(To read this from the beginning, start with Replicating the Roswell Rock , then follow the links.) Updated version HERE A final comparison. The original is on the right.
It would usually be easy to allow the bitter end of an experience like this cast a dark shadow over the whole thing. Putting effort into something you enjoy, that ultimately goes unrewarded can certainly be disappointing, but it hardly seems to matter in this case. I think what was so intriguing (and rewarding all by itself) was that I managed to do something that many people were saying could only be done by aliens - How often does a person get a chance to do something as odd as that? It also resulted in some unexpected interactions with some very interesting people. So in conclusion I would like to give special thanks to some of them.
To UFO Investigator Chuck Zukowski - for actually buying a stone / To Crop Circle Investigator Andreas Muller for featuring my work in an article on his website - much appreciated! / And to Author Gary Val Tenuta for his words of support, and for trading me a signed copy of his book "The Ezekiel Code" for a Roswell Rock replica - Very Cool!
Additional thanks must go to my wife, who was also "very cool" and patient while I once again 'went off on one of my tangents'. Thanks also to those of you who bought rocks - hang on to them, looks like they might be rare indeed.
Oh - and one more thing... please don't leave them lying around just anywhere!
The fact was that no matter how many new stone carving techniques I learned, it was unrealistic to think that I could mass produce rocks that could spin under a magnet at anything resembling a reasonable price, and Roswell Rock replicas themselves would surely only appeal to a limited number of people - so I needed to come up with an alternative product. To me it seemed that the carving technique created such an interesting and mysterious look, that it didn't really need to do the spinning thing. After all, there is a world of things that could be carved onto a rock - special rocks for special interests... for example, crop circles! There were, of course, plenty of designs to choose from, and it seemed as good a place to start as any.As quickly as I could, I opened an eBay store and because virtually anything that can be carved onto a rock could be rightfully called a "symbol" (try to think of something that could not be), I named it "symbols in Stone" and began tentatively putting them up for sale. Within that first week I sold enough that I was convinced that it was going to actually pan-out and proceeded to work like a maniac, and why not? It seemed perfect. Now when people contacted me about the images on Coast's website, asking where they could buy one, I had somewhere I could send them.
But as the weeks passed and rocks began to accumulate, on the window sills, on the fridge, the mantel, the piano - and the carvings improved, and the store improved, and even the prices improved, the sales... did not.
After two grueling months I sat glassy-eyed before the computer screen, preparing to load images of the latest work, and smiled as a simple thought blossomed in my mind. "I don't have to do this". Peaceful relief washed over me as I shut down the store.
The response I got from posting the images on Coast to Coast am's website was unexpected and a bit overwhelming. The idea that I might have stumbled into a "pet rock"-like opportunity propelled me into a whirlwind of activity.
At that point I was getting closer and closer to what could be called a Roswell Rock replica. Along the way it had evolved from simple sandblasting into so much more. Eventually I was even taking larger stones and cutting them into smaller pieces, then grinding and polishing them down to the right shape and size.
As far as making a true replica, there was still one issue nagging at me. You see - When the design is applied and the surrounding area is blasted away, the new surface is fresh looking, while the protected area of the design still has its aged and natural look. There is, of course, dramatic contrast between the two, much like what can be seen with this yin-yang (which you can click on for a larger view). The rock found by Robert Ridge, although obviously sandblasted, does not have that fresh and very contrasted look about it. There is no color difference and the sandblasted part has a peculiar shininess to it. I think it was this unnatural shine on such an obviously textured surface that caused people to be so quick to label it as being fake somehow, even though they often couldn't quite articulate what it was about it that bothered them so much. Sometimes they said it looked plastic, or painted.
At first, the only way I was able to somewhat get rid of the freshly sandblasted appearance was to rub it with mineral oil. It worked pretty well for the color contrast, but it also looked, well...."oiled". Some of the rocks also soaked the oil in so much that the color contrast came right back.
One day I was pondering the problem, when suddenly I remembered reading somewhere that when the Roswell Rock was found, it was caked with dirt, and that Silly Putty was used to clean it. Hmmmm
The closest thing I had on hand was modeling clay. It worked quite well. With a combination of dabbing it with the clay and buffing it with a brush, I was able to give it that shinier, more unified looking finish. A few days later I actually bought some silly putty and found that it worked even better.
As far as the message board went.... after having met the challenge of 'do yours spin under a magnet?' and then a final submission of one more that I considered to be an irrefutable example.... yes - I really WAS done, although nothing I HAD done seemed to have affected much of anything. There were still plenty of discussions going on about how it could have been made, but I certainly wasn't interested in repeating the process I had just been through on all the different paranormal message boards. How many of them are out there? It could be a never ending crusade - no thanks.
Early on, there had been suggestions from the board that I should send photos of what I was doing to the primary investigator of the Roswell Rock. I got right on it and wondered why I hadn't thought of that in the first place - it was from that person's website that the story being discussed had originated. Much to my surprise I was responded to immediately with a couple of questions, one of which was something like, can you try your technique on a sample of iron-rich hard sandstone? I said I would try.
Ultimately, I was unable to come through, after a few crazy days of trying to fit it in I realized I just didn't have the time, didn't know any geologists, didn't know anyone who knew anybody who knew anything about iron-rich sandstone. I just couldn't do it. As much as I wanted to, it just wasn't my part of the puzzle to solve. Not long after that, in an interview on the radio, I heard that person report that although someone had sent in photo samples of sandblasted stones, experts were still saying that there was no evidence of any type of machine work whatsoever.
This brought me to a place I had never been before - standing on opposite sides of an issue from a well known Investigative Reporter for whom I had nothing but respect and admiration. To be honest it was a place I didn't want to be, and still don't, which is why I am still not using the persons name. I will always tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the ufologist, the crop circle investigator, the ghost chaser, I'm not one to dismiss something outright just because it is different.
Studying the ways people operate when confronted with mystery has long been a hobby of mine, and I of course know that it's unfortunately never as simple as right and wrong, or true and false. As those of us who are compelled (and most of us are) to pick a side, it requires that we mentally dismiss much of what the other side is saying. It's really the only way we can hope to half-way believe that what we've decided is probably the truth ...is in any way true. Having watched people dismiss elements of my own life experiences that I consider to be true, because it didn't fit their own understanding of reality has made me automatically sympathetic to the side opposite the skeptic, or the debunker.
All I had to offer the investigator were photos. It was not enough, and I understood why, and knew that what I was saying was getting dismissed and there was most likely nothing that was going to change that.
At that time, in the "listeners emails" section of the website of Coast To Coast am, an animation appeared, sent in by a listener. It showed the image of the Roswell Rock superimposing itself onto an image of the 1996 formation. The point was made in the accompanying comment that it is an astonishingly exact match. It's amazing how the mind can see what it expects to see. At first it DOES seem to be quite exact, but this is the result of the eye bouncing around and looking at the parts that DO line up, If you continue to watch the animation though, and look at ALL the parts you will see that there are many that do NOT line up. Some of them are actually pretty far off in my opinion.
The unspoken point was that the rock and the crop circle were connected in ways other than normal and that this animation was proof. This irritated me quite a bit because, seeing the (apparently hard to perceive) inconsistency between the two was in reality more proof that the two were NOT paranormally linked.
I knew what I had to do. I wrote up an email, attached images of some of the rocks, and sent it in to Coast to Coast. With the way everything had been going, I wasn't actually expecting that they would post the images, but boom - up they went! It was a little bit of a shock how fast it happened. One evening, only a day or two after making the submission I went to the website right before one of the shows was about to start, to see who that nights guest was going to be. Just a few minutes later I was back on there for something else and there they were. Remembering that I had given permission for them to show my email address, I popped over there and saw that in just those few minutes there were already 5 responses, and over the next several days there was a steady flow until I had seven pages to deal with. Among those responses was another investigator - Chuck Zukowski of ufonut.com.
Chuck was kind enough to purchase one of my rocks for his research. I sent him the best one I had at the time, but in the days that followed, my techniques improved and I felt he deserved an upgrade - so I sent him the one that can be seen in the video below.
I was really starting to enjoy the creative aspect of what I was doing. Initially, When I felt that urgent desire to get the 96 formation onto a stone as quickly as possible, my only means at the moment was to look at the image on my monitor and actually draw it the old fashioned way - and then using that sketch as reference, draw it again the next day onto a masked rock. This went against twenty plus years of conditioning as a professional artist. When it comes to projects that require speed and accuracy, we typically use modern tools such as printers projectors and plotters. Time is money and the competitive nature of our society dictates how we approach our work. The unfortunate result can be a disconnection with why we are artists in the first place. I'm thankful though that our printer was out of ink that day because, being forced to draw it meant that I was made to study it completely.
Speaking of studying it completely; The observation that has been made about the inverse opposite relationship of the Roswell Rock and the 96 formation is incorrect. It is true that the design on the rock is positive while the one in the field is negative, but to function as opposites they would need to be mirror images. For example, If you press your hands together, palm facing palm, then open them like a book, you can see that they are mirror opposites - the thumb of the left hand is left of its palm while the thumb of the right hand is on the right. Looking at the comparison photos of the rock and the field formation, you can see that they are like two left hands.
To draw one of these correctly, the proportions have to be taken in with an almost chess-like mentality - thinking several moves ahead. The more you look, the more you find connectedness between all of the design's elements. It was a simple form really, entirely made from circles and parts of circles, but as the eye, hand, and mind work together to find just the right placements and alignments, the cleverness of the design sings right out, loud and harmoniously.
The energy of the experience lured me into the vastness that is crop circle design. For several weeks I went from one formation to the next, drawing them by hand and finding the creative pathways and I felt I was walking in the footsteps of an artistic giant or giant(s). I learned things I could never have learned on my own. For example, I found that an equilateral triangle can be made within a circle by boxing in the circle, and then by dividing the box into 16 smaller boxes, the points of the triangle will fall where the lines of the boxes intersect with the line of the circle.
Inspired by all I was learning, I decided it would be fun and challenging to try to come up with my own design for the one rotational stone that I had found. Three basic things contributed to what I came up with.
1. I wanted it to be like a symbolic instruction manual for spinning the stone.
2. I also wanted it to be a design that would look good while spinning.
3. There were three strong pull points on the rock that I wanted to emphasize.
So basically it needed to be a triangular circle-ish spiral pictogram thing. In retrospect I think the design I ended up with was “OK” in that it had all those things, but what it definitely did not have was that mystical harmony that I was seeing in the crop circles. Eventually, I began to appreciate more and more that much of the power people often perceive in the designs, is directly attributable to geometry itself. Playing with circles and lines will lead you to coincidence after coincidence, pattern-work that just… happens. Formation designers must certainly learn very quickly, that the more adept they become with the mathematics of what they are doing, the more meaningful the designs begin to look.
Back on the board I posted a picture of the resulting stone and video of it spinning and thought that it would surely suffice and that maybe I was done.
So what does it take for a rock that can be magnetically attracted to spin? Its all about shape and nothing more. The bottom should be a nice shallow convexly curved surface, the smoother the better. The only other requirements are that it has variant thickness on opposite sides of the pivot point and that there is a proportional relationship between the weight of the rock and the pull of the magnet. The latter is in a sense adjustable being that magnets come in a variety of different strengths.
Basically it works like this. If you hold the magnet over the stone, between the center (pivot point) and the edge, and also between the thick and thin parts, the thicker part is more attracted and also closer to the magnet than the thinner part - so, it turns itself toward the magnet.
I thought it was going to be a simple matter of visiting the creek near my house, but being new to the area, I hadn't yet been there and didn't know that it was really more like a swamp. Walking along an asphalt path through the most "rockless" terrain I have ever seen, I saw no easy way to get to the water itself. If there were any rocks in there I wasn't about to trudge through the grassy muck to find them.
After about a mile, just as I was starting to feel like turning back, I found an out of place swatch of small river rocks hiding in the grass under some bushes. So I got out my newly purchased bright orange handled, telescoping, "mechanic's magnet" and started poking around. I tried to behave as best I could like what I was doing was normal so that passers-by would hopefully overlook me. It didn't work. One girl came right out and asked, "Whats that?" Not being much of a conversationalist, I answered, "it's a magnet". Looking at the rocks she then asked "and what are you doing with it?" This was just the kind of surreal exchange I was hoping to avoid. "Finding rocks that are ...magnetic..." I said sounding uncertain. Much to my relief she didn't come back with "why" and instead continued on her walk.
I managed to come away with about twenty rocks that I thought might do the job. As it turned out only three of them would do the turning thing and only one of them (on the left) would do it well.
Read the updated version at my new site This is the original blog where I described in real time my adventure in figuring out how to recreate the "Roswell Rock". In doing so, I developed a love for carving stone and came away with a better understanding of how paranormal subjects can be so easily misunderstood.
A final comparison. The original is on the right. 
