The Claim
There’s a set of ancient pipes over 100,000 years old built into the back of a cave
The Baigong pipes is an anomaly found on and within white mountain in the Qinghai province of China. They are a series of pipe like formations that can be found within 3 caves in the mountain, though the entrances to the smaller 2 caves have collapsed, leaving only the largest 18 feet high cave still accessible.
The pipes are also on the surface just above the entrance to the largest cave, and so far no one has come up with an acceptable explanation as to what they are or how they got there.
There are 2 of these pipes within the cave, measuring 16 inches in diameter, and several dozen upright pipes ranging between 4 and 16 inches in diameter on the surface area above the cave. Though they may look strange, sometimes things like this can be put down to natural phenomenon, and there are a few explanations along this line as to what they could be.
The most accepted explanation is that the pipes are mearly fossilised trees or roots. With their state turning them into an almost stone like material and giving them the appearance of old iron pipes. An article in Xinmin weekly claimed a team of Chinese scientists used atomic emission spectroscopy (whatever the hell that is) to determine what the pipes were made of. They detected high levels of organic plant matter, leading to the conclusion of some sort of petrified tree.
This sounds quite reasonable, but another investigation conducted at a local smelter found there to be high levels of oxidised iron in the material, something that isn’t found naturally in these kind of formations. This would of course suggest that the pipes are man made, which wouldn’t seem so strange if they hadn’t been dated at over 100,000 years old. Different investigations provide different results, the highest estimates putting them in the area of 150,000 years old, but most estimates conclude them to be at least 50,000 years.
If they are artificial, there is simply no way that humans could have built them as we weren’t really “human” 50,000 years ago like we are today, and people were not even close to being able to use pottery at that time, never mind metal.
Yet another article that featured in a state-run newspaper called “People Daily” in 2007 claimed that an investigation by the Chinese earthquake administration found some of the pipes to be highly radioactive. If this is true then they are most definitely artificial and not just some old trees, as organic matter has great difficulty in holding radiation for extended periods, and if some kind of radioactive emission did happen in the cave at some point, the walls would be more radioactive than the pipes.
But then again this is just an article in a less than credible newspaper so who’s to say. There doesn’t seem to have been any recent investigations into the pipes, and today the Chinese government openly advertises them as a tourist attraction.
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