The Coso Artefact- A 500000 Year Old Spark Plug

A Brief History
On February 13, 1961, while 3 Californians were looking for geodes, they picked up a rock believed to be 500,000 years old that was later found to contain a spark plug! Understandably, this find, now known as the “Coso artifact,” sparked a lot of mystery and controversy.

Digging Deeper
Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell (love that name), were poking around the geology of Olancha, California when they came across their amazing discovery.

Upon cutting open the supposed geode, they expected it to be hollow inside and containing crystals. Instead the trio’s diamond-bladed saw blade was ruined, and rather than find crystals, they found a modern spark plug instead. History and Headlines Note: Spark plugs were invented in 1860 and became common a few decades later.

Explanations for this seemingly impossible event included: speculation that an ancient advanced civilization (perhaps Atlantis?) had produced the spark plug; that it was of alien origin; or that it had been forgotten by time travelers.

More scientific investigations have concluded the spark plug was of 1920’s manufacture (Champion brand used in Model T and Model A Fords) and that the supposed geode was actually a “concretion” of clay and stone that had formed over a period of decades, not thousands of years as would a geode.

Still, the mystery continues to this day. It is unknown who originally estimated the age of the rock around the spark plug to be 500,000 years old. The location of the discovery is also unknown. Of the 3 hobby geologists, one is dead, the other cannot be found, and the third refuses to discuss it. And most mysteriously, the artifact itself has disappeared.

Question for students (and subscribers): Is this a case of 3 people finding a recently-in-human-history discarded spark plug that became encased in dirt, or could there be a more mysterious explanation? Let us know who or what you think is behind this “time-traveling” spark plug in the comments section below this article.