Home » Out-of-place artefacts » Very ancient artefacts » Gold thread from Rutherford Mill (UK)
Published 27 July 2007 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
A 'gold thread' was reported in The Times of 22 June 1844 as having been found by quarrymen. According to the account, a few days earlier, the thread was found in a quarry close to Rutherford Mill (Raxton, Borders Region, Scotland) embedded in the rock at a depth of eight feet (1.8 m). The local rock is of Early Carboniferous date (360-320 million years old). The source of the story seems to have been The Kelso Chronicle, a newspaper local to the discovery, which had been sent the piece of thread.
Like all of these nineteenth-century stories, the details are purely anecdotal; there is no supporting evidence that the thread was really found by the workmen, no description of the thread is given and there is no means of knowing the circumstances of the discovery. How securely "embedded" was the thread? How long was it? How was the rock being quarried? Without answers to questions such as these, this anecdote remains precisely that: a tale with no supporting evidence that is difficult to take as serious evidence. And evidence for what? Those who use this type of curiosity often have vague agendas, which may include attempts to undermine our understanding of geological chronology, evidence that humanity has existed on earth for much longer than is usually believed, as evidence for alien visitors and so on.
3 Responses to Gold thread from Rutherford Mill (UK)
TJ on 16 February 2013 at 4:42 pm
Seems like golden thread would be a difficult commodity for work men to falsely produce or acquire. was anyone even making gold electrical wire in 1844? it's also an expensive hoax, who ever places it, say the workmen, upon "discovering" it, can't make any claim to it without raising suspicion. so you're out the cost of what ever it takes to acquire gold thread in 1844. which isn't even getting into how it could be embedded in the rock.
on the other hand, gold is one of the few stable metals, that if worked in the distant past could be expected to wait, in a stable fashion, for discovery untold millions of years later, depending of various factors.
and, for those who prefer alien explanations, gold wiring happens to be a commodity likely used in a space vessel. an alien explanation has many advantages, one being we don't have to change our current chronology of human presence, if the artifact can be attributed to an extraterrestrial who just stopped by for a visit.
it would of course be wonderfully helpful if there was more information, such as: how long was the thread? how thick was it? how available was a substance like this at this time? where is it now? are there photos? etc. has anyone tried to track it down? maybe it's still in someone's collection.
Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews on 10 March 2013 at 12:08 pm
We don't actually know that the supposed gold thread even existed: all we have is a newspaper report, so your complaint that "it's also an expensive hoax" doesn't apply. Even if the thread did exist, how do we know that it was really gold? Might it have been pyrites or copper?
kai on 21 May 2013 at 11:37 pm
Im no geologist but Ive come across plant matter coated in a fine mix of quartz and *rust* that at a generous push could pass for a very fine metalic thread to people paid partly in Beer ,and lets face it,a 19th century quarry was not a sterile enviroment,who knows what could have come onto the site caught in the hobnailed clogs of a worker plus Kelso is not the centre of newsworthy stories even these days,the hack back then will have jumped at the chance to fill a few lines with a mystery .
What makes me chuckle is that the same people who place such veracity in the reports of Victorian tabloids tend to be the same people who think the zionist lizard men control all the media today .
Not sure how that squares up with their insistence that these reptilian empire builders have been controling us via the knights templar since the days of the battlestar galacticas arrival 50 K years ago…………..