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Out-of-place artifact

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An out-of-place artifact or OOPart[1] is a name given by creationists and woo-pushing fringe scientists for historical and archeological artifacts they feel could not have been created by a particular culture due to a lack of knowledge or materials.[2]


Supporters such as Zecharia Sitchin claim OOPArts are evidence that vanished civilizations possessed knowledge or technology far more advanced than our own, alien beings undoubtedly visited the earth millions of years ago, and mainstream science is overlooking huge areas of knowledge.[3] Adjectives like "mysterious," "unexplainable," and "anomalous" are liberally used to describe stuff like:

  • The Wedge of Aiud: A wedge made from aluminum found in 35 feet of sand in Romania, said to be 11,000 years old. But it's simply a tooth from an excavator machine that fell off when construction workers were digging the hole.
  • The Baigong Pipes: Rusty, hollow, metallic pipes in the caves of Mt. Baigong in China's Qinghai Province ranging from needle-thick to over a foot in diameter imply some sort of ancient municipal water system made from alien metallurgical techniques. Actually just fossilized tree roots.[4]
  • The Coso artifact: A supposedly unknown electrical device encased in a 500,000-year-old geode. Actually just a concretion of iron around a rusting 1920s spark plug.
  • The Dendera lamp: Relief decoration within the Hathor Temple at the Dendera complex in Egypt. Snakes depicted inside elongated cocoons look somewhat like the filaments inside light bulbs, so ancient astronauts theories incorporate the carvings as evidence that the ancient world harnessed electricity for lighting.
  • The Diquis spheres: Stone spheres of varying sizes, some over 2 meters in diameter. They're not perfectly spherical as claimed by woo sources, but are impressively close. They're believed by real science to be manmade, their purpose unknown, and are attributed to the lost Diquis culture.
  • The Eltanin Antenna: A picture taken from a boat of an antenna-like object seemingly staked into the seabed in the deep ocean. Later recognized as Chondrocladia concrescens, a sponge.
  • The Ica stones: Decorated stones from Peru depicting everything from dinosaurs cohabiting with man to advanced medical procedures. A hoaxer owned up and showed how he'd done it. A good example of all the various woo camps using undatable objects from no valid archeological context, and calling it "proof" (of whatever they happen to believe in).
  • The Iron pillar of Delhi: Said to have been constructed in 912 BCE of a highly advanced iron-based alloy that cannot rust. But wait, it has some rust near its base, and it more likely has its origin in the reign of Chandragupta II, 380-c.415 CE.
  • The Klerksdorp spheres: Geological curiosities found in 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits, often misleadingly described as "perfect spheres" while actually being far from perfectly spherical.
  • The London Hammer: A hammer partially encrusted with limy rock concretion found in London, Texas. Sometimes exaggerated as having been found "embedded in solid rock", it's merely the result of dissolved sediment hardening around a hammer.
  • The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone: Supposedly ‘proof’ that ancient Hebrew-speakers roamed the Americas - or at least New Mexico. Due to the unusual alignment of the Hebrew, more likely to be a modern hoax, or at least a 16th century Spanish Jewish "converso" during the age of the conquistadores.
  • The Paluxy River ‘footprints’: Claims of footprints of dinosaurs and humans preserved together in one strata of rocky riverbed, supposedly made while running from the rising waters of Noah's Great Flood. Except the tracks are not human footprints, they were made by the same three-toed dinosaurs, but with only the middle toe visible.
  • The Starchild skull: Supposed evidence of an alien-human hybrid child. Really just the skull of a child with a congenital deformity.
  • The Tucson artifacts: Latin- and Hebrew-inscribed lead objects self-dating to the first millennium CE, apparently sealed in rock that's very much older, indicating the presence of a lost Roman colony in Arizona pre-Columbus. A hoax.
  • The Wolfsegg Iron: An iron cube found buried in a 20 million year old coal seam, misleadingly described as a "perfect cube" when, in fact, it could be generously described as a lump with a few straight-ish edges.[5]

Creationists often argue that such "anomalies" show that mainstream scientific chronologies and models of human evolution are all wrong, and all this mysterious stuff is proof that Noah really built that Ark. Ancient astronaut fans maintain it's ironclad evidence of alien visitors' influence on mankind. Pseudoarcheologists are convinced it's proof that advanced civilizations existed during the Pleistocene Ice Age.

The idea of a "smoking gun" with the potential to completely overturn the scientific orthodoxy that's shunned them is a daydream that appeals to a wide variety of cranks.

The Antikythera gambit[edit]

The Antikythera mechanism is a 1st century BCE mechanical computing device that was found in an ancient Greek shipwreck. It is often used by fringe science promoters to argue that stuffy old mainstream science should never dismiss fantastic claims of OOParts, because scientists' original conclusions about it were wrong.[6] While scholars initially proposed it was a piece of modern junk that got mixed in with more ancient junk, they never called it an "out-of-place artifact" and they certainly never speculated it came from aliens.

See also[edit]


  1. Nobody knows why they felt the need to abbreviate this in such a weird manner.
  2. "OOPARTS (out of place artifacts) & ANCIENT HIGH TECHNOLOGY --Evidence of Noah's Flood? Page 5"
  3. Neil Freer and Zecharia Sitchin. Breaking the Godspell. Falcon Press, 1987.
  5. Look at it. Not a "cube" in the slightest.
  6. At the time of the mechanism's discovery in 1902, most scholars thought it was too complex to have been constructed during the same period as other pieces found in the wreck. But by the 1970s, our more advanced technology was able to help identify it as a genuine mechanism based on the theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by the ancient Greeks. In other words, we knew the Greeks understood complex astronomical calculations, we knew they could manufacture mechanical gearing, we just didn't know they could put it all together like that.