The ＂Ancient Machine＂ Found in a Kentucky Coal Seam — What the Record Actually Says

Two recent online videos claim that Kentucky coal miners broke into a seam three hundred million years old and pulled out an impossible "ancient machine." One sets it in eastern Kentucky in 1889, the other in Harlan County in 1932. We went looking for the source: the newspaper, the mine, the name of a single miner. No source has ever been produced. The two versions disagree on the year, the county and the object, and Kentucky's coal is not even the anthracite the first story describes. The machine is a claim, not a find.

So where did it come from? This documentary traces its real ancestors, starting on June 9, 1891, when Mrs. S. W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois, broke open a lump of coal and found a gold chain, and following the Oklahoma iron pot, the West Virginia bell, the Iowa "carved stone" and the Coso spark plug into Brad Steiger's paperbacks and Forbidden Archeology.

Then it goes underground for real: the ancient miners of Mammoth Cave and Salts Cave, the mastodon bones of Big Bone Lick, and the Shawnee, Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations, whose Kentucky homeland was never an empty hunting ground. The Shawnee words written down in 1762 about the giant creatures of Kentucky are in the video.

If you are drawn to out-of-place artifacts, ancient mysteries, Mammoth Cave and Native Kentucky history — this documentary reads the original record and shows you what is really under the ground.
#archaeology #history