In this episode I look into the Aiud Wedge and Bob White's mysterious UFO artifact.
In this episode I look into the Aiud Wedge and Bob White's mysterious UFO artifact.
Ep 22 Artifact-What IS that thing
Hello and welcome back to the UFO and Alien Podcast. I’m your host Rick Black. I had a lot of fun doing the research for this weeks episode. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. I think I mentioned before that I love watching Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. Well, I first started watching just to see the different places they would go to. I was fascinated by the history not as much on the Ancient Alien theory aspect of the show. But they had an episode where they were examining artifacts, or weird objects that were found and had no explanation for. They were real head scratchers. Today, I’m going to take a look at a couple of those and see what I can discover.
I’m going to start with Bob White. Back in 1985 Bob White and his friend Jan were driving from Denver to Las Vegas. That’s a long drive. Last week we had a case that involved a long drive. This one is about 747 miles and usually takes around 10-11 hours. Last week I did the conversion from Kilometers to miles, so I guess to be fair I’ll do the reverse. That’s about 1203 kilometers, but it still takes 10-11 hours. I saw a meme about the way the U.S. measures things vs. the rest of the world. It was something about a rocket weighing approximately 13 walruses.
Anyway, Bob and his friend are driving on this remote highway. It’s 2 or 3 a.m. Bob’s friend is driving while Bob is sleeping on the passenger side and they’re approaching the Colorado-Utah border. Jan wakes him up and points to a strange light in the distance and asked Bob what that strange light was. White looked at it, didn’t think too much about it and went back to sleep. Jan wakes him up again, this time the light is practically blinding. They pulled the car over and got out to get a look at this thing. It was about 100 yards ahead of them (or 91 meters). And in Bob’s words “it was huge…absolutely huge”. It was so bright that Bob had to shield his eyes to look at it.
Bob was frozen, not with fear but with awe. Jan turned the headlights on for some reason and when she did the lights shot up toward what looked like a pair of neon, tubular lights. He guessed later that it was a mother ship. Then the object, or UFO or whatever it was flew towards the east across the Colorado sky and disappeared.
White was quoted as saying “What I saw was not of this earth.” As the craft flew away Bob saw an orange light falling to the ground. Did they just release a probe or did something break off of the craft? Curious to see what it was, Bob and Jan followed it as it struck the ground. When they got to it, it was glowing red and just looked like a glob of something. It was too hot to touch. His first thought was “what in the world could this possibly be”. After it cooled down, White picked it up and put it in the trunk of his car and they both headed off to the nearest all-night diner. I guess that they talked about the UFO and the object that they collected. It was basically a hunk of metal about 9 inches long and weighed a pound and a half, it was shaped like a stretched out tear-drop. Like it had dripped off of the craft. It also looked like it had scales as it tapered down. Maybe they were created as this molten blob first fell from the craft and cooled as it fell.
Bob took the object home, packed it away and forgot about it for about ten years.
Bob was trying to make a living in show business. He was a comedian and a singer. I don’t know if that was his full time gig or if he was going to Las Vegas for work. At any rate, he was not going to go running around telling people what he just saw. He thought that it could damage his entertainment career and he was probably right.
After his career as a singer/comedian ended in Branson, he thought that maybe it was time to investigate what this thing was that he found on that night he saw the UFO. He had the thing tested several times. The first time was at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There they subjected it to isotopic ratio and other elemental compositional tests. After several weeks of testing, Bob finally got to talk to a technician. The scientist was very excited about it, he said that it was definitely extra-terrestrial. Bob told a reporter about all of this, so the reporter went and spoke to the scientist who claimed he never said it was extra-terrestrial. And he added that his bosses told him that he was not to talk to anyone about this. White send the object to 8 different labs including MIT. They all revealed that it was mostly aluminum. But White feels that its origin may have been revealed in one of the tests.
Most of the sources claim that it definitely is terrestrial. But, are they telling the truth or holding back information?
In 1996 The Nevada-based National Institute for Discovery Science sent a sample of the object to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. They didn’t find any evidence of it being extraterrestrial. Bob was probably disappointed that it turned out to be mundane, but he still didn’t know what it was. It was tested by another scientist in California but the results were the same. They were not doing expensive tests on this object that they found out is 80% aluminum. Just cursory tests. They were leaving a lot of doubt out there. Some questions unanswered.
Sgt. Gary Carpenter, who works at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs said it was not uncommon for NORAD to get calls about strange lights and unidentified objects. Not once, he said, has the object been identified as an alien spacecraft.
He said found objects usually turn out to be space debris from satellites that are decaying. Some of the reported sightings turn out to be naturally occurring things like celestial lights, falling stars or even contrails that are trailing aircraft.
After the government released files as a result of the Freedom of Information Act of 1997, Bob found that an object almost identical to his was found in Denmark in either 1947 or 1948. The declassified file folder was labeled “Flying Saucers From Denmark”. The folder contained only photographs but it is believed that these photos are of debris of some kind, related to a “flying saucer” case in Denmark. And the pictures show an object very similar to Bob’s.
Bob White decides to open the Museum of the Unexplained. This museum is in a renovated video-rental store in Reeds Spring Missouri between a Humane Society Thrift Shop and the Sunrise Cafe. Well, it was. The building was turned into a pool hall and the Museum is now on tour in a 42 foot bus touring the country. The bus is a former Dallas city bus that was purchased by one of the museums board of directors members. When not on the road you can see it on highway 13 at several locations between Branson West and Kimberling City. Besides the artifact that Bob found the museum also has bigfoot casts, Roswell and Soccorro NM reports. The museum has over 2,500 documented trace landing cases on file in 71 countries, five full time research associates on staff, and six ongoing cases currently under study. It looks like Bob’s been busy. I don’t know if that’s still going on. This was reported around 2005.
I mentioned before that it was tested by 8 different labs and one scientist said that it was definitely extra-terrestrial and then walked it back. The rest said it was mundane and terrestrial. There is actually a report from the National Institute for Discover Science, or NIDS. Without going into all of the scientific details with big words like “semi-quantitative elemental analysis blah blah blah, we’ll skip to the interesting parts.
The object was mostly aluminum with some silicon, and iron and some trace elements, but it is similar to what is known as a “360 aluminum casting alloy.” There is nothing exotic about the make-up of this object.
Bob White died in 2009, but he was devoted to finding an answer to this mystery. He passed three polygraph tests regarding his sighting and the object. He wrote a book, he had a website, he was on UFO Files and Ancient Aliens. It’s all very intriguing.
In volume 16, number three of Skeptic Magazine, Pat Linse wrote a very interesting article about Bob artifact. She starts the article with a story about a late night radio show psychic taking calls on air. One caller calls and it upset because he thinks he is experiencing a bad omen. Whenever he drives at night, street lights that he is approaching turn off. Honestly, that used to happen to me at one particular street light. Every night, it would turn off. I didn’t think omen, I thought there was something wrong with the street light. But this guy was experiencing multiple street lights going out. Well, the phone lines at the radio station were lighting up because auto mechanics were calling in to explain what was happening. They said the caller needed to have his headlights adjusted because they were triggering the street lights to turn off.
The point of that story was that sometimes you just need the right expert. In Bob White’s artifact case, the right expert to give the explanation is Ean Harrison, a retired steel foundry quality control supervisor who worked in the Seattle area. He said that not only could he explain what Bob had, but he also had several of them. He used them as garden ornaments.
He said the object was created by a foundry standgrinder. This was a by product of the process and was created almost like stalagmites are created. The grinding makes metal dust which gets down in the machine where it reaches it’s melting point and drips and drips and builds up until it creates this stalagmite. When the machine is cleaned out, the big chunk of metal is usually recycled.
There are pictures of these things in the article and they look pretty much like Bob’s artifact. Which leads us to think, is that what it really is? What about his sighting of the UFO and him witnessing the molten metal falling from the UFO. The object glowing red when he reached it. Is this whole thing a hoax perpetrated by Bob White? Did he deceive all of those UFO experts on UFO files and Ancient Aliens?
Is this the answer to the mystery? It's definitely something to think about.
Now on to the other mysterious object. In 1974 construction workers in Romania working on the shores of the Mures River near Aiud found three objects at a depth of 30 feet. Two of these objects were the bones from a mastodon, which is a distant relative of the elephant that went extinct around 11,000 years ago. The third object was a mysterious wedge shaped object. They were so intrigued, they took it to an archaeological institute to have it analyzed. They found out that it was made up of 89% aluminum and 6% copper and some trace elements. All total it had 12 different elements in it. Aluminum didn’t come into existence in 1829. So the mystery is, where did the wedge come from? According to the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, there are a lot of theories, but no one know for sure.
If they had found this thing (they are calling it the wedge of Aiud) on the surface, it would be a mystery, but not a big deal. It would be like “hey, what’s that thing? I don’t know. Oh well” and no more thought would be given to it. But this thing was found thirty feet down in the sand and next to mastodon bones. What the heck? So the theory begins, since this thing was found that deep and next to mastodon bones, it must be at least 12,000 years old. Well, no human was making anything out of aluminum 12,000 years ago since we didn’t make aluminum until the mid 1800’s, it must therefore be an alien artifact. The mainstream archaeologist are baffled, they say this is an item that just couldn’t exist, but there it is.
An object like this has to come from a highly advanced civilization and in the words of David Childress “probably extraterrestrial”. That’s his answer to everything. “I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.”
Right? An aeronautical engineer who saw this thing said “that’s a piece of a landing gear for vertical take off and landing aircraft.” Ancient Alien theorist have looked at this and determined that it’s part of a crashed extraterrestrial craft. They also say that what we have here with the Aiud wedge is hard physical evidence that we have had extraterrestrial visits as long ago as 11,000 B.C.
Ancient Aliens not only had the Aiud Wedge in one episode, but they had it in two. On January 18th, 2007, Giorgio Tsoukalos and Erich Von Daniken went to Transylvania and visited the National History Museum there, they were offered a rare opportunity to get a first hand look at the wedge of Auid. Museum curator Ana Gruia took the wedge out of the storage locker, where it has been sitting since the early 1970’s out of the public view. Ana says that as historians they do not consider it a historical object that they’re used to. They don’t know what it was used for and they acknowledge there’s some uncertainty about its dating and its composition as well. The object is 20 centimetres long (7.8 inches)12.5 centimetres wide (4.9 inches) and 7 centimetres thick (2.8 inches)
Von Daniken is all excited when he picks it up and he exclaims “Giorgio”, “it’s heavy” Then he wonders what it was used for. Was it used for digging? Then he asks Giorgio something in their native language and Giorgio says “excavator tooth”. It does kind of resemble an excavator tooth. One of those giant buckets on a back hoe. Oh, but then Erich admits, those excavator tooths are never made out of aluminum. Aluminum is too soft, they are made out of steel. So, it couldn’t be that. So there is a big mystery here.
Then they talk about the patina. A patina is a layer that forms on the surface of copper, brass, bronze and similar metals and metal alloys as they are exposed to the atmosphere. The older the object is, the thicker the patina layer will be. This object is covered in a patina except in areas where samples were taken. There it looks shiny and silver, like aluminum. Giorgio says “you cannot fake a patina”. “It is impossible to artificially create a patina”.
Giorgio goes on to say that it takes hundreds if not thousands of years for a thick layer of patina to form as thick as the one on the Aiud wedge.
Ana says that there are two problems, one is that aluminum was not invented at the time they think this artifact was left there and two second is the patina. So Ana thinks this item according to the patina is older than 200 or so years.
Giorgio slams modern day archaeology because this item was lost in a box somewhere in the back of the museum. He thinks that they should have been studying it.
Ana says that they are just baffled with the conflicting evidence and comes up with two scenarios. One is that the item isn’t really that old and the context is irrelevant and the patina was somehow produced under unusual circumstances. So it’s a new object strangely preserved and second, is that it is not of terrestrial origin.
Giorgio has known about the Aiud wedge since the early 90’s and see it, he says “is like a dream come true”. He says “it’s a very strange thing. I mean, how do you explain this? It certainly looks as if it was part of a larger object.”
Well Giorgio, I might have the answer for you and you are right. Kinda.
Not right in the sense that it’s extraterrestrial, but right in the sense that it is part, or was part of a larger object. It really looks bulky-not what I imagine a part from an extraterrestrial craft would look like-it just doesn’t look advanced enough to be that.
These two adult men were geeking out over this object. Treating it like they were certain it was the landing pad for a 12,000 year old extraterrestrial vehicle. They tried to debunk it by saying that maybe it was a tooth from an excavator, but not doing much more than that. You can’t possibly know everything and have seen parts of every machine ever made by man, so publish pictures of the thing and ask if anyone has any idea what it is. Maybe they did that, I don’t know.
When it was found, the details were never made public because it was found in communist Romania.
I don’t know how recently it happened, I would like to think that it was after Giorgio and Erich visited the item, but…Romanian authorities reached out to a number of companies and manufacturers asking about the origins of this item. A Russian company named IAK referred them to the Germans to confirm if it was a piece of a Messerschmitt ME 262 WWII warplane which IAK believed it to be. The Germans responded confirming it is from an extractor plate from the front wheel of the Messerschmitt ME 262. Duralumin, which is an Aluminum and copper alloy that’s contents match those of the object, was a key alloy used to make plane part. This alloy is almost exclusively used in the aviation industry. Now surely, when they tested the Aiud wedge, they would find out exactly what it was made of. A type of aluminum alloy used exclusively in planes. That should close the case. Mystery solved. Even if they didn’t know exactly what type of plane or what part it is. The Messerschmitt 262 was a very advanced airplane for its time. It was actually the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft.
Not only were they able to confirm that it was a part of a man-made plane, but they were able to say what part it was. There is still a question out there. What was it doing buried 30 feet down next to mastodon bones? Or was it? And what about the patina? I don’t think you can accurately age something based solely on the patina. Giorgio said a patina is impossible to fake. Well, maybe not. You can use vinegar or muriatic acid to create a patina. I’m no expert, but with a quick internet search, I was able to find a ton of information on how to make metal look older than it is.
But I don’t think that is what happened here. First of all, it’s already old. It was already at least 30 years old when it was found. It was buried in sand near a river. I don’t know if it was there the whole 30 years, but it seems that those circumstances at least would have prematurely aged it.
So, what do you think? Had you ever heard of these artifacts before? If so, do you think of them differently now? Do you believe that they were both hoaxes, or one of them a hoax? The second one was definitely not extraterrestrial, but was it deliberately placed to look like something it wasn’t? And if so, by whom? There’s a lot to think about here. I certainly hadn’t heard the other side of the stories until I started looking into this.
I just makes me believe stronger that you should believe none of what you hear and half of what you read. If somebody tries to pull one over on you by telling you a lie, what are the consequences if they are caught. On the other hand, if someone writes the lie down…My aunt told me “don’t ever write something you can’t defend in court.” That’s good advice.
If you like the show, I would like to encourage you to help support the show. You can help me out with just three dollars a month. Just go to the website and click on support. I would really appreciate the help and would be happy to give you a shout-out.
Do you have a UFO story that you’d like to share? Is there a UFO story that you’d like for me to look into? Just send me an e-mail at ufoandalienpodcast@gmail.com I’m Rick Black and I’ll talk to you next time.