Mystery sphere comes from 1,500 year old lost civilization, archaeologist claims

An enormous stone sphere found outside of the Bosnian town of Zavidovici is drawing global excitement—and skepticism.

The discovery was made by archaeologist Semir Osmanagich, also known as “Bosnian Indiana Jones”—and he claims it’s proof of a lost civilization dating back 1,500 years ago or more. According to a recent blog post, Osmanagich has been researching the phenomenon of stone balls for 15 years, a focus that has led him from Antarctica to Albania. After returning to Bosnia, he claims he’s found similar spheres in twenty different locations around the country.

Most, however, have been found near Zavidovici. According to Osmanagich, 80 of them used to exist near the small town in the 1930s.

“Most of them have been destroyed in 1970s after rumours of gold being hidden in the middle of them, some were taken by locals and moved to their backyards,” he wrote in the blog post.

Now, only eight survive in the forest around the town. The most recently excavated sphere, though, is the most massive stone ball ever found in Europe, according to Osmanagich.

“Preliminary results show the radius to be between 1.2 – 1.5 meters,” he wrote. “Materials have not been analyzed yet. However, brown and red color of the ball point to very high content of the iron. So, the density has to be very high, close to the iron which is 7,8 kg/c.c…Mass comes to be over 30 tons !

“It makes this Bosnian stone ball the most massive in Europe. However, if further lab testing shows higher content of iron, than this will be the biggest stone ball in the World surpassing those in Costa Rica (35 tons) and Mexico (40 tons).”

Which Osmanagich believes is an incredibly significant discovery.

“First, it would be another proof that Southern Europe, Balkan and Bosnia in particular, were home for advanced civilizations from distant past and we have no written records about them. Secondly, they had high technology, different than ours.”

Skeptics abound

But many experts aren’t buying what he’s selling. Osmanagich has made some wild claims in the past, the most infamous of which being that Bosnia’s Visoko Valley actually contained extremely ancient pyramids connected by underground tunnels—an idea which revealed no proof of human shaping following an excavation.

“There is some genuine archaeology on the hill and I’m told it’s medieval, possibly Bronze Age or Roman,” said Anthony Harding, the president of the European Association of Archaeologists, to Telegraph.co.uk, in regards to the pyramids. “But the speculation that there could be a 12,000-year-old structure beneath is a complete fantasy and anyone with basic knowledge of archaeology or history should recognize that.”

His most recent claims are quickly garnering similar criticism. Experts from the University of Manchester told MailOnline that the spherical stones could easily be the result of concretion—a natural process in which rock is formed by rain and other precipitation mixing with natural mineral cement and sediment, and which often results in spherical objects. The most famous example of this is the Koutu boulders in New Zealand.

Other experts told MailOnline that the round shape is also easily explainable by spheroidal weathering—a natural form of chemical weathering that leads to the formation of spherical layers of decayed rock.

But Osmanagich still believes he knows the truth. “[T]hey new [sic] the power of geometrical shapes, because the sphere is one of the most powerful shapes along with pyramidal and conical shapes. No wonder, that pyramids and tumulus phenomena can also be found in Bosnia.

“While visiting the site group of dowsers were recorded that aura field improve and grow when exposed to the vicinity of stone ball. It seems that ancient did one more thing better than us. They new [sic] Planetary energies better, living in the harmony with our Mother Earth.”

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Image credit: Semir Osmanagic

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