Nexus - 0305 - New Times Magazine-pages

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- the Arizona sunshine which was about 115 degrees at five per cent humidity, so it really dried fast. What happened was that after the material dried, it ‘exploded’. It exploded like no explosion I had ever seen in my life, and I've worked with a lot of explosive materials. There was no explosion and there was no implosion. It was as if somebody had detonated about 50,000 flash bulbs all at one time—just poof! All the mate- rial was gone, the filter paper was gone and the funnel was cracked. So I took a brand new pencil that had never been sharpened, stood it on end next to the funnel and started drying another sam- ple. When the material detonated, it burned the pencil about 30 per cent in two but did not knock the pencil over. All the sample was gone. So this was not an explosion and was not an implo- sion. It was like a tremendous release of light. It was like you set that pencil beside a fireplace and after about 20 minutes you saw it was smoking on onc side and burning in two. That's what the pencil looked like immediately after the flash. Now this just had me baffled. Whatever this stuff was, it was wild. We found that if we dried it out of the sunlight, it didn't explode; but if we dried it in the sunlight, it exploded. Then we took some of the powder that was dried out of the sun- light, and we decided to put it in what is called a crucible reduc- tion. A crucible reduction involves taking a crucible—which is like a big drinking-glass made out of porcelain—and mixing your powder with lead and all this flux, and heating it ‘til the lead melts. What happens is the metals that are heavier than lead stay in the lead, and all of those that are lighter float out. This is the basic premise of your fire assays which have been done for hun- dreds of years. Now supposedly, gold and silver will stay in the lead and all your other non-heavy elements will come out of the lead. This is the tried-and-true way of doing metals analysis. Well, this material settled to the bottom of the lead just like it was gold and silver. This material seemed to be denser than lead. When we poured off the slag it would take everything but the noble elements. When we poured off the lead, this material would come off as a constituent at the bottom of the molten lead. It was separated from it. Yet when we take this material and put it on a bone ash cupel, the lead soaks into the cupel and it leaves this bead of gold and silver. Well, we did this and we got a bead that should have been gold and silver. We took this bead for analysis to all the commercial laborato- ries and they said, "Dave, there is nothing but gold and silver there." Except I could take that bead, set it on a table, hit it with a hammer and shatter it like glass. Now there is no known alloy of gold and silver that is not soft. Gold and silver dissolve in each other perfectly and they form solid solutions. They are both very soft elements, and so any alloy of gold and silver, if that's all that's there, is going to be soft and ductile. You can flatten it out and make a pancake out of it. Yet this material shattered like glass. | said, "Something's going on here that we are not under- standing. Something unusual is happening.” So what we did was we took these beads of gold and silver and separated them chemically, with the gold and silver out. What we had left was a whole bunch of black stuff. When I took this black stuff to the commercial laboratories they told me that it was iron, silica and aluminum. I said, "This can't be iron, silica and alu- minum. First of all, you can't dissolve it in any acids or any bases once it is totally dry. It doesn’t dissolve in fuming sulphuric acid, it doesn't dissolve in sulphuric nitric acid, it doesn't dissolve in hydrochloric nitric acid. Even this dissolves gold, yet it won't dissolve this black stuff." I thought this material was really strange. It just had to have an explanation. No one could tell me what it was. Basically, 1 went to Corncll University. 1 said, “We are just going to have to throw some money at this problem." So I went and hired a Ph.D. at Cornell who considered himself an expert on precious elements. | suspected we were dealing with precious elements. I said, "I want to know what this is." I paid him to come out to Arizona. He looked at the problem. He said, "We have a machine back at Cornell that can analyse down to parts per billion. You let me take this material back to Corel] and I'll tell you exactly what you have, exactly. Unless it is chlorine, bromine or one of the lighter elements, then we can't analyse it. But if it is anything above iron, we will find it." Zz When we got back there he told me it was iron, silica and _ aluminum. - I said, “Look, doctor, do you have a chemistry laboratory around here we could borrow?" He said, "Yes." I said, a "Let's go to the chemistry laboratory." We worked in the chemistry laboratory all the rest of that day and we were able to remove all the silica, all the iron and all the alu- minum. We still had 98 per cent of the sample, and that Y was pure nothing. a7 I said, "Look, I can hold this in my hand, I can weigh it, I can perform chemistries with it. That is something. 1 know ' that is something. It is not nothing.” He said, "The absorp- yt - : Hi tion or emissions spectrum does not agree with anything we have programmed into our instrument." I said, "Well, that is something and I'm going to find out what.” And he said, "Mr Hudson, why don't you give us a VV US$350,000-dollar grant and we'll put graduate students to looking into it." Well, I had already paid this man about US$22,000 because he claimed he could analyse anything, and he hadn't. He didn't offer to pay any of my money back. I said, "Sir, I don't know what you pay the people around here, but we pay minimum wage on the farm where I work and I can get a lot more out of US$350,000 than you can. So I'm going to go back and do the work myself.” oi x AN OO i} L a : : — a = Se f 2 : oad >: 3 = . ve oye Ses Pe: : ; — aa ‘ uv : i re aS 30 * NEXUS ec Panis _ — = a AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1996