Coso Artifact Controversy—The Half-Million Year-Old Sparkplug That Will Not Go Away
Report Topics:
- New information has emerged concerning the existence of the remains of a "sparkplug" found encased in a clay spheroid that is 500,000 years old, found in the Coso Mountains of California in 1961.
Full Report:
In 1961, three rock-collecting enthusiasts named Wallace Lane, Mike Mikesell and Virginia Maxey co-owned a small store in Olancha, southern California called the “LM and V Rockhounds Gem and Gift Shop.” Periodically they liked to close their business for several hours and head out into the nearby Coso Mountains to do some mineral prospecting and look for interesting rock specimens to sell in their store. On the morning of February 13th of that year, the trio traveled roughly six miles east-southeast of town. According to Maxey, “We hiked about three miles northward, after we had parked some five miles east of State Highway 395, south of Olancha.”
Their destination was toward the summit of a 4,265 foot peak that overlooked the ancient dry bed of Lake Owens, situated 340 feet below them. Upon their arrival, they scattered in three different directions to cover more ground. During his exploration, it was Mikesell who found what he thought was a geode half-buried on a spur of the peak. He dug it out and brought it back with him to the group’s rendez-vous point. Each person tossed their rock samples into a single cloth bag, then together shared a picnic lunch before heading back to their store, escaping the rising desert heat of the afternoon sun.
It was not until the next day that Mikesell found time to take the cloth bag into the store’s inhouse workshop and empty it out, so he could get a better look at the previous day’s discoveries and more closely examine the individual samples, to see if any of them were saleable. He immediately recognized the almost three inch-wide spherical rock he had unearthed, and because he thought it might be a geode, he decided to work with it first. Geodes are usually spherical in shape, like his specimen, having a very hard chalcedonic silica exterior, and when cut open reveals a hollow space inside lined with beautiful patterns of quartz crystals. Such split-open geodes were very popular with both local buyers and visiting tourists. Mikesell noticed that his spheroid was heavy enough to be a geode, and that if he successfully severed it in half right then and there to expose its crystalline interior, he could put it on display for immediate sale in the shop.
It was in his attempt to cut the specimen with a special ten-inch diamond-edged saw-blade that the rockhound eventually recognized his mistake on two counts. First, he realized on closer inspection under the cutting machine’s magnifying lens that the outer surface of the spheroid was not composed of hard igneous rock but rather of a compacted sedimentary clay that was encrusted with shell fossils. This meant that there was no way it could be a geode. Yet he was curious why what should have been a much lighter type of rock still felt heavy. Something giving it added weight had to be inside. So Mikesell determined to go ahead and cut it open just to see.
Afterwards he greatly regretted his decision because of what resulted. In making his initial slice, at first the incision passed very easily through the clay exterior, which only had a Mohs hardness of 3. But then suddenly, toward the center of the sample, the blade began coming in direct contact with something else, creating tremendous resistance. As he steadfastly persisted and continued to lean the blade forward with greater effort, Mikesell’s cutting table motor began to groan and he started noticing the saw making high-pitched squealing sounds. When he finally managed to separate the specimen in two, he was chagrinned to find that his expensive diamond saw-blade was ruined.
Meanwhile Mikesell’s partners, responding to all the loud and aggravating noise that filled the entire store, immediately sought him out in order to complain and try to stop him from continuing. After he tried to explain what he had inadvertently done, together they decided to get a closer look at what was the mysterious culprit that had caused the blade’s demise.
What they found inside the clay spheroid completely took the trio by surprise.
The highly resistant material encountered was a three-quarters of an inch thick cylinder core composed of solid ceramic or porcelain with a Mohs hardness of 9—almost equivalent to that of diamond, which is why the diamond-edged saw-blade literally bit the dust, because making a slice into the porcelain was like trying to cut through itself.
In the center of this cylinder was a shaft of bright-colored metal about .08 inch in thickness, that apparently ran the full length of it. Maxey reported that during all the subsequent time the artifact was exhibited in the store, the brightness of this metal never dulled or corroded from oxidation. She thought it was made either of copper or iron or some form of alloy that conducted electricity, because she discovered by bringing it in close proximity to a small magnet that the shaft metal was indeed magnetic, though after a while that property diminished and disappeared. Later on, when the specimen was photographed utilizing radiographic equipment that was able to get a glimpse inside it with X-rays, the images confirmed that the shaft did extend the entire length. The bottom end had been broken off, but the upper end terminated beyond the ceramic cylinder in a strange helix spiral or spring configuration.
The cylinder was encompassed by a hexagonal or six-sided sheath of carved wood that during the interim millennia had petrified, having the soft consistency of agate or jasper. Fragments of corroded copper or a copper alloy were situated between the ceramic cylinder and the petrified wood, suggesting the two components had been originally separated by a now decomposed copper sleeve.
The later X-ray images would also reveal that the clay spheroid, near its outer edges, also held two other metal pieces, what looked like a nail and a washer, though tests performed with both an electromagnet and a magnetometer demonstrated that they were surprisingly non-magnetic, like portions of the artifact itself.
The overall first impression was that the encased object was not natural, definitely having been intelligently made, even manufactured in appearance. Maxey was the first to identify it as possibly being a modern sparkplug, and based on this she initially believed that the specimen could only have been a few decades old.
However, within a month of its discovery, the store was visited by a tourist who happened to be a professional geologist, and who spent time carefully examining it. From his assessment of the spheroid’s fossil shell inclusions, fossil impressions on its surface, the type of embedded gravel pebbles, and the classification of the clay composition itself, he was able to definitively date the entire specimen at 500,000 years old. But this also meant that the so-called “sparkplug” or electrical apparatus inside the spheroid also had to be at least that old as well. This not only surprised Maxey, but also mystified the geologist, who had no way of reconciling such an obviously artifical machine part in so old a rock sample. We will have occasion to learn more about his story later on, and why he insisted remaining anonymous for all the decades following his encounter with the Coso artifact.
In the years immediately following its discovery, the owners kept the unique specimen on exhibit in their store and made an effort to publicize their find whenever they could. Early on, another geologist, named Ron Calais, was allowed to examine it and photograph it both in normal light and by radiographic X-ray techniques. These images in turn were sent to the Charles Fort Society, an organization that specializes in studying all things out-of-the-ordinary, for their scrutiny. Paul Willis, publisher of the Socety’s magazine, INFO Journal, stated his opinion that the Coso artifact bore closest resemblance to a sparkplug, though he, like others, could not explain the spring or helix terminal at one end of its central metal shaft, which did not correspond to any identifiably modern sparkplug component.
As the initial reports about this “out-of-place” artifact began circulating in the news media, further speculations were bantered about, that the object had been a super-antenna, a superconductor, a small capacitor, a communications device, a direction finder, or “some instrument made to utilize power principles we know nothing about.”
While at first their specimen brought them recognition, and their business enjoyed a temporary surge from curiosity seekers, there then followed a skeptical scientific backlash in the press that soon labeled the Coso artifact as a fake and accused its owners as blatant hoaxers. For a brief period the clay spheroid and its enigmatic contents were placed on temporary display at the Eastern California Museum in Independence. But because of the growing rumors and accusations of fraud being circulated by the conservative scientific and academic communities—who condemned the artifact without even so much as taking a look at it—the specimen’s museum exhibition was pulled after only three months and hurriedly returned to its owners, no explanation given. Even in the store, the specimen was purposely hidden from sight, and when anyone came to specifically see it, they were charged money to bring it out, in the hopes of discouraging any more interest.
By 1969, when the editor of INFO Journal returned to Olancha to do a follow-up article on the Coso artifact, he found that the object’s notoriety had taken an unfortunate toll. The gift shop had lost money and was going out of business. The three owners, who had been such good friends, were split apart over the ensuing controversy surrounding the status of the specimen, and would no longer speak to each other. Wallace Lane, who still believed in its authenticity, took possession of the artifact and kept it in his home for several more years, yet stubbornly refused permission for anyone to examine it. He even tried to sell it for a sum of $25,000 in order to recoup his financial losses in the store, and just to get rid of it, so embittered did he become over what misfortunes the object had brought.
After that, little is known what happened in the ensuring years. In 1999, thirty years later, a national investigative search could not locate Mike Mikesell, Virginia Maxey was then still alive but refused to speak to anyone, and Wallace Lane was presumed deceased. Equally tragic, by then the Coso artifact itself had also vanished—either lost, given away, thrown out or destroyed along with the rest of Lane’s private property, now long disappeared. If it were not for the few photographs and X-ray images taken years earlier, we would have no proof that the artifact had even existed.
Those who made the inquiry in trying to track down the previous owners and the possible whereabouts of the missing artifact were writer Pierre Stromberg and geologist Paul Heinrich, both of whom are affiliated with a group called the Pacific Northwest Skeptics. One of their stated goals has been to debunk the whole Coso artifact affair. In 2000 and 2004 they released reports concerning their extensive research results.
First, they found records that showed that mining operations had been performed in the Coso mountains in the early part of the last century, and the two investigators wondered if, perhaps, at that time any engines may have been utilized in the enterprise. There was a chance, they surmised, that the infamous sparkplug had really been a discarded piece of the mining equipment.
One of the sticklers in interpreting the Coso artifact as having been a modern sparkplug is the puzzling helix spiral or spring at one end of its metal shaft terminal, as seen in the object’s X-ray images. Most of the initial examiners of the artifact had made comparisons with contemporary sparkplugs—but what about earlier models, the types of plugs used by engines when the early twentieth century mining operations were underway in the Coso area?
The two researchers decided to test their suspicions by mailing copies of the existing photos and X-ray images to four different groups of officially registered historical sparkplug collectors, not telling then the source, but simply asking if they could identify if the object in the pictures was a sparkplug, and if so what was its make and model.
The responses they received back from each of the groups was a nearly unanimous agreement that the object in question looked like a 1920’s Champion sparkplug once used in Model T and Model A Fords, designated as either a 7/8” - 18 Thread, or a 1 /2” NPT plug. In that era of early automobile production, these types of infant sparkers had had a threaded screw-like terminal, which is how the Coso artifact’s own terminal now also became identified as having been.
With this revelation, Stromberg and Heinrich triumphantly announced they had finally solved once and for all the enigma of the Coso artifact’s true relatively modern origins, and declared, “Case closed. End of story.”
However, there are still a number of nagging unanswered questions and literally “loose ends” about the object that need to be addressed further.
First of all, if the original encased artifact was in fact a sparkplug, no matter what geologic era it may have come from—prehistoric or present—it would have exhibited many very precise similarities to any modern sparkplug simply because of its limiting parallel design function parameters. A sparkplug, like any such sophisticated technological component, has a specific operational purpose, and only by making it with specific materials and shaped into a specific configuration will it be able to perform the functional task for which it was designed. Whether the Coso artifact was 5 years, 50 years or 500,000 years old, if it was indeed a sparkplug then by its very nature its inherent features will inevitably mirror the very same features seen in all sparkplugs, no matter what their age or origins.
Of course, based on the progressive developmental evolution of any technology, there will also be small variations present as innovations and improvements are continually added to the basic design over the course of time. But such evolutionary progressions can happen more than once, as the history of technological developments in the known past has shown. Such elements thus cannot be used to attempt to date a mechanical component exclusively to one time period only.
Case in point is the appearance of the so-called terminal threading in the Coso artifact, which cannot be used to date it to the 1920’s just because this was also part of a Champion sparkplug design from that era. If, as the original geological dating suggests, there was a parallel period of prehistoric technological development in the far distant past, could not a similar terminal design have likewise surfaced during that forgotten era, again as a function if its design parameter and parallel purpose?
In truth, there are some serious questions about the recent deliberate “re-assessment” of the Coso artifact’s spiral terminal, which is really only an attempt to bring its interpretation more in line with its supposedly being a 1920’s Champion plug. A closer and more unbiased analysis of the X-ray images indicates the depicted “spiral” is not screw-threading at all, but is an actual spring of helix-shaped piece attached to the upper end of the object’s central metal shaft.
Over the course of the past several decades, I have had opportunities, while visiting both the Henry Ford Museum near Dearborn, Michigan, and the Harold Warp Museum of Minden, Nebraska—both of which have the world’s most excellent collections of old model automobiles—to talk with those who maintain the collections and keep spare engine parts on hand. Several times they have granted me permission to examine some of the earliest sparkplugs used—including the Champion models in question—and I have found that these do not so easily correspond to the Coso artifact as the skeptics claim. On all the samples I inspected, the screw-threading terminals appear very small and very obscure—and would not have shown up so prominently as they supposedly do on the X-ray pictures.
In fact, it can be very plainly seen that the size of the artifact’s helix end—the circumference of each spiral and the space between each full turn—is far too large to match the much smaller and more compacted threads observed on the early model sparkplugs. What is more, the darker and more clearly focused imagery indicates this is not merely threading on an unseen “ghost” screw, but is instead a separate metal spring piece.
What all this means is that we are back to square one—in the Coso object we are dealing with what may be a sparkplug, but which has parts that do not correspond with any known sparkplug in today’s developmental line of such components. No where do we find a corresponding spring component featured on any modern plug, no matter what its age.
As for the confirmations received from the various sparkplug collectors’ groups, the skeptics’ reports gloss over the fact that not all the enthusiasts were in agreement concerning what they were asked to identify, One participant, with a keen eye, noticed that the X-ray images of the artifact show one rib on the upper end of its porcelain cylinder core, in contrast to the Champion plugs of the 1920’s era using two ceramic ribs instead. What we are talking about here are two fundamentally different design features, so that, in all honesty, one cannot be precisely equated with the other.
Perhaps the most curiously unique aspect about the Coso artifact that so far no skeptic has yet addressed head-on is the fact that one of the chief component materials that appeared deep in its interior was a sheath of carved wood that had become petrified over time—a process that takes thousands of years to complete, the wood cells being gradually replaced by a mineral substitute. The formation of such a metamorphic material would not have been possible from just the 1920’s on.
But the real revelation is this—has anyone ever seen a sparkplug that used wood as one of its main ingredients?
In the Champion plugs, the parallel go-between layer was composed exclusively of asbestos. But asbestos has a Mohs hardness of only 4.5 to 5, while the petrified wood layer in the Coso artifact had a Mohs factor of 7. There is no way possible that the petrified wood could have been mismeasured or misidentified—asbestos and petrified wood are two very different materials, having two different properties and substance. Therefore in comparing the two sparkplug samples—one from the immediate past and the other from the far distant past—we can only conclude that they came from very different origins, and based on their different make-ups had separate functions.
There is too the problem in assuming that the Coso artifact sparkplug had been discarded from an engine used for mining operations at the turn of the last century. The California state business and assessors’ records do indicate that some mining was done in the Coso region, but not anywhere near the area where the specimen was found. Over the last two decades various groups have scoured the local desert expanses, looking for traces of other possible out-of-place artifacts like the one discovered in 1961. None of these searches has uncovered any abandoned pieces of machines or tell-tale cast-off debris on the Coso peak where the original artifact was found, that one would have expected to have been left behind by any mining enterprise.
As Maxey herself puzzled over, why would only a single sparkplug show up all by itself in an isolated location, and in the middle of the desert, without anything else of a modern origin accompanying it? And there is also the important questions, what of any value would have been excavated at that particular place? Why would a mining operation choose to work precariously perched near the summit of a 4,300 foot peak, and then disappear without a trace left behind? And where are the missing corporate records of what was mined and sold from this spot?
Yet one more difficulty involves just how the specimen was found. According to Mikesell—who both discovered it and was among the very first to examine its interior just after he cut it open—the artifact was completely embedded inside a spheroid of compacted clay, and the spheroid itself was partially buried in a rocky spur solidly in situ, and had to be removed with a small pick to get it free. Part of the rock layer the artifact was extracted from still clung to the spheroid when it was sliced open, and remnants of it could still be seen attached to the specimen a month later when the visiting geologist examined it. This attached debris was later completely removed when the spheroid was cleaned off by the owners in order to prepare it for photography and X-raying. Being both encased in one type of material and half buried in another type of rock could only be indicative of a long passage of time in such a doubled geological formation.
Some critics have argued that the compacted clay could not have been very old, because as the X-ray images show, mixed in with the surrounding clay material is the presence of what look like a modern nail and washer. But a later detailed image analysis demonstrated that these two objects are not really separate from the artifact, but were in fact originally integral parts of the mechanism itself, broken off when it was subjected to the violent turbulence of the water-borne materials that finally became the surrounding clay. The two pieces, which are certainly as old as the main piece, luckily managed to be buried with it.
Perhaps more revealing is that—through the use of a high-powered microscope— identical pebbles as those found embedded in the outer surface of the spheroid were likewise detected impinged inside the surface of the mechanism itself. This means that the artifact was not merely dropped on the ground and left there, but had been subjected to the same swirling mud waters of half a million years ago that finally encased it.
This clearly contradicts several critics’ remarks that the specimen was found freely laying on the surface, and that the artifact was surrounded by a nodule of iron oxide, a “concretion composed of iron derived from the rusting sparkplug, which rapidly forms around them as they rust on the ground.”
Except that neither Mikesell nor the visiting geologist detected one speck of iron oxide residue anywhere inside or outside the spheroid.
In 2005, the skeptical author of a website article about the Coso artifact entitled Archaeology From the Dark Side, falsely concluded,
“The object was not sealed in a geode at all, but just a sun-baked lump of clay, pebbles and shells. It had been on that mountain no longer then forty years. Case closed, or pretty much so.”
Adding insult to his own self-injurious comments, the author also stated,
“About the only thing that distinguishes the Coso artifact from the rest of the murky realm of fringe archaeology is the fact that no one—or almost no one—is still prepared to defend it as an ancient mystery.”
Such flagrantly misleading words need to be answered—and by someone who played a long-overlooked role in the Coso artifact’s original professional assessment.
In the early autumn of 1985, I was a guest presenter at a convention of the American Dowsers Society which is held every year in Danville, Vermont. In one of the workshops I gave, I offered an overview of the life-long research I have done on out-of-place artifacts, and I happened to mention the Coso artifact as one of many examples. After my talk, I was approached by an elderly gentleman who identified himself as a retired science teacher, but who at that point was reluctant to give me his name or any further details about himself. He said that he had some important information he wanted to share with me about the Coso artifact, and invited me as his guest to join him that evening for supper at one of the town inns.
My curiosity piqued, I agreed to his invitation, and met with him again a few hours later. As we sat down together to enjoy the very fine local New England cuisine, my host finally opened up and revealed to me his name, and then told me something about himself that took me completely by surprise. He claimed to be the geologist that Virginia Maxey had spoken to very soon after the Coso artifact’s discovery. It had been based on his analysis that he informed her that, in his estimation, the specimen and the mechanism inside it were at least 500,000 years old.
At that time in 1961, he further revealed, he was working as a consultant for a local southern California oil drilling firm, plus was teaching part time as an assistant professor in a small college. Later he moved to the Northeast, continued to teach for several years, and when I met him he had already retired.
As he told it, he was passing through Olancha as part of a vacation with his family, and just happened to stop at the local gem and gift store on a whim, in order to get an idea of what the local geology had to offer. Lane and Mikesell were out of town that day attending a mineral show in another state, but he met with Maxey, who told him about the unusual discovery they had made only a month before. The geologist was so intrigued with the Coso artifact as soon as he saw it, that he sent his family on ahead to their next destination, while he spent the rest of the day making a careful analysis of the mystery object.
Maxey told the geologist her first impression, that she thought the embedded sparkplug was maybe only a few decades old or probably less. Yet she was puzzled how something that modern might have wound up all by itself in such an isolated location near the summit of a mountain out in the middle of California desert country.
The geologist said that it took him only a few minutes’ worth of careful examination to realize that the clay rock and its contents had far greater implications. Part of his college degree in petroleum sciences had been in the study of recent era fossils in the southern California region, and he immediately identified the fossil shell inclusions in the Coso specimen as dating to at least half a million years old. These consisted not just of the shells themselves, but the fossil imprints pressed into the clay, which implied that they had died when the clay itself was just forming. This meant that the shells, the impressions, the clay and the object inside all had to have been of the same age—from 500,000 years ago.
When he relayed this information to Maxey, she made a connection with some of the metaphysical books she had been recently reading which spoke of such lost prehistoric civilizations as Atlantis and Lemuria. She wondered, and shared her new realization with the geologist—had this sparkplug been a part of a forgotten advanced technology from the unknown past?
The geologist discounted her theories, because, in his words, his “traditional academic background did not allow for such flights of fantasy.” Yet there he was, holding in his hands an artifact he could not explain in the context of his accepted geological paradigm.
At the time of our supper meeting, nearly twenty-five years after his life-changing encounter in Olancha, the geologist still claimed he did not believe in alternative ideas of history. Nevertheless, he was well aware how important an anomaly the Coso artifact was—and just as equally dangerous. He wisely recognized how much of a curse for him it could become. With something this radically upsetting to the established concepts of the past, if his name in any way became associated with it, both his oil job and his teaching position could be seriously jeopardized. The geologist decided right then and there not to publish any report or paper on the subject, and tried to convince Maxey to also keep quiet about her find.
But she and her fellow discoverers were more in favor of going public with it, while at least promising to keep the geologist’s name confidential. As the geologist later lamented, the trio’s disclosure of the artifact’s existence to the world did eventually lead to their being discredited and derided by the scientific community, subsequently also resulting in the loss of their business and reputations, and their having to live the rest of their lives in self-imposed obscurity.
In addition, the retired gentleman sitting across from me also mentioned that about a year after his first visit, he returned to Olancha and this time had a chance to speak with Mike Mikesell. Mikesell gave him the never before disclosed details concerning the circumstances surrounding his discovery of the artifact and the situation in which it was found, his cutting the specimen open, and his initial close-up observations of what he found inside.
As we were waiting for our desserts to be served, my supper host presented me with his second bombshell for the evening—his unpublished geology report on the Coso artifact that he wrote up for his private files a few days after examining it. He had only shown this to half a dozen other people, those who had had a sincere and unbiased interest in the artifact. He was allowing me to skim through it as we sat there, because he knew how focused I was in helping to authenticate this and similar out of-place artifacts.
Unfortunately, he would not let me keep the report or even allow me to borrow it and photocopy its contents. I had only the very next few minutes we had left in our mealtime together to scan it over as fast as I could before he had to depart and drive back to his home in a neighboring state. I hurriedly scrutinized the words of his findings and tried to grasp only the highlights. I was unfamiliar with much of the geologic jargon, and quickly got lost in the many technicalities. After we said goodbye to each other, I literally ran back to my hotel room, grabbed my notebook and frantically tried to write down the facts I could remember, which unfortunately were only an infinitesimally small portion of what the report contained.
Just before we parted company, the geologist made me promise not to ever reveal his name to anyone, in order to protect his family and his academic retirement fund, nor could I repeat any of the contents of his report he had talked about with me until after he had died. He was suffering from cancer and knew he had a short time left to live. Luckily his cancer during the next few years went into partial remission, and I did not receive word of his passing until the summer of 2008.
In continued deference to his family, I am still honoring his request not to reveal his name. But I now have felt free enough to share just a few things of what I learned about his Coso artifact analysis, as he had shared them with me during our supper conversation so many years ago, and I was also able to verify in reading several passages in his report during the few fleeting moments I had it in my hands.
Presently I am still trying to solicit his family and his estate to release the full text of his original geology report, so that its content can be made public for the first time in its entirety. But so far my efforts have been to no avail, the family especially wanting to maintain their privacy as well as the integrity of their father‘s good name and memory. It is my hope that one day soon, when his family members might change their minds, the geologist’s unpublished secrets concerning what he found out about the Coso artifact will finally be brought to light.
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
