In search of the Salzburg Cube
This infamous out-ofplace artefact is not a cube and you won’t find it in Salzburg, explains ULRICH MAGIN…
A cube of metal, carefully machined, notched, and rounded on one side, was found in the centre of a block of coal in Austria in 1885”, John Keel breathlessly tells us in his wildly excited book Our Haunted Planet. “It’s still in a museum in Salzburg and no one has ever come up with an explanation for it. Basing their conclusions on the age of the coal bed, various experts have estimated it to be 300,000 years old.”
This cube of pure steel from Salzburg in Austria, perfectly fashioned and with a groove in the centre, unearthed in fossil layers and therefore not the handiwork of any known civilisation, is one of the most frequently listed OOPARTS or out-of-place artefacts. Some writers even allege that it has vanished from the museum, perhaps hidden by sinister conspirators in a vain attempt to hide the truth – which would be easy to believe were you to look for it in the Salzburg Museum. It’s not there; instead, it is, in fact still being exhibited, for all to see, in the Heimathaus Museum of Vöcklabruck, Upper Austria.
Variously called the ‘Salzburg Cube’ or ‘Dr Gurlt’s Cube’, the object probably gained most of its fame in the English-speaking world because Charles Fort mentioned it in The Book of the Damned. 1
Fort, in summary, has this to say:
“A block of metal found in coal, in Austria, 1885. It is now in the Salsburg museum… We’re a little involved here. Our own acceptance is upon a carved, geometric thing that, if found in a very old deposit, antedates human life, except, perhaps, very primitive human life, as an indigenous product of this Earth: but we’re quite as much interested in the dilemma it made for the faithful. It is of ‘true meteoritic material’. In
L’Astronomie, 7-114, it is said that, though so geometric, its phenomena so characteristic of meteorites exclude the idea that it was the work of man. As to the deposit – Tertiary coal. Composition – iron carbon, and a small quantity of nickel. It has a pitted surface that is supposed by the faithful to be characteristic of meteorites… The scientists who examined it could reach no agreement. They bifurcated: then a compromise was suggested; but the compromise is a product of disregard: That it was of true meteoritic material, and had not been shaped by man; That it was not of true meteoritic material, but telluric iron that had been shaped by man; That it was true meteoritic material that had fallen from the sky, but had been shaped by man, after its fall. The data, one or more of which must be disregarded by each of these three explanations, are: ‘true meteoritic material’ and surface markings of meteorites; geometric form; presence in an ancient deposit; material as hard as steel; absence upon this earth, in Tertiary times, of men who could work in material as hard as steel. It is said that, though of ‘true meteoritic material’, this object is virtually a steel object… It’s a cube. There is a deep incision all around it. Of its faces, two that are opposite are rounded.”
The Cube is also mentioned by all the early ancient-astronaut supporters – Kolosimo, Charroux, and later Michael Baigent. 2 All just repeat the few excerpts from contemporary accounts that Fort already quotes.
The technical literature lists the Salzburg Cube as “Wolfsegg iron”. It was found by a worker in the Braun iron foundry in Schondorf when he broke up a lump of lignite (or brown coal) that had been mined at Wolfsegg. The man who introduced the find into the literature, Bonn physicist Friedrich Adolf Gurlt, thought it was a fossil meteorite. That made it quite a sensation at the time. In contrast to many modern authors, Fort luckily gives his sources (which themselves were translations from the German), and so I could follow the career of this strange find.
In 1886, the Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau3 summarised Gurlt’s theses in an abstract: “Gurlt: Discovery of a meteorite in Tertiary brown coal. In a block of Tertiary lignite from Wolfsegg a very important discovery has been made at the very moment a worker smashed same to burn it. A meteorite was discovered inside, whose shape corresponds to that of a right-angled parallelopiped with strongly rounded edges. Its dimensions are 67mm, 62mm, and 47mm, and its weight 785g. The whole surface is covered with the finger-like depressions
It was found by a factory worker in the Braun iron foundry
peculiar to meteorites; a layer of magnetic oxide which covers it is finely wrinkled. The iron contains compound carbon and some nickel, but a quantitative analysis has not yet been carried out.” Although geometrical terms are used to describe the form, the measures already indicated mean that the object cannot have been a perfect cube! In 1892, the Die Fortschritte
der Physik 4 still regarded the Cube as a meteorite, but noted that one characteristic of iron meteorites was missing: “A piece of meteoritic iron was discovered in a lump of lignite from Wolfsegg when this was smashed. The piece has the dimensions of 67mm, 62mm, 47mm and weighed 785g. The iron showed fingerprints, contained carbon, nickel, but showed no Widmanstätten pattern. Mr Daubrée has some notes on lignite mines and stresses how important this find is, as previously not a single meteorite has been encountered in these strata.”
However, despite these misgivings, Gurlt’s identification of the metal object as a meteorite was not questioned by anyone for quite some time. In 1888, the Vienna mineralogist and meteor expert Dr Aristides Brezina (1848-1909) carried out an investigation on behalf of the Bergmannstag (miner’s assembly) and published his results in a six-page text ( Ueber
das Eisen von Wolfsegg, Verlag des Comité’s des Bergmannstag, 1888). He concluded that the iron was not meteoric after all, but artificial and man-made, and was the product of iron smelting. It also was recent, not Tertiary.
After Brezina, other experts had a closer look, and the story quickly changed. Much, it now appeared, had been pure imagination on the part of Dr Gurlt. It seems that by 1908, it had become common knowledge that the Wolfsegg Iron or Salzburg Cube was simply a piece of slag – a by-product of metallurgy. The science magazine Gaea pointed out that the iron had not been found in isolation, but as a part of a large deposit. “The Wolfsegg iron had been taken for a Tertiary meteorite, but later analyses by Dr Aristides Brezina has revealed it to be an artificial product.” 5 A mining magazine wrote, after carrying out its own investigation: “The Wolfsegg iron is most likely a product of a furnace, and according to Dr M Mach an artefact of a doubtful historical period.” 6
I am not the first to find this out. As Canadian fortean Mr X explains in a note to his cyber text edition of Fort’s first book: “The object was believed by Adolf Gurlt, a mining engineer, to be a fossil meteorite; however, the object had no Widmanstattan pattern, and it contained no nickel, chromium, nor cobalt. The ‘Wolfsegg Iron’ was believed, by R Grill of the Geologische Bundesanstalt in Vienna, to be a piece of cast iron, which was found among pieces of coal at an iron foundry and which may have been ‘used as ballast with primitive mining machinery’.” That brings to three – Brezina, Mach and Grill – the total number of specialists who determined that the Cube was nothing more than a piece of slag. Common scientific opinion on the identity of the specimen has not changed since then. As the photo of the actual specimen in the Vöcklabruck Heimathaus Museum shows, the Wolfsegg iron was never a cube, and the groove is far from technically perfect. When Gurlt described the general form as a
parallelepiped (a three-dimensional figure formed by six parallelograms) he obviously never intended to imply a precise, abstract body, but it was so taken by Fort, and after him repeated by many others. Fort could only speculate as to whether it was an alien artefact or the remains of a lost civilisation from our most distant past. But it is not. However, I am sure it will resurface in some fortean potboiler sooner or later, described once more as a perfectly machined cube bearing an equally precise and mysterious groove.