The enigma of the aluminum artifact from the Pleistocene
In 1974, a few kilometers from the city of Aiud, Romania, during an excavation on the banks of the Mures river, a group of construction workers stumbled upon some mastodon fossils. Alongside the fossils, workers also found an object that shouldn't have been there: a mysterious metal artifact. Here is the controversial history of the Aiud Artifact.
Around the mid-1970s, a group of workers engaged in a construction excavation near the city of Aiud, Romania, uncovered a disconcerting artifact.
At about 10 m deep, the workers found some fossils of mastodons, animal species that lived during the Pleistocene, plus a mysterious metal object covered in a layer of aluminum oxide.
At first, the find appeared to be a simple rock, but after removing the thick crust of sand from the surface, the workers realized that it could not be a natural object, rather something produced artificially, given that it had very specific characteristics.
The object, weighing approximately 5 kg, was 20.2 cm long, 12.7 cm wide and 7 cm thick, with a circular depression in the center with a diameter of approximately 4 cm. Another small perpendicular hole, with a diameter of approximately 1.7 cm, appeared on one of the sides of the object perpendicular to the central depression. Finally, two protruding flaps seemed to have housed some sort of hinge.
The workers took the artifact to the Transylvanian History Museum, where it was placed in a warehouse and remained forgotten for almost 20 years, without anyone ever thinking of carrying out any analyses. Until, in 1995, the artefact was "rediscovered" and subjected to in-depth analysis.
The first chemical tests to determine the composition of the object were carried out in two separate laboratories: that of the Archaeological Institute of Cluj-Napoca, and one in Lausanne, Switzerland. Both laboratories reached similar conclusions: the object was composed mainly of aluminum (89%), plus 11% of other minor metals.
The researchers were a bit disconcerted by the results of the analysis, given that pure aluminum is not found in nature (it is extracted from bauxite), and the technology needed to create something so pure only became available in the mid-1990s of the 19th century. The production of aluminum requires a complicated industrial process of electrolysis and temperatures above 900° C.
Dating the thin outer layer of oxidation covering the aluminum block gave a date of 400 years. However, the geological layer in which the object was found corresponded to the Pleistocene era, about 20 thousand years ago.
A new metallurgical analysis was subsequently carried out by Dr. Florin Gheorghita, at the Institute for the Study of Metals and Non-Metallic Minerals, based in Magurele, Romania. The examination revealed that the object is composed of an extremely complex metal alloy. 12 different elements were found, of which Gheorghita was also able to establish the percentages:
- aluminum (88.1%)
- copper (6.2%)
- silicon (2.84%)
- zinc (1.81%)
- lead (0.41%)
- tin (0.33%)
- zirconium (0.2%)
- cadmium (0.11%)
- nickel (0.0024%)
- cobalt (0.0023%)
- bismuth (0.0003%)
- silver (0.0002%)
- gallium (in tracks)
So, what is it ?
Despite having obtained the precise chemical composition of the object, the scientific community has not expressed its opinion on its nature, so the Aiud find remains an enigma.
However, some researchers are convinced that it is an artificial object, part of a larger tool produced by a lost ancient civilization that managed to produce aluminum of remarkable purity hundreds, or even thousands, of years before the modern era, while Ancient Astronaut Theorists venture to suggest that it is even a component of an ancient spacecraft.
The shape, in fact, would resemble that of a support of a space exploration module, similar to the final part of the Vicking probe or the lunar module of the Apollo missions. According to this hypothesis, the object would be part of an alien probe that broke away following a rather violent landing.
In both cases, both the analysis of the external oxidation layer and the geological layer in which it was found fail to adequately explain how such a technologically advanced object could have existed in such a remote era.
