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The ancient spark plug and other “out-of-place artifacts”

Ellsworth Toohey
Jul 06, 2026
∙ Paid

out-of-place artifact — Logg Tandy / CC BY 4.0 (via Wikipedia)

The Coso artifact, dug from a California hillside in 1961 and claimed to be prehistoric, was “actually a 1920s spark plug that had become encased in a concretion.” It belongs to the category of the out-of-place artifact, or OOPArt — an object found where it seems to “challenge conventional hi…

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