finds are often discouraged: how could certain artifacts end up in our land, who left them for us, and why?
For example, where did the “Salzburg parallelepiped” come from, or, as it is also called, “Wolfzegg Iron” or “Hurl cube”? What is his purpose?
A mysterious item was found in the 19th century in a piece of lignite (brown coal). The artifact got its first name due to the fact that coal itself was mined in the city of Wolfzegge at the mine, and belonging to Salzburg is determined by the finding of an outlandish find in the museum of this city.
Find
In 1885, on the first day of November, the source of the Isidor Brown factory in the Austrian city of Schöndorf split the mined coal for its subsequent laying in the furnace. Quite by chance, inside one of the pieces a worker discovered a metal object in the shape of a parallelepiped with dimensions of 67x62x47 mm. The weight of the find was only 785 grams. The image and shape reminded who, as it seems, of the brain, circuitry, cipher. A deep furrow neatly lay in the center of the artifact, as if custom-made.
The curiosity was sent to the Carolina Augusta Museum in Salzburg and gave it the name "Salzburg Box." The photo clearly shows a drawing on a mysterious stone, the mystery of which no one can solve yet.
Why was the item named "Gurlt's cube"? Professor and mining engineer Friedrich Adolf Gurlt, who lived from 1829 to 1902, was the first to investigate the find. In 1886, he devoted a report to her, speaking at the next meeting of experts from the natural history society of Westphalia and the Rhine region and stating that the strange object found was made of metal, or rather, of iron, but the person was not related to its origin. Nevertheless, the meteorite is too regular in shape, which is not typical for a cosmic body.
Is the Salzburg parallelepiped a meteorite?
Lost in speculation about the origin of the artifact, scientists determined the age of the coal in which they found an unusual object. It turned out that coal already existed for about 65 million years!
Reports of the find soon spread around the world, appearing in the most prestigious scientific journals. An article was published in the journal Nature from November 11, 1886, which spoke of different points of view on the origin of an unusual object. Some believed that the "Salzburg parallelepiped" is a creation of man, others - that it is a meteorite. The point of view of the magazine itself was expressed in the fact that the find is of extraterrestrial origin.
The Earth theory of the origin of the find was supported by the fact that so-called Widmannstätten figures were not detected when the metal was etched using nitric acid. These patterns appear on meteorite iron and are very similar to a symmetrical lattice. Only one type of iron meteorite does not have such figures - ataxites containing up to 30% nickel. Raw meteorite iron has always been fragile. At the same time, the scientist Gurlt stated that the find metal was solid like steel.
Item geometry
An in-depth study of the Salzburg curiosity revealed interesting numerical ratios. Remember its sizes mentioned above? So: 67-62 = 5; 62-47 = 15; 67-47 = 20. See the rhythm, if you subtract from one parameter another? Each result differs from the previous one by five units.
Studying the origin of the Salzburg parallelepiped, other interesting facts were revealed. If the dimensions of a strange object are presented in the form of three squares, whose sides are 47, 62 and 67 mm, which are nested one into another, a composition with interesting properties is obtained:
- The diagonal of the smallest square is equal to the side of the larger one and is identical to the radius of the circle that is inscribed in this largest square.
- If we take the same circle, then its chord is identical in size to the side of the middle square.
- The radius of the circle that is described around the largest square is equal in length to the side of the least square.
- In certain calculations, pi is detected.
Charles Fort
Gradually, interest in the artifact subsided. But four decades later, in 1919, the American writer Charles Fort remembered the Salzburg parallelepiped. This journalist harassed the world of scientists and collected facts and data bit by bit, reminding the world of forgotten (accidentally or intentionally) phenomena, for example, strange objects falling from the sky, the appearance of unusual animals, mirages, atmospheric phenomena and other events left without a rational explanation.
Charles put forward his own hypothesis about the origin of the "Salzburg parallelepiped": in his opinion, the subject was brought to mind by representatives of extraterrestrial intelligence.
In the 1950s, ufologists read Fort books, interest in the find revived. They hastened to declare the mysterious “piece of iron” disappeared, but then they found it in the storerooms of the Linz Museum, where from 1950 to 1958 it was openly displayed.
Not a meteorite
In the late sixties, Dr. Gero Kurat from the Vienna Museum of Natural History and Dr. Rudolf Grill, an employee of the Austrian Geological Survey, studied the artifact globally. As a result, it turned out that it does not contain nickel, and it followed from this that he could not be a meteorite. Iron and carbon - the materials that made up the "cube" were contained in the proportions of blast iron.
The French edition of the Syanse eV published an article and photo of the Salzburg Meteorite. Reporter Georges Ketman once again raised the burning topic of the alien origin of the artifact.
How did they react to the find in the USSR? In the fall of 1961, the Soviet journalist G.N. Ostroumov went to Salzburg. Based on the results of visiting the museum and evaluating the exhibit, as well as comparing all the facts, he concluded that there had been no visits to aliens, this was just a myth and Western propaganda. “Don’t worry, comrades, ” he wrote in his article.
But most likely, interest was only warmed up, because inquiring minds always existed, and in the USSR there were plenty of them too. Not taking into account the authority of Ostroumov, the scientists of our country continued the search for truth.
At the end of 1972, ten years after the publication of Ostroumov’s article, the Salzburg parallelepiped was exhibited under the meteorite from the Wolfzegg sign in Linz (in the museum).
Mysterious death
One of the meteorite researchers, American historian Maurice Jessup, never finished studying. In April 1960, he was found dead, and the cause of death has not yet been established.
