When I lived in Japan, I was a half hour walk away from one of the country’s greatest mysteries: Masuda no Iwafune. Translated as the Rock Ship of Masuda, this strange stone overlooks Asuka from the top of Iwafune Hill. It weighed about 800 tons and has perplexed researchers, historians and the curious alike because of the two perfect square holes cut into the top of it.
When asking locals in the area, one thing was clear. Nobody really knew who made it, how it was made and why it was there. Of course, there were many theories ranging from it once being a tomb, a type of distillery for sake, something as simple as a sign holder, as complex an equipment for astronomical observations, and as mysterious as a remnant of alien life. When in doubt, as you will read, go all out X-Files!
Whatever it was, visiting this rock sparked a fascination in me on the unexplained things we leave behind. Things like Stonehenge, the Dolmens of North Caucasus or the heads on Easter Island are some of the most known finds due to their size, scope and seeming impossibility for ancient people to have made them without the technology or tools we use now.
While sparking much debate, many of these do feel that these are all in tune with the time we place them to have been built within. This can’t be said about Out-Of-Place Artifacts. Also known as OOPArt (because it’s so much cooler to say!), these are things we’ve discovered that just don’t belong at all. Picture discovering, say, an iPhone inside King Tut's tomb, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a Hurrian hymn written in cuneiform, or a cave painting of Keith Richards. Ok, I admit, the last one is plausible but you get the idea.
OOPArt challenges our conventional chronology of history by being far too advanced for what we know of the civilizations and the inherent limits we believe them to have had. They were just ahead of their time. Like Kraftwerk! Even more peculiar, some of these artifacts suggest a human presence before we were here. While some turned out to be clever hoaxes, there are many that just present more questions than answers.
So let me bust out my best Robert Stack impersonation and dive into some of my favourite unsolved OOPArt mysteries.
The Baigong Pipes Location: Mount Baigong, China Discovered in: 1996
Inside of China’s Mount Baigong there are a series of caves. Well, that’s not so strange. In these caves there are what appear to be a system of pipes running through the rock and connecting to a nearing lake. Seemingly made at least partially of metal, some are quite small with others measuring at 16 inches in diameter. Ok, still not so strange. I hear ya’. Somebody had a really dedicated plumber to get their lake water, right? Well, not unless this Mr. Rooter was 150,000 years old. That’s how far back thermoluminescence tests date these things. Research states that humans have only been in the region over the past 30,000 years so how did the pipes get there, how could they possibly have been created and what were they for? There could be a simple explanation for this one, that being that there are not pipes at all, really just a naturally occurring phenomenon, but there’s been nothing definitive. Adding to the mystery is a pyramid structure on top of the mountain. Sadly, China isn't letting anybody in to inspect these more thoroughly.
The Coso Artifact Location: Olancha, California Discovered in: 1961
A spark plug from the 1920s found sheathed in 500,000 year old rock? That’s what Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell believe they found while seeking out geodes at the start of the 60s. While the rock certainly dates back long before we were racing in the streets, members of the Spark Plug Collectors of America (yup, that’s a thing!), pegged the plug to be one that was widely used in Model T Ford engines. This was again confirmed more recently, April of 2018 to be exact, by a geologist from the University of Washington Earth and Space Science department. While some have speculated, you guessed it, aliens or even an advanced civilization to have crafted the plug, critics state that Maxey’s failure to provide specific information on how he dated the geode the plug was stated to have been found in as evidence that this could be all more spark than fire.
The London Hammer Location: London, Texas Discovered in: 1936
Imagine being out for relaxing walk with your lover and discovering a strange looking piece of wood jutting out of a rock. Do you just keep walking or attempt to Excalibur that sucker out of there? Well, Max Hahn and his wife didn’t do either. Instead, they just picked up the curious stone and brought it home. Sure, why not? We needed a paperweight. It was only when their son busted the thing open ten years later that they discovered the wood was attached to 6 inch hammerhead. 96.6% iron, the discovery of the tool in and of itself isn’t so perplexing as it is consistent with tools made in the region dating back to the 1800s. The questions start arising when articles such as one in a 2014 edition of the Epoch Times state that the rock surrounding the hammer was more than 100 million years old. Humans, thus, couldn’t have made it as the earliest fossils records tell us we only started cropping up 2 million years back (a fact that important to keep in mind as you keep reading). The current owner of the hammer isn’t keen on having this mystery solved as he has not agreed to having it tested by an independent source. For now, we either have to go with #FakeNews or time travelers from the 1880’s went back to mess with the fine Texas folk of 1936. Yee ha!
The Kensington Runestone Location: Solem, Minnesota Discovered in: 1898
Found wrapped up in roots, this stone was covered in runes that were roughly translated to read:
“8 Geats and 22 Norwegians on acquisition venture from Vinland far to the west We had traps by 2 shelters one day’s travel to the north from this stone We were fishing one day. After we came home found 10 men red with blood and dead AVM (Ave Maria) Deliver from evils.I have 10 men at the inland lake to look after our ship 14 days travel from this wealth Year of our Lord 1362”
The discovery caused some to believe that Vikings ventured much farther than L’anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland here in the Great White North. Hell, they could have made it to Fargo, yaaah. So, should we start re-writing the history books? The stone caused a sensation after it was discovered with the Swedish immigrant who found it receiving both praise and scorn. The latter stemmed from the fact that the language of the stone did not match other 14th century discoveries of a similar nature. It does beg the question, still, how a simple farmer would have had the knowledge of such discoveries if runologists of the time couldn’t actually read it or, better still, what did the man have to gain from the fakery? Then again, he did have Scandinavian roots and was a former stonemason so things that make you go hummmm.
Aluminum Location: Romania Discovered in: 1973
Kept secret at the time of its finding, the unnamed chunk of metal found next to two ancient fossils is causing some to claim that our old alien travelers were again at work long before Mulder and Scully were telling us that the truth is out there. Here we appear to have an object that tests have revealed to not only be made from 90 per cent aluminum but also date back 250,000 years. If you buy into the alien route, seems E.T. knew something we didn’t about metal because humans didn’t start making this stuff until the 1800s. As for the bones found near the object? They were determined to belong to a now extinct mammal that died between 10,000-80,000 years ago. Baffling experts even more is that it looks like this was part of a bigger, more intricate machine.
Saqqara Bird Location: Saqqara, Egypt Discovered in: 1898
It’s a bird! It’s a plane. No, wait, it’s clearly just a bird…a bird made of sycamore removed from the 2,000 year old tomb of Pa-di-Imen, an Egyptian official from the third century BC. Orrr, maybe it IS a plane?! While some see the bird as a simple toy, ceremonial object or even an early type of weather vane, others can’t ignore just how much it resembles a plane. These more controversial hypothesis are said to give credence to ancient Egyptians making aircrafts long before ol’ Orville and Wilbur took off from Kitty Hawk. This notion is pretty well quashed if you think about how we’ve not found any ancient Egyptian 747s or any other evidence suggesting aircraft were made there. Sometimes a bird is just a bird or, more likely, a masthead for a more reasonable mode of transport at the time: a boat.
Nampa Figurine Location: Nampa, Idaho Discovered in: 1889
So, the story goes that workers drilling a well in Idaho back in 1889 unearthed this baked clay figure 320 feet underground. This depth in the Earth would be a geologic stratum formed in the Plio-Pleistocene period 4 million years ago. Soooo, once again, considering humans were only out and about 2 million years back, one might wonder how this piece, so resembling one of us, could have possibly been made? There’s some quirky theories out there that this all relates to time travel (with or without a TARDIS), but the truth is for this to be genuine we gotta’ believe a dude who writes books like Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race. The more mainstream thought is that the figure was either pushed deeper into the earth by the drilling or, somewhere in wibbly wobbly timey wimey it fell through a fissure and landed in older ground then the surface it first fell upon.
Screw Location: Kaluga region, Russia Discovered in: 1990s
So, upon first glance at the image above your first through might be: “Alrighty, who put this screw in my baked potato.” Only, it isn’t a baked potato but a 300 to 320 million year old rock and whether it is actually a screw is highly debatable. As we have learned, there supposedly wasn’t anyone around to make such a thing unless you buy into the whole even more ancient intelligent civilizations or ye’ old alien theories lobbed around in cyber land. The second is all the more likely when factoring in that the “screw” was collected by a paranormal research team who may be a little biased in their reports. As they have not turned it over for study or said what it is made of, skeptics and scientists alike believe it is probably just a crinoid fossil. The fact that most of you are thinking that that isn't as cool as aliens has got to make the crinoid fell a little depressed.
Antikythera Mechanism Location: Aegean Sea, Greece Discovered in: 1901
This one is pretty damn fascinating. The Antikythera Mechanism, pulled off a shipwreck by archaeologist Valerios Stais, is believed to be a 2,000-year-old computer. No, for reals. Not ancient unknown humans, not aliens, but made by an actual Bill Gates of the past! This thing actually has changed our understanding of our history. When you first look at the thing you might brush it off as a cog or gear but closer inspection revealed that there are at least two dozen gears atop each other regulated with a certain precision we most commonly date to having originated in the 16th century. Most who studied it came to the same conclusion, it was a type of clock or calculator though nobody could adequately say what it was really for until 1959. That was when Derek J. de Solla Price revealed that he believed it was a device used to predict where the planets and stars would be depending on the month. “The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock ... or like a modern analogue computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation.” How the ancient Greek’s came up with such a device remains a mystery so I guess it could still be aliens.
Don’t you just wish they’d stop leaving all their space junk lying around?