Yesterday Was A Very Special Day,

in February, 1961, on the 13th,

Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell three amateur rockhunters were out looking for geodes near Olancha, California, like the ones above, rocks or boulders that when cut in half reveal a cave of crystals, one of the “geodes” they found, when they took it home, turned out to contain something other than the usual sparkly minerals,

  Andrew O’Hehir forSalon writes, "It consisted of a cylinder of what seemed to be porcelain with a 2-millimeter shaft of bright metal in its centre, enclosed by a hexagonal sheath composed of copper and another substance they couldn’t identify. Yet its discoverers first believed it had been found in a geode, a hardened mineral nodule at least 500,000 years old." if it was actually “an example of unknown technology from many millennia before the accepted emergence of Homo sapiens, let alone the dawn of human history,” he writes, it would pretty much wipe out everything scientists knew about our species’s past, all kinds of alien culture and psudo-scientists came sniffing around to see what the Coso artefact as it was known, was all about, and until the late ‘90s it was the topic of much pseudoscience and alt-archaeology conversation, but, O’Hehir writes, in 1999 a sceptic group took images and X-rays of the so-called ancient artefact (the real thing having been lost some time in the later 1960s) to spark-plug collectors, the collectors‘ take, write Pierre Stromberg and Paul V.Heinrich: it was a 1920’s spark plug with some of the metal components rusted away, and it wasn’t in a geode, just some old detritus, “To date, there has been no dissent among the spark plug collectors as to the identity of the Coso artefact,” they wrote, there is no mainstream scientific or archaeological research on the Coso artefact, but, like many other examples of hoaxes, O’Hehir writes, there are always a few believers in the unknown, some of which make up a group of people in a science called pseudoarchaeology, where fringe ideas flourish amongst groups that includes creationists and others looking for evidence to support their beliefs, the Coso artefact is an OOPART, or out-of-place-artefact: these are the bread and butter of pseudoarchaeology, the group and others have suggested that the Coso artefact is evidence of a hyper-advanced ancient civilisation like Atlantis, or of alien visitations to prehistoric earth or of time travellers, 

or it could just be a 1920s Champion spark plug, as used in the Model T Ford above, you decide!