1. Replicating the Roswell Rock

Newer version HERE

In July, while roaming the internet, I came across a most interesting story about a carved stone known as the "Roswell Rock" that was found in 2004 by a man out hunting in New Mexico. Recently, because of certain of it's peculiarities, he was encouraged to have it looked at.

The lines and shapes of the carving seemed too precise, too perfect,and had the odd appearance that it had somehow been raised up from out of the natural surface of the rock. Experts and professionals began examining it, but were unable to determine how it could have been carved. Even under a microscope, no evidence of tool work of any kind could be found.

This in itself was probably enough to make it an object worthy of continued study....
But there was more.

Passing a magnet over it would cause either clockwise or counter-clockwise rotation depending on the placement of the magnet. Interesting - but more than that, two dominant elements in the design, tangential circles featuring yin-yanged crescent moons, seemed to be placed precisely on these two rotational pull points ..... Even more interesting - but it doesn't end there.

At some point someone noticed that this same design had appeared in 1996 as a crop formation in the UK. Not only was it reportedly a precise match, but the two were also apparently inverse opposites, so that if the two could somehow be scaled to the same size and come together that they would fit as if one had made the other. That is actually not really true, they are not inverse opposites - I will explain in detail later. (original aerial image © 1996 by Steve Alexander. Also see: Cropcircleconnector.com)

All of that - the crop circle design, the rotational pull points, the fact that it was found near the Roswell ufo crash site, and the anomalous look of the carving, these things came together easily in peoples minds as possible indicators that the stone might have an extraterrestrial connection.

As a cautious but open-minded follower of fringe subjects, I'm pretty sure I would have been very drawn in and/or excited by this story, but as it turned out, I'll never know what my natural reaction would have been because it probably took less than two seconds of seeing the photo before I recognized the technique used to carve it, one that I have been using on occasion for 15 years.

On The Board

The place I initially found the story was the message board of a well known website on which a lively discussion about the stone was taking place. I wanted to jump right in, but knew I would need more than words to back-up my opinion. Being that this was a Saturday, meant that I was going to have to resist posting anything until after I had a chance to get down to the studio where I work and make some kind of sample, photograph it, and then figure out how to put it on the message board. It was a long weekend.

In the meantime I googled the term " Roswell Rock " and saw conversations on message boards all over the place. Speculations, debates, and theories galore. While the "of alien origin" side was trying to figure out its function or decipher the design, the "it's a hoax" side were throwing out spiteful words about hunks of clay, epoxy resins, and sculpted wax models etc. But no one that I could find, had really figured it out yet. When Monday came, I made a couple of quick samples, and after work, got my 14 year old son to teach me how to post an image. So with that and a couple of brief sentences, I put it up there and thought,"well that's that". I felt sad really, that I might be ruining a perfectly good mystery.

It didn't go at all like I had imagined. It was near silence on the board. There were a handful of responses though, some congratulating me for exposing an obvious hoax (which I strongly disagree with), but there were also several along the lines of, "nice work, but yours is not nearly as detailed". Also there was this, "does yours spin under a magnet?" I didn't even see it coming. In my own mind I had dismissed the magnet issue. It seemed like pretty normal activity for a rock to me. I didn't see any point in demonstrating that a rock could spin under a magnet, anybody that felt the need to prove or disprove this could do it for themselves, right? If they wanted more detail though, I could give them that.

The next day on my lunch I made another one, this time using the 1996 formation's design.

This time the reaction was a little stronger and most people were now saying they were convinced, but there were still some bringing up the magnet issue, and I knew that they were really right. I had only done half the job. I knew I wasn't going to feel right until I found a magnetic rock and put a crop circle on it.

By the way, I don't think the term "magnetic rock" is correct. A refrigerator is a thing we stick refrigerator magnets to, but we don't say the refrigerator is magnetic. There are rocks though, that really ARE magnetic that are known as "load or lodestones".

lodestone
n : a permanent magnet consisting of magnetite that possess
polarity and has the power to attract as well as to be
attracted magnetically


If someone knows the term (if there is one) for a rock that "can be attracted magnetically" please let me know, I would sure appreciate it - I'm tired of the verbal effort it takes to NOT say magnetic rock.

Update: It turns out the correct term is "ferrous" - (thanks to Mike in the comments section at Glasstone)

(To be continued with "finding rocks that spin under magnets" or something like that.)