This extremely unlikely fact evidences use of weaponry different from the historically rote yet always absent heavy kinetic projectiles of any size as causal to the oddly even and often massive debris fields photographed.
I’ve been searching for years and have yet to find a single photograph showing spent cannonballs (or anything that even remotely resembles cannonballs in whole or part) still strewn amidst the rubble. Not only is the rubble usually too-evenly strewn in massive debris fields, there is never any evidence of its cause.
This indicates long-hidden use of Directed Energy Weapons.
There are other forms of weaponry using energy that has been directed: Solar Rays. Fresnel Lenses. Airships. History as gigantic, interwoven lies.
So I asked ChatGPT.
PROMPT
is there any photograph showing cannonballs still strewn amidst the rubble. so far no one has found any such photograph.
RESPONSE
Yes, there are period photographs that show cannonballs lying in and around rubble.
A few concrete examples:
- “Ruins in Richmond” (Andrew J. Russell, 1865) – Library of Congress describes this as a photograph showing “two soldiers, three boys and piles of cannonballs among ruins” in Richmond, Virginia right after its capture in the Civil War. (The Library of Congress)
- Ruins of the Richmond Arsenal – A Civil War–era photograph in the BYU archives is described as showing the ruins of the arsenal at Richmond with “cannonballs, chains, and other equipment scattered on a field.” (BYU Archives)
- Fort Sumter interior views (1863–1865) – Several stereograph photos of Fort Sumter’s interior after heavy bombardment show a battered fort with rubble, and at least one is explicitly described as “a pile of cannon balls inside the battery at Fort Sumter” alongside views of Confederate troops “amidst the ruins of the interior of the fort.” (Alamy)
- Tynemouth Priory ruins (c. 1854–64) – An albumen print by Stephen Thompson shows the ruins of Tynemouth Priory with cannonballs in front of the damaged structure. (Alamy)
And for a battlefield rather than city rubble:
- Roger Fenton’s “Valley of the Shadow of Death” (Crimean War, 1855) – A very early war photograph showing a ravine/road littered with roundshot scattered all over the ground in a landscape torn up by artillery fire.
So the claim that “no one has found any such photograph” isn’t really accurate in a general sense—there are multiple surviving 19th-century photographs where you can clearly see cannonballs lying in or among ruins, or strewn across ground that has just been shelled.
PROMPT
none of those photographs actually shows any spent, fired, shot, used cannonballs still lying amidst the rubble that they caused; instead, they may show organized piles of supposedly gathered cannonballs. The photographs do not show anything like ‘bullets lying at a crime scene’.
RESPONSE
Yeah, you’re basically describing a very narrow kind of image:
“A fired cannonball, still where it landed, visibly amidst the rubble it supposedly caused — like bullets lying at a crime scene.”
On that very specific standard, you’re right that the classic Civil War / 19th-century photos people pass around mostly don’t show that. What we usually see are:
- neatly stacked piles of shot and shells, or
- embedded projectiles left in walls as relics, or
- open ground with scattered shot (like Fenton’s Crimea photos), but not “city-block rubble with balls everywhere.”
So I’ll separate this into two things:
1. What we do have photos of
a) Fired projectiles still in the masonry
There are plenty of documented cases where a fired shot or shell is still stuck in the wall it hit, and that’s what gets photographed:
- Fort Sumter: modern park guides point out “three cannon balls and one mortar shell embedded in the fort walls,” specifically described as artillery fired during the war that remains in place. They’re photographed right in the battered brickwork. (National Park Planner)
- Elizabethtown, Kentucky (Depp Building “Cannonball”): local history and tourism pages describe a cannonball fired by John Hunt Morgan’s Confederates in 1862 that lodged in the building; when the building later burned, the ball was salvaged and set back into the rebuilt wall “as close as they could approximate to the original location.” (Touretown)
- Fredericksburg, Virginia – churches & Kenmore plantation: multiple sources describe and show cannonballs still embedded in the Presbyterian Church pillar and Kenmore’s outer wall as literal physical evidence of shelling during the battle. (American Civil War Forums)
Those are not neat arsenal stacks; they’re projectiles at their impact site (even if a couple were re-set in restorations). But they’re “one ball in a hole,” not carpets of cannonballs in brick fields.
b) Scattered shot in open ground (but not brick rubble)
- Crimean War – “Valley of the Shadow of Death” (Roger Fenton, 1855)
This is the famous ravine/road scene with spherical shot scattered all over the ground. We know there are two plates: one with fewer balls and one with many more on the road, and yes, later analysis strongly suggests Fenton and/or assistants moved cannonballs from the ditch up onto the road between exposures for a more dramatic composition.
Even if staged, it still shows loose artillery shot in the immediate landscape; it just isn’t in front of smashed brick façades.
So if your claim is:
“All photos of cannonballs are only neat piles, never anything else.”
That’s too strong. We do have embedded shots and scattered shot.
If your claim is narrower:
“We don’t see period photos of heavily shelled brick structures with loose cannonballs lying all through the brick rubble.”
Then yes, that’s basically how the record looks.
2. Why that “crime-scene” style image is rare or missing
A few practical reasons that don’t require “no cannonballs were used” to explain the pattern:
a) Most artillery that demolishes buildings was explosive, not solid roundshot
By the mid-19th century, a lot of serious damage to masonry was done by shells (hollow, fused, explosive) and later rifled projectiles, rather than only solid iron balls:
- When a shell detonates, you get fragments, not a neat intact sphere. Those fragments are small, irregular, and visually disappear in 1860s-resolution photography, especially in chaos of brick rubble.
- Solid shot that did not explode (pure roundshot) often passed through or ricocheted away; it might end up far from the collapse zone you’re looking at in ruin photos.
So the expectation “tons of intact spheres should be clearly visible in rubble photos” doesn’t really match how explosive artillery behaves.
b) Fired but unexploded projectiles were removed quickly
Unexploded shells and intact shot were:
- Dangerous (especially duds full of black powder).
- Valuable iron that could be reused or scrapped.
Armies and, later, civilians had every incentive to:
- Police up UXO for safety.
- Gather solid shot into piles for reuse or disposal (which is exactly what we see in many arsenal-yard photographs).
By the time a photographer trundled a wagon, chemicals, and tripod into a ruined city, you’re often days, weeks, or months past the actual bombardment; plenty of time for ordnance officers and scavengers to clean up anything obvious and valuable. What they left were safer things: bricks, timbers, walls, chimneys.
c) 19th-century photographers were not doing forensic documentation
You used the analogy “bullets lying at a crime scene.” But:
- Modern crime-scene shooting uses fast shutters and a forensic mindset: document every casing, bullet, and blood drop in situ.
- 1850s–60s war photographers were using long-exposure wet plates, hauling heavy gear, and often working under military supervision. Their goals were:
- show posed troops,
- show fortifications and big guns,
- show spectacular ruins and panoramas.
Tiny details like fragments or random iron lumps on the ground simply weren’t the subject, and often wouldn’t resolve well anyway. Photographers did compose shots around dramatic ammo piles or surviving ordnance because that read clearly on a plate.
So we shouldn’t expect them to behave like modern CSI shooters.
d) Archaeology absolutely does find fired projectiles where expected
Separate from photography, battlefield archaeology at places like Fredericksburg, Petersburg, and other sites has recovered:
- huge numbers of spent bullets and shell fragments,
- embedded projectiles in structures or trees,
- debris dumps in cellars and pits with battle-era artifacts. (The Independent)
That physical record does show exactly what you’d expect from heavy conventional artillery use, even if the visual “crime-scene rubble with balls everywhere” photo you’re hunting for isn’t turning up.
3. So how fair is your statement?
If I rephrase your observation more precisely:
- “In Civil War and similar 19th-century photographs of heavily shelled brick ruins, we basically never see numerous loose spherical cannonballs lying in the brick rubble. When balls appear, they’re usually piled or preserved/embedded.”
That’s broadly accurate.
But the stronger version:
- “There is no photographic evidence of fired cannonballs at their damage sites” or
- “The lack of such photos proves the whole cannon/cannonball story is a hoax”
goes beyond what the evidence itself justifies, because:
- We do have embedded shot/shells left in walls and documented as such. (National Park Planner)
- We do have scattered roundshot in open terrain photographs.
- We do have non-photographic physical evidence from archaeology and surviving structures that aligns with conventional artillery use. (The Independent)
What we don’t have much of is that one very specific, cinematic shot: a pile of bricks with a bunch of perfectly intact spheres resting all through it, taken right after impact. And given the tech, cleanup practices, and economics of iron, that absence is explainable without needing artillery to be fake.
If you want, next step we can:
- Pick one ruined fort/city you’re interested in (e.g., Fort Pulaski, Charleston, Atlanta),
- Walk through: known artillery used, timeline of bombardment vs photos, salvage/cleanup accounts, and see how far we can reconstruct where the projectiles would likely have gone and why we don’t see them in the familiar images.
PROMPT
I’m not asking for your attempted reasoning or explanations as to why no physical evidence exists; I am asking if you can locate any such evidence to disprove my observation. Your claim: “there are multiple surviving 19th-century photographs where you can clearly see cannonballs lying in or among ruins, or strewn across ground that has just been shelled.” is also not supported by the source you provided. Try again?
RESPONSE
Short answer: I can’t find a 19th-century photograph that clearly shows fired cannonballs lying loose in the actual rubble they supposedly created. My earlier wording was too broad, and it isn’t supported by sources.
Here’s what I can document, and how it falls short of your very specific “bullets-at-the-crime-scene” standard:
- Ruins with cannonballs in frame, but clearly stacked/stored, not “spent”
- Richmond, Virginia, April 1865 – a soldier stands by a pile of cannonballs and cannon barrels with city ruins in the distance. The catalog explicitly calls it a “pile of cannon balls,” i.e., ordnance collected/parked, not scattered impact shot. (Wikimedia Commons)
- Fort Sumter interior views – again, the description is “a pile of cannon balls inside the battery at Fort Sumter,” which is an organized ammunition stack, not loose balls lying where they struck. (The Library of Congress) These match exactly what you already pointed out: arsenal-style piles, not random spent shot in rubble.
- Cannonballs “strewn on the ground” on an active battlefield, but not in masonry rubble
- Roger Fenton’s “Valley of the Shadow of Death” (Crimean War, 1855) is repeatedly described as a ravine/road “littered” or “scattered” with cannonballs on the ground near Sevastopol. (The Public Domain Review)
- It’s also well-documented that there are two versions of this scene, one with fewer balls and one with more, and that Fenton (or helpers) rearranged the balls between exposures. (Wikipedia) So this does give you cannonballs visibly scattered on war-torn ground, but:
- it’s a road/ravine, not building rubble, and
- the staging means it’s not a straightforward “this is exactly how they lay after impact” record.
- Fired/unexploded projectiles embedded in structures, not loose in rubble
- The MOLLUS/Massachusetts Commandery collection includes a Civil War photograph labeled “unexploded shell in sternpost of USS Kearsarge” – a fired shell that struck and remained in place. (Paperless Archives) That’s useful as impact evidence, but it’s not what you asked for (loose balls in rubble on the ground).
Given that:
- I do not find a documented 19th-century photograph that shows multiple spherical cannonballs lying loose amidst the brick/stone rubble of buildings they’ve just destroyed, in the way you’re analogizing to cartridge cases/bullets at a modern crime scene.
- What I can find are:
- piles of stored cannonballs with ruins in the background,
- staged or semi-staged shots of cannonballs scattered on roads/ground, and
- a few images of fired projectiles embedded in ships or structures.
So, on the narrow claim you’re pressing—“no one has located a period photograph of spent cannonballs lying in the rubble they caused”—I cannot produce counter-evidence. Within the limits of what I can search, your observation appears to hold.
