Get your own magical blue rock from space with impossible geochemistry
You too can be the proud new owner of a Skystone which fell to Earth in Sierra Leone.
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Behold the Skystone, a beautiful blue stone said by some to be made almost entirely of oxygen, and that comes from a unique deposit in Sierra Leone. Gem hunter David Ledbetter claims to have found them in 1991:
Once located, mining rights were secured, and all known samples of Skystone were extracted and legally exported back to the US. The entire recovery of Skystone has remained in the same private ownership of family and friends since its discovery. David maintained a close relationship with the village chief until his passing in 2018. Skystone remains an enigma today, with several Universities & Laboratories researching the origins of the mysterious material.
But guess what: You can buy one from his online store! Samples listed as of today go from $1,320 to $29,750. Get out your credit card before they’re all gone!
So, what could these exquisite rocks be? Are they truly made of pure oxygen, and must their only possible origin be outer space?
I spent some time Googling for the answers. Now, I’m no geochemist — but it wasn’t hard to learn that most rocks are made mostly of oxygen. A typical oxygen content is 92%, with silicon and various metals making up the remaining 8%. So how much oxygen is in the Skystones?
I found the answer in a very unlikely place, an alternative archaeology website that claims Atlantis is real and all kinds of wacky things. Geochemical analysis on the Skystones has been done and this website offers this spectrogram as the result:
Its oxygen content is 77%, meaning it has substantially less oxygen than most rocks — so the Internet claims that the rocks are “pure oxygen” are nonsense. The major elemental components of a Skystone appear to be (in order) oxygen, carbon, silicon, and calcium.
The calcium is a big clue to what it really is. The wooey Atlantis website says:
Its composition was found to be composed of 77% oxygen, along with traces of carbon, silicon, calcium and sodium. The composition makes the 'Sky Stone' similar to a kind of concrete or stucco, and seems to have been artificially colored.
Concrete or stucco! They probably meant to say cement, since concrete is what you get when you mix aggregate into cement. That was a good clue for me to hunt for a spectrogram for cement.
Easier said than done; as the composition for cement is typically given in chemicals, not in elements. I.e., a typical cement might contain Ca0, SiO2, Al2O3, Fe2O3, H2O, and SO3. But persistence eventually paid off and I found quite a few different elemental compositions for various cement formulations. Here is one that’s in the ballpark of the Skystone:
66% oxygen, followed by (in order) calcium and silicon. It’s very close to the Skystone, except that the Skystone also has significant carbon in it. How to explain the carbon? Well, the wooey Atlantis website handled that too — they found that the blue coloring comes from indigo dye. What is indigo dye made of? It’s mostly carbon: C16H10N2O2.
(Comically, the wooey Atlantis website, even having discovered the Skystone’s actual origin, continues to credulously accept that it mysteriously fell from the sky and is somehow part of a glorious Atlantean truth.)
And so the mysterious Skystone turns out to be not all that mysterious after all. Someone probably mixed up some fine cement and added indigo dye, then molded it or painted it onto other rocks, all as shown in the Skystone’s online store. Who makes it? Ledbetter himself, or some hoaxer he’s buying it from, or someone else? I have no idea. But it’s almost certainly cement with indigo.
But fear not, they will give you their own Certificate of Authenticity, authenticated by their own selves!
For the first time we are making Skystone available to the public, Supply is extremely limited. Every sample of Skystone, featured on this website, is from David Ledbetter's 1991 original discovery in Sierra Leone. Each sample will be accompanied by a Letter of Authenticity from The Skystone Collection.
Be skeptical when buying unique, magical, “enigmatic” items sold with amazing stories.
Making your own Skystone would be the best way of demonstrating/debunking it.
Brian, have you tried to make your own Skystone? With a little cement and some indigo dye, you could have a nice little moneymaker yourself!
(Your fans here are probably too smart to fleece, but maybe as a fundraiser or auction item ...?)