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The Coso Artifact is a spark plug found encased in a lump of hard clay or rock on February 13, 1961 by Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey, and Mike Mikesell while they were fossicking for geodes near the town of Olancha, California. Following its collection, Mikesell destroyed a diamond edged blade cutting through the rock containing the artifact and discovered the item.

Originally it was believed that the artifact must be very old, perhaps 500,000 years old, as claimed by Virginia Maxey, one of the people who discovered it. However, details of either dating technique or evidence on which this estimate were made was neither revealed nor published. Rather, this date was based solely on the opinion of an anonymous "geologist" as repeated second hand by one of the people, who discovered this artifact. Neither the identity, credentials, nor expertise of this "geologist", from which this opinion came is known. It is not even known if he or she was a real geologist or not. Now it is largely accepted that the material surrounding the sparkplug may have accreted in a matter of years or decades.

The origin of the artifact has been the cause of much speculation. Pseudoscientific suggestions include:

• An ancient advanced civilization (such as Atlantis)
• Prehistoric extraterrestrial visitors to Earth
• Human time-travellers from the future leaving or losing the artifact during a visit to the past.

Certain young-earth creationists have hailed the artifact as evidence for a young earth, arguing that if a modern item such as a sparkplug can become encased in stone then the entire idea of rocks taking millions of years to form can be shown to be false. This is a strawman argument as geologists and archaeologists have known for many decades, if not more than a century, that the rate at which different types of concretions, i.e. "Concretions, bombs, and groundwater", form and layers of rock lithify vary so greatly that the degree of their lithification cannot be use to determine how old either they or argue that the Earth is millions of years old.

An investigation carried on by the Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich with the help of members of the Spark Plug Collectors of America suggests that the artifact is a 1920s Champion sparkplug and that it was likely used in the area in support of mining operations during that era.^[1] Their report indicates the spark plug became encased in a concretion composed of iron derived from the rusting spark plug. It is typical of iron and steel artifacts to rapidly form iron oxide concretions around them as they rust in the ground.

The current location of the Coso artifact is unknown to the general public despite an intensive effort made to locate both it and the people who found it.

1. ^ Stromberg, P., and P.V. Heinrich, 2000, The Coso Artifact Mystery from the Depths of Time, Talk.Origins Archive.

• Stromberg, P., and P.V. Heinrich, 2004, The Coso Artifact Mystery from the Depths of Time?, Reports of the National Center for Science Education. v. 24, no. 2, pp. 26-30 (March/April 2004)