Lighting the fire during a cold winter evening a resident of Vladivostok found a rail-shaped metal detail which was pressed in one of the pieces of coal that the man used to heat his home. Mesmerized by his discovery, the responsible citizen decided to seek help from the scientists of Primorye region. After the metal object was studied by the leading experts the man was shocked to learn about the assumed age of his discovery. The metal detail was supposedly 300 million years old and yet the scientists suggest that it was not created by nature but was rather manufactured by someone.

The metal detail which was recently found by Vladivostok resident is yet another discovery which perplexed the scientists. The coal in which the metal object was pressed was delivered to Primorye from Chernogorodskiy mines of Khakasia region. Knowing that the coal deposits of this region date 300 million years back, Russian experts inferred that the metal detail found in these deposits must be an age-mate of the coal.

When geologists broke the piece of coal in which the metal object was pressed into and spot-treated in with special chemical agents, it turned out that the metal detail was unusually light and soft. No more than seven centimeters long, the object was found to be composed of 98 percent aluminum and 2 percent magnesium. On the one hand, such an alloy stalled the scientists because nearly pure aluminum is very rarely found in nature. Thus, the detail was most definitely created artificially. On the other hand, however, when it became clear that the object was made from aluminum-magnesium alloy the experts quickly found an answer to the question of how a metal detail could withstand the ravages of time so well. The scientists explained that pure aluminum is increasingly prone to oxidation which contributes to the creation of a special layer protecting it from further corrosion. As a result, the metal detail made 98 percent from aluminum can endure not only high pressure but also heat and other severe natural conditions.

The last property of the object that puzzled the scientists was its distinctive shape which was reminiscent of a modern tooth-wheel. It is hard to imagine that an object could take regular shape of a tooth-wheel with six identical ‘teeth’ naturally. Moreover, the intervals between the ‘teeth’ of the gear are curiously large in relation to the size of the ‘teeth’ themselves which might mean that the detail was a part of a complicated mechanism. Nowadays, such ‘spare parts’ are used in construction of microscopes and other mechanical appliances. This poses yet another unanswerable question to the modern scientists: how can the metal tooth-wheel be 300 million years old if the regular-shaped ‘wheel’ itself was created by man millions of years later. After the discovery came public, conspirators were quick to dub it ‘a UFO tooth-wheel’.