Mysterious objects dating back millions of years
In 2013 Russian journalistic sources report a curious story that occurred in a small town in Russia. Mr. Dmitry, a resident of Vladivostok, had ordered some coal to fuel his stove and cope with the harsh Russian winter. When he began to take coals from the pile, Dmitry noticed a coal nugget with a metal object stuck inside it. Intrigued by the mysterious object, Dmitry wasted no time and immediately reported the discovery to Valery Brier, a biologist from the Primorye region, who, together with other researchers in the area, agreed to carry out laboratory analyses.
When the researchers broke the piece of coal containing the metallic object, they discovered that it was a particularly light and soft alloy. At first observation, the object appears to be very similar to a toothed metal rail, artificially created to be part of a mechanism. It's hard to believe that a natural object can take on such a precise shape. Furthermore, the intervals between the teeth of the gear are curiously large in relation to the size of the teeth themselves, which raises the possibility that the object could have been part of a complicated mechanism.
X-rays analysis on a fragment established the object's metallic structure, showing that it is a metal alloy composed of 98 percent aluminum and 2 percent magnesium.
A counter analysis was also performed by Igor Okunev, researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in St. Petersburg, who confirmed the composition of the material. This detail surprised scientists, because such an alloy is very rare in nature, so it is very likely that the object was created artificially.
But what really left scientists perplexed was discovering the age of the object: the coal in which the metal object was found was extracted from mines in the Chernogorodskiy Khakasia region, deposits famously formed 300 million years ago, therefore the metal fragment, can only date back to the same period.
How could the gear of a mechanism have been created 300 million years before the appearance of man?
But there is still a question brewing in researchers' minds: is the metal fragment of terrestrial origin? The presence of 2 percent magnesium could indicate the cosmic origin of the metal alloy.
Meteor fragments that break away from the main body are exposed to intense cosmic ray bombardment during their journey into space, which causes substantial production of aluminum-26, an isotope of aluminum, which naturally decays into magnesium-26. However, further analysis is needed to confirm this hypothesis.
Naturally, there are persons who push themselves into the most daring hypotheses: there are those who say that the fragment could be the gear of an alien mechanism that was destroyed in an ancient UFO crash, or there are also those who believe that it is a fragment left by future time travelers on a study visit to the time of the primitive Earth.
Yet, finding a strange artifact in a coal seam is not as unusual as you might think. The first discovery of this type dates back to 1851, when workers in the Massachusetts zinc mines extracted a silver vase embedded in a block of coal that dated back to the Cambrian period, that is, about 500 million years ago.
Sixty years later, Oklahoma researchers discovered an iron pot in a 312-million-year-old piece of coal.
In 1974, in a sandstone quarry in Romania, the famous "Jurassic hammer" was found, a curious aluminum object similar to a hammer, complete with a handle.
In 2012 on the Kamchatka Peninsula, a mysterious mechanical device was found cast in 400-million-year-old volcanic rock.
The discovery was made by archaeologists from St. Petersburg University, who, upon finding this kind of machine, were left speechless.
All these discoveries, before exciting mystery seekers, undermined the fundamental doctrines of modern science.
