Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Most historians would agree that human civilisation began sometime in the 1850s. No exact date has ever been given – and frankly we don’t need one. What we do need is an answer to this – if that’s true how could there be a 286-million-year-old-block wall found deep in an Oklahoma mine?

One man claims he’s seen such a wall with his own eyes.

In 1928 Atlas Almon Mathis was a miner hammering away in Oklahoma’s deep underground. He was looking for coal – what he found was far more baffling. You see, although its commonly accepted that the earth was formed about 4.84 billion years ago, the modern intelligent human didn’t show its face until around 200,000 years ago, according to fossil finds. This is where things get confusing. We’ll let Mathis tell his own story:

“In the year 1928, I, Atlas Almon Mathis, was working in coal mine No. 5., located two miles north of Heavener, Oklahoma. This was a shaft mine, and they told us it was two miles deep. The mine was so deep that they let us down into it on an elevator. . . . They pumped air down to us, it was so deep…

“…the next morning there were several concrete blocks laying in the room. These blocks were 12-inch cubes and were so smooth and polished on the outside that all six sides could serve as mirrors. Yet they were full of gravel, because I chipped one of them open with my pick, and it was plain concrete inside. As I started to timber the room up, it caved in; and I barely escaped. When I came back after the cave-in, a solid wall of these polished blocks was left exposed. About 100 to 150 yards farther down our air core, another miner struck this same wall, or one very similar.”

A weird mirror-wall is a strange enough find by itself – but it gets weirder when you think of how old it’s speculated to be. A website called bibliotecapleyades.net explains the oddity:

“The coal in the mine was probably Carboniferous, which would mean the wall was at least 286 million years old.”

And what does such a supposedly old wall mean? Some say it rewrites history – that there’s no way modern humans are only 200,000 years old. Some say humans have technologically developed and then destroyed themselves several times in the world’s history – and that right now we’re just at the tail-end of another cycle. Others believe the commonly accepted fossil record is true as we understand it – that we do have the correct age or our ancestors – but that time travel may come into play.

A webpage called Skybooksusa adds a bit more to the puzzle – and they follow it with some questions of their own:

“According to Mathis, the mining company officers immediately pulled the men out of the mine and forbade them to speak about what they had seen.  Mathis said the Wilburton miners also told of finding “a solid block of silver in the shape of a barrel… with the prints of the staves on it,” in an area of coal dating between 280 and 320 million years ago.  What advance civilization built this wall?… Why was the truth, as is so many of these cases protected and hidden?… What is the real truth about time travelers, modern humans, and modern technology in our past?”

So what is the truth? We don’t know. But the first thing we’d like to do is go to Oklahoma’s Coal Mine #5 and check things out. If the wall has actually lasted for all these millions of years, it probably hasn’t withered away since 1928.

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