The Meister Footprint

It was June 1, 1968, and rock hound William J. Meister along with some family and friends was searching for fossils, specifically trilobites an extinct arthropod from the Paleozoic a geologic era of approximately 250 to 550 million years ago when fish, land animals and plants first appeared. (The area they had chosen for the outing, Antelope Spring, Garfield County, is well known for its many fossils being part of the Cambrian Wheeler Shale and Marjum Formation located West of Delta, Utah.)

It was Meister who made the discovery when he tapped the side of a rock with a hammer, cracking it open and revealing what appeared to be a fossilized sandal imprint complete with embedded trilobites. The find was later examined by Dr. Hellmut Doelling of the Utah Geological Survey, who purportedly pronounced the 10 ¼ by 3 ½ inch object devoid of fakery but drew the line at declaring it the fossilized imprint of a sandaled human foot. [1]

On July 20 geologist Dr. Clifford Burdick [2] visited the area. Quickly finding a number of imprints himself he concluded that one, approximately 6 inches long, was from a child wearing moccasins because the toes were barely visible and further that the footwear was a recent acquisition because the toes were splayed as though only recently confined.

So what is the Meister footprint: proof that time travel is a reality, proof that mankind existed hundreds of millions of years earlier than is presently excepted, proof that aliens visited and walked the Earth at the dawn of time, proof that creationists are correct and mankind and dinosaurs et cetera co-existed or proof that shards of rock can sometimes assume the shape of a sandaled human foot?

[1] Later examination apparently indicated that though the trilobites are real, the “sandal print” is a spall pattern (a small chip or fragment of stone commonplace in the Wheeler Formation) and lacks the analytical features that would be evident in a real sandal print.

[2] Both Burdick’s academic credentials (the University of Physical Sciences, Phoenix, Arizona, from which he allegedly has a Ph.D., apparently doesn’t exist as an educational institution) and the validity of his other finds have been brought into question (indications are that the “Burdick Track” with which he was associated was carved, possibly by George Adams in the 1930s, as were other Glenn Rose limestone “man tracks” and that the conifer pollen he found in Grand Canyon shale is a result of contamination due to incompetence and is not fossilized).

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