Headline of the year: "Buddhist ‘Iron Man’ found by Nazis is from space"

The only way this Nature News headline could be any better is if the Nazis themselves were from space.

A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin. Known as the ‘iron man’, the 24-centimetre-high sculpture may represent the god Vaiśravaṇa and was likely created from a piece of the Chinga meteorite that was strewn across the border region between Russia and Mongolia between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to Elmar Buchner, of the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and his colleagues.

The paper this article references is here: "Buddha from space—An ancient object of art made of a Chinga iron meteorite fragment," in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

• [SamSam]

  Do they have any evidence that it was carved by Humans? I’d like to believe it came from space looking as it does now.

  • [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

    It’s a black helicopter larva. They sample the brain waves of nearby populations during and before extruding their cocoon in order to pick an appearance that maximizes the chances of the larva being left undamaged by local people and sufficiently venerated that an unsuspecting host will be nearby when it emerges to start the next stage of its life cycle.

    The morphology can vary markedly depending on the ambient mythology at the time of pupation, so they can be quite difficult to recognize.

    • [Boundegar]

      Waaaaaaaait a minute.  THAT wasn’t in Wikipedia!

      • [retepslluerb]

        It is now.

• [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

  Are we sure that the Buddha wasn’t actually planted in Tibet by time-travelling space Nazis(you never know what they are up to in their base on the dark side of the moon) in order to legitimize the Tibetan expedition as part of some wacky power struggle within the upper echelons of the party?

  • [Brainspore]

    We already knew the Iron Man was a time traveller thanks to the research of Doctors Iommi, Ward, Butler and Osbourne of the Black Sabbath Institute. A partial abstract of their findings reads:

    He was turned to steel In the great magnetic field When he travelled time For the future of mankind 

    Still unanswered questions include: Is he alive or dead? Has he thoughts within his head? We’ll just pass him there—why should we even care?

• [Felton / Moderator]

  Indiana Jones and the Buddhist Iron Man from Space.

• [kmoser]

  Technically, everything is from space.

• [Brian Donohue]

  Damn, they beat Weekly World News to the scoop!

• [Jeremy Pickett]

  This just confirms what us Laser Lotus Buddhists have known all along.

• [blindidiotgod]

  Probably acquired by the Nazi expedition documented in this film:

  http://archive.org/details/1943-Geheimnis-Tibet

  “In 1938 Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler sponsored an expedition to Tibet lead by several Nazi SS scientists to study the regions flora and fauna, and to take scientific measurements of the Earths magnetic fields. The expedition was also sent to find traces of the orgins of the “Aryan” race in Tibet which was where Himmler thought evidence of could be found. This film is a Nazi era documentary of that expedition.”
  - Film Summary by Jim Riecken via IMDb ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236249/ )

• [Gyrofrog]

  Heh heh… “chinga.”

  • [Nagurski]

     Wouldn’t “Chingada meteorite” be more grammatically correct?

• [tyrsalvia]

  On my Facebook, I asked my friends what author they would dearly love to see write a novel about this object. I have been enjoying the mental plot synopses I have been getting out of this exercise. 

• [acerplatanoides]

  Sure it’s not carved from the Buddha’s spaceship, suuuuure it isn’t. 

• [heligo]

  I love you Xeni :)