Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

unknown technology from millennia before the accepted emergence of Homo sapiens, then obviously it would turn accepted thought about the past of the human species on its head.

The only other person known to have physically inspected the artifact was creationist Ron Calais, who was allowed to take photographs of the nodule in both X ray and normal light. The X ray of the upper end of the object revealed that the metallic shaft was attached to what looked similar to some kind of tiny spring. This led to the object being categorized as some type of electrical mechanism. Paul Willis, publisher of paranormal magazine INFO Journal, examined the X rays of the mysterious artifact and concluded that it could be "the remains of a corroded piece of metal with threads," and noted the similarity between the object and a modern spark plug. In 1963, the artifact was apparently displayed for three months at the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The spring 1969 issue of INFO Journal stated that Wallace Lane, one of the original discoverers of the object, was then its owner, and that it was on display in his home. Lane steadfastly refused permission for anyone to examine it, but was reportedly offering to sell it for $25,000. Some time after 1969, the Coso Artifact seems to have disappeared. In September 1999, a national search undertaken to trace any of the original discoverers proved unsuccessful. It seems likely that by then Lane had died and the whereabouts of Mikesell were unknown. To this day, Virginia Maxey, who is known to be still living, refuses to comment publicly about the artifact, the location of which remains unknown.

Curiously enough, INFO Journal editor Paul J. Willis has conjectured that the artifact was some kind of spark plug, but was unable to understand the function of the spring on the object, which did not match up with contemporary spark plugs. Around the time of the original discovery of the Coso Artifact, Virginia Maxey speculated that it was possible that the object was a mere 100 years old. She thought that if it had lain in a mud bed, and afterwards become baked and hardened by the sun, it could have ended up in the condition in which they found it. But it was also Maxey who stated that the artifact was possibly 500,000 years old and "an instrument as old as legendary Mu or Atlantis. Perhaps it is a communications device or some sort of directional finder or some instrument made to utilize power

principles we know nothing about." Thus began the fantastic speculations about the artifact.

The crux of the mystery seems to be that the object was found encased in a 500,000-year-old geode, which included fossil shells. However, the exterior of the object was mainly composed of hardened clay with a mixture of organic matter, whilst a geode has an outer shell composed of dense chalcedonic silica. When broken open by Mike Mikesell the day after the discovery, the inside of the object proved to be of a different composition to that of a geode; it did not possess a hollow center filled with a layer of quartz crystals, as with most geodes. However, this still leaves the problem of what fossil shells were doing encrusted into the surface of the object. But the value of these fossil shells for dating the object is negligible if one remembers the original discoverers identified a nail and washer on the same surface as the fossil shells.

X ray of the Coso Artifact.

Because of the mystery surrounding its whereabouts, and the lack of a published report on the object, speculation is rife about the Coso Artifact. A mechanical object encased in a geode apparently more than half a million years old. How had it gotten there? Was it the product of some unimaginably ancient technologically-advanced culture, all traces of which have now disappeared? The Internet has many Websites that include speculations on the purpose and origin of the mechanism, while offering no new evidence to support their claims. Opinions on its function include a super-antenna, a small capacitor, or an ancient spark plug. The latter suggestion is the most widespread: a spark plug produced by an advanced civilization as part of some mysterious technological apparatus.

Investigations into the origins of the Coso Artifact by writer Pierre Stromberg and geologist Paul V. Heinrich discovered that mining operations were being carried out in the Coso Mountains early in the 20th century. Perhaps, they conjectured, internal combustion engines were being used in these operations, and the ancient spark plug proponents might have been at least partly right after all. In order to test their tentative theory, the duo attempted to have the object identified by contacting an organization known as the Spark-Plug Collectors of America. They sent letters and copies of X rays of the artifact to four different spark-plug collectors, who had no knowledge of the case and had never seen the pictures before. The collectors independently came to the same conclusion-they were certain that it was a 1920s era Champion spark plug, one that probably powered a Ford Model T, and had possibly been modified to serve the mining operations in the Coso mountain range. The amount of decay in the artifact was an almost perfect match for the rates of decay that would occur in a spark plug from this era. So, the Coso Artifact had been lying on the mountain for no more than 40 years.

It seems clear that the spark plug was not actually embedded in rock, but in an iron oxide nodule. The formation of this nodule was probably accelerated by corrosive "mineral dust" blown off of the dry lake bed of Lake Owen

by local windstorms, and onto the neighboring uplands where the artifact was found.

The Coso Artifact is not the only spark plug to have been found in a strange place. The summer