SPECIAL FEATURES:
Email
Man looks for missing cat, finds 'UFO' instead
The farmer and neighbors immediately jumped to UFO as it has become the default explanation for mysterious and oversized metal objects.
Fri, Mar 16 2012 at 3:23 PM
Related Topics:
HOW'D IT GET THERE THEN?: A deep hole in an Austrian field was discovered by a farmer looking his cat. A UFO was believed to be burried 25 feet beneath the ground there. (Photo: Life's Little Mysteries)
According to news reports, an Austrian farmer discovered a mysterious, deep, perfectly round hole that apparently had appeared in his field overnight. And, of course, extraterrestrial activity was assumed.
Farmer Franz Knoglinger discovered the hole while looking for a lost pet. In an interview with the Austrian Times newspaper, Knoglinger said: "I was looking for our family cat, Murlimann, when I noticed the hole. I didn't know how deep it was, so I dropped the stone down there and heard a metallic clunk. From the time it took for the stone to reach the bottom, I realized it was very deep."
Intrigued, Knoglinger used a rope to lower a magnet into the hole, and he concluded that whatever was at the bottom was metallic. This only deepened the puzzle, and soon the mystery drew local, national and, finally, international attention. Curiosity-seekers, geologists and UFO buffs flocked to the farm to see the hole for themselves. A buried UFO became a favorite explanation.
A few clues shed some light on the mystery. If the hole was indeed perfectly round, then the obvious source was a drill. In fact, the hole's perfect roundness would make it less mysterious, if anything, because drills leave round holes. A perfectly square, rectangular, or even oval shape would be more extraordinary.
Perhaps a more interesting question was why, of all the possible explanations — an abandoned well, a long-forgotten underground storage tank — the idea of an underground extraterrestrial spacecraft was the one Knoglinger and others focused on. [7 Things that Create Convincing UFO Sightings]
Part of the answer is that an extraterrestrial craft has become a default explanation in recent years for any large unknown (and presumably round and/or metallic) object. For example, a large round object was recorded on sonar on the ocean floor by a Swedish archaeology team last year. The image has not been confirmed as real (and many experts suspect it's actually a false reading), but by far the most popular explanation is that the round object is a spacecraft. Human imagination almost always creates far more exotic and interesting possibilities than reality can provide, and anything just out of reach, be it deep underwater or underground, can conjure visions of alien spaceships.
The case in Austria stumped many until a local historian decided to do a bit of digging — not in the dusty field but in the local land-use archives. It turns out the hole had not appeared overnight as Knoglinger assumed, but had been there for decades. In fact, a half-century ago an oil company had drilled there looking for oil. A large metal drill bit became stuck and broke before workers could find anything, so they left the drill bit at the bottom of the hole and never bothered to fill it in. That's what attracted the magnet dropped down to the bottom: not a spaceship but a large metal bit stuck in rock.
Over the years the area became farmland and people stopped noticing the hole, either because it had been covered by grass or a piece of wood or simply because, with the advent of modern farming machinery, there were fewer people working in the field.
As for the missing cat, it was eventually found hiding in a cupboard.
Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and author of Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. His Web site is www.BenjaminRadford.com.
Related on Life's Little Mysteries:
Copyright 2012 Lifes Little Mysteries, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved.
You might also like:
Sign in with one of these accounts to add your comment.
EDITORS' PICKS
Advertisement
TODAY'S MOST POPULAR ON
- Student science experiment finds plants won't grow near Wi-Fi router
- How to get a second crop of tomatoes -- for free
- 15 famous people who mysteriously disappeared
- 9 habits that may do more harm than good
- Bras don't actually work, says French study
- The 9 nastiest things in your supermarket
- Men and women literally see the world differently
- Food fraud: 10 counterfeit products we commonly consume
- Man looks for missing cat, finds 'UFO' instead
- 12 best new features of the Samsung Galaxy S4
NEWSLETTER
Advertisement
Why would a cat in a cupboard ever need a bell? :)
Lest he were musically shy, private, or perhaps nice acoustics.
Why would you waste our time with this post... It's a good article but very misleading title.
i don't think the title was misleading at all. the fact that they had UFO in quotes gave me all the info i needed.
He probably drilled the hole and made a fake metal thingyy and through it down there, and probably ate the cat !! ^^
i did my research and the same things are
all over russia and some of austria...
IF it was a UFO, then where is it.. you would think they would have brought whatever that is in the whole out. So show us what was in there, instead of the whole in the ground. Yes, what happened to the cat?? Strange..
What happened to the cat? What happened to your attention span? ;-D Read the final line of the article.
The cat was hiding in a cupboard. It's OK.
The Metal thing is a piece of metal left by an oil company... and the cat is fine :)
That must have been a heck of surprise! LOL
UFO is Unidentified FLYING Object...this is an Unidentified Buried Object or UBO...and I think it's smells just as bad!!
WHAT ABOUT THE CAT???
This is hilarious, as are the comments! Makes me want to go get a post hole digger and see what kind of whackiness I could stir up.
dropped a magnet down and it was attracted to something-
that almost automatically eliminates a space type vehicle-
not likely to be made of a magnetical type metal-
You're all terrible detectives. The "kitty" is an alien!
LOL!!!!!!
LOL!!
A photograph of the object found would've been nice! The image shown here is pointless.
Show us the cat.
dude. did they ever find the cat?!
it says "as for the cat, it was found hiding in a coubord" SORRY FOR THE misspellings im only 12
wow, this article was POINTLESS
>.<
What is wonderfully hilarious about this article is that we start off talking about a hole in Australia and by the end of the article we are in Austria.
Wah ha!
no where does it say australia
No Austraia
read the caption.
Pages