What would you do if you found a perfect metal ball, absolutely spherical, with finally

etched grooves around its center so straight and regular they look like they were made with

a laser engraving machine? Would you assume it's just an ordinary rock? Or would you assume

it's some artificial device manufactured by some advanced civilization?

We're going to find out right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

The Clerks Dorp Sphere's.

Imagine miners or rock hounds working a 3 billion year old rock deposit when suddenly what pops

out of the rock, but a flawless metallic sphere. It's a rare combination of alloys,

unusual for anywhere on earth, and it's more perfectly round than any human manufacturing

technique could produce. But not only that, it has three perfect parallel grooves etched

around its equator. It is quite obviously artificial, so what could it be doing in this

3 billion year old deposit? This is the mystery posed by a set of objects known as the Clerks

Dorp Sphere's, and which some authors have explained, convincingly to some, they are examples

of out-of-place artifacts that are best explained as relics of an extinct ancient advanced civilization.

Today we're going to find out if a dividing line between fact and fiction intersects the story

of the Clerks Dorp Sphere's, and if it does, exactly where along that spectrum does its slice.

The Sphere's are a series of round rocks, many of them being in the 3 to 10 centimeter range,

think between a golf ball and a cantaloupe. They were found around the town of Autosdol

in South Africa, a region in which pyrophilite deposits are found on the order of 3 billion years

old giver take. And that's very old as rocks go. There is no firm count for how many Clerks Dorp Sphere's

there are. Probably lots and lots of them, most have probably been collected privately, but a few

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