Upshur County, West Virginia is a classic example of Appalachian coal country. Besides the mineral wealth of the earth, its forested hills provide an equally valuable timber industry. There is only one incorporated city, the County Seat of Buckhannon, with numerous diminutive unincorporated communities interspersed through the forest ridges and valleys. It seems an unusual place for an artifact that insinuates a prehuman civilization to have been discovered.

The Second World War was reaching its climax in 1944 when then ten year old Newton Anderson went to his home's basement for another load of locally produced coal for the family fire. One large lump falls to the floor and splits along the seam and exposes an object hidden away in the mineral that formed roughly three hundred million years ago in the Carboniferous Era. It is a brass, hand-held bell!

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The most distinguishing feature of the bell is the carved figure on its top. It is of a humanoid figure which appears to be in a kneeling position with wings and a beak. There was an iron clapper still attached to the inside of the bell. The object has changed hands since Mr. Anderson found it years ago. In 2007 it came into the hands of the newly constructed Institute for Creation Research and on display at the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky. According to the Institute, the bell was delivered to the University of Oklahoma for analysis by the nuclear activation method. While it is brass, it is not the brass alloy that has been used by our civilization since at least the rise of the Sumerian culture some six thousand years ago. It has an unusual mixture of copper, zinc, tin, arsenic, iodine, and selenium.

Also to help verify the story behind the bell's discovery, the Institute solicited the services of a licensed polygraph expert to test Mr. Anderson about the finding of this unusual object. The examiner, Mr. L. Stan Fulmer of Davidson, North Carolina is a trained professional with over twenty-seven years experience performing polygraph tests for both the courts and private sector businesses. His findings were that Mr. Anderson was expressing no deception when he related his story.
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The figure adorning the bell is an interesting study in the possibility of either an ancient pre-Adamic race as the founders of the Creation Institute believe or evidence of an ancient alien presence on our planet long before humanity emerged. Both theories are possible and could well be one and the same. The Sumerian legends of the Annunaki say that their planet Nibiru had already been captured in orbit around our sun before the Earth had restablized from its collision with Tiamat. It is therefore possible they were traveling to and exploring this planet long before the four hundred thousand year mark that Sumerian legend says was the time of their colonization.

It is known that the astronauts that piloted the Annunaki rockets were always depicted with wings and bird-headed helmets. Couldn't it be just as likely that the image is a depiction of one of these voyagers as it might be a "demon" from a mythology millions of years younger than the geological strata the bell was buried in? That this artifact ended up in what is now West Virginia in the North American continent is not so unbelievable. A people capable of interplanetary travel would have no trouble traveling anywhere on the planet. That this out of place and time artifact was even found after its long wait in the dark is a testament to the incredible potential for the amazing, whether terrestrial or of otherworldly origin.

Twentieth century archaeology uncovered a literary gold mine from the past when they excavated the massive library of clay tablets stored in the area that was once known as Sumeria in our current Middle East. Thousands of records written in cuneiform, possibly the first written human language, divulged a great storehouse of information, including much that on first look conflicted greatly with our understanding of our planet's past and our rise to dominance of the planet.

These records describe to gravitational capture of a rogue planet that had been traveling the depths of interstellar space for unknown eons. This planet, called Nibiru, turned out to be much more than a mere wayward rock. According to the Sumerian texts, this planet was inhabited by a race of virtually immortal beings that the Sumerians considered to be their gods. This intrusion was so far back in our solar system's history that planet Earth was said to be formed from the collision of two planetary bodies being knocked together by the gravitational disruption Nibiru caused by passing within the inner part of the system.

Whether due to the long voyage between the stars or because of damage to Nibiru during it's gravitational capture, its inhabitants needed the raw materials to fix the damage and maintain the internal heat of this "radiant" planet. As time passed they colonized the earth and began mining operations. While they took many materials, it was gold they most fervently sought for its electrical properties to heal the wounds in Nibiru's atmosphere.

Using the astronomical data about Nibiru that was presented in the Sumerian texts, astronomers used the "Infrared Astronomical Satellite" to scan the far reaches of our system to see if they could locate what was causing the wobble in the orbits of the outer planets. In the 1983-84 observations from this satellite’s data was discovered a planetary body immersed in to Oort cloud of debris on the edges of our star system. This planetary body fit the descriptions of a retrograde orbit that did not lie along the plane of the elliptic and was roughly where projected orbital calculations would put Nibiru at this time in history. While this discovery made news at first, it quickly became a buried subject that no one seemed to want to discuss.

Had they realized they had discovered the home planet of the ancient aliens that walked our Earth long before we even existed?

In recent years the excavation and subsequent translation of thousands of clay tablets from the ancient land of the Sumerians has sparked a new controversy over just who we humans really are and where we originated. Based primarily on the work of the linguistic scholar Zechariah Sitchin, these translated writings from the earliest days of our known history tell some interesting and occasionally shocking stories about our beginnings.

Along with lists of daily business transactions there are extensive and detailed tables of scientific and astronomical information. The priest/scientist class of these ancient people were very interested in the movements of the planets with especial care about the proper times when a spacecraft/rocket could travel from Earth to what is described as the home planet of their gods. This was not mythology for the Sumerians as these gods lived among them and ruled over them.

Added to the fact that these tablets accurately portrayed all the planets of our solar system, including those only visible with large telescopes, is the system by which they are numbered. The planets in the ancient Sumerian texts count inward from outer space rather than outward from the sun.

Annunaki or Annukim translates from the Sumerian language as "Those who from the sky (or stars) came". The discovered tablets contain stories of how the planet of the gods entered our solar system very long ago and destabilized the planets to the point of causing the destruction of one, now circling the sun as the asteroid belt, and the collision of two others. These two broke up and ultimately reformed as the Earth and the Moon.

Much later, as the new planet Earth stabilized and developed life, the Annunaki journeyed from their home planet, called Nibiru, and set up several colonies on the young planet. The primary purpose for this colonization was to mine several natural resources, most notably gold, to be used to repair the damaged atmosphere of their home world. It is recorded on these tablets that the Annunaki are virtually immortal, with life spans so long that a single administrative assignment on Earth was two thousand years.

It is only circumstantial, but this could explain why, even as far from their colonies in what is now called the Middle East, there are fossil records that show in an ancient Texas mudflat, the tracks of a shoe wearing human crossing and mixing with the tracks of a dinosaur. From these tablets comes the belief that these aliens have been here from the very beginning.