I remember reading a article in my moms, Fate magazine a few years ago about this guy in south flordia building a house out of coral and a table and a door that weight about 1 ton.
The weird think is he did it all at night and some people claimed the guy moved these large blocks of coral with his hands. it was thought that he used the star alignment to be able to lift these stomes by hand.
i cant remeber the article that well but it was neat. Has anyone lese heard about this?

here is a link to the castle http://floridainfo.com/travel/southf...tsee/coral.htm

Link to the article from fate
http://www.parascope.com/en/articles/coralCastle.htm

Wow ....

And, Here I thought, he Used a Crane ...

Naw, On Second Thought, I prefer the Rational Explanation.

Construction Machinery!!!

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I lived in the Fort Lauderdale for ten years, and drove by the "Coral Castle" on US 1 south of Miami several times. It is real, he was a strange bird, it was moved from its original location to alongside US 1, can't remember when though. The material is very dark coral, but I don't know if too much exposure to pollution and sunlight had anything to do with the color.

Again, the structure itself is real; everything else is urban legend, or just plain BS. Even my first cousin who lived in Coral Gables just up US 1 from the place told me that "strange things happened at night."

I would suggest anyone who is really curious contact my good friend James "The Amazing" Randi at www.randi.org and send him an e-mail. He can fill you in on a lot about the urban legends surrounding The Coral Castle. There was absolutely nothing unusual-looking about it when I was there, other than the construction material of course.

Welcome to the forum Cowboy! A friend of Randi will find plenty of advocates around here.

Here's a quote from the link posted by grant23, just to provide a perfect example of a least-likely possible explanation for a mystery:
Not only is the explanation absurd, but it doesn't even fit the facts. The castle was built over 20 years, then moved 10 miles! Don't those facts completely invalidate everything Stoner claims?

(On edit: note that the link was posted by dgruss23 as a service, he was not advocating it, just to be clear.)

It isn't actually made of coral. It is made of fossilized coral that can be found on land. This was once a relatively common building material, although I believe quarrying of it is now illegal. One of my houses had a patio made of the same material, and you can see it all over in Coral Gables, Florida (that may even have something to do with the name, I'm not sure). There is really nothing unusual about it is compared to conventional limestone besides its appearance.

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It has a tendency to be more porous, due to the heterogeneity of the pre-fossilized substrate.

Thank you, it is always nice to get a welcome on arrival. I got to know Randi after knowing of him by his writing, read "Flim Flam" a long time ago, and was really pleased to learn he lived in Plantation after we moved there from North Carolina in 1993. I was with no small amount of trepidation that I entered the JREF one memorable day and actually met "The Amazing" one himself. He was everything I had pictured him to be and much more.

I was at the JREF a lot, and participated in the monthly open forum discussions in the Isaac Asamov Library, and on the webcast many nights until it was cancelled due to his schedule. I was even at the table filling in a lot of nights when Randi, Andy, or Jack were absent; it was an honor beyond my vocabulary to express. I called the JREF my "Escape from the darkness." O was deeply involved in the TAM in Plantation. I have missed them all since, but hope to be in LV this time..

I had to get out of S. Florida, and moved to what I call being "Behind the fundamentalist curtain" in north central Texas near Decatur. See www.decaturtx.com if you want. The only thing more important to Texans than the Baptist religion is football.

Coral Castle is really C - - p Castle, but it is neat in its own way when one ignores all the BS people have associated with it.

Cheers

Cheers right. Yes, it is a shame Coral Castle has been so sensationalized with obviously bogus reports, since it is a fascinating accomplishment. It seems like a classic example of Truth is Stranger than Fiction, so it's such a shame that all that has survived is the Fiction.

It's probably been mentioned in this forum before, but this site with one man who demonstrates single-handed moving of multi-ton concrete blocks is pretty cool: The Forgotten Technology

It certainly doesn't require supernatural ability, just the wise application of natural laws for leverage and tracks to make rectangular blocks rock and roll.

(There, run your cursor over a black box to inititate a movie clip.)

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But with all due respect, he's rotating the block, not lifting it. He is doing no work against gravity, so it's much easier to achieve the necessary leverage (to lift it, he'd need a leverage factor of roughly 100 to 1). He's not even moving the center of mass, so all points of contact are close to something that is stationary. Elsewhere, he might use the many-roller approach to transporting blocks, which is a cool idea that certainly has been used for things like the pyramids, working on the same principle of keeping the contact points static even though the whole business is moving. So that is kind of a "forgotten technology", but lifting still has to be a lot tougher.

Check out the stills and diagrams. He moves the really big blocks by "walking" them. With two tracks, he just keeps rotating alternate ends forward, using one track and then the other, lifting the long ends by lmoving a counterweight to the short end to lever the block. The system's center of mass will move because he keeps changing the center of mass by moving the counterweight.

The stills also show him walking a block upward, by progressively raising the pivot points.

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Thanks, I didn't stay with it that long, I should have! It's quite clever indeed.