The Coso Artifact
On 13 February 1961 three rock dealers from Olancha, collecting geodes in the Coso Mountains, cut open a concretion and found a ceramic cylinder inside with a metal shaft down the middle and a copper sheath. Geologists they consulted put the rock at half a million years, and the find entered the literature as an extraterrestrial spark plug. In 1999 Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich showed X-rays of it to the Spark Plug Collectors of America: the members identified a Champion plug of the 1920s, with its characteristic thread and ceramic insulator. Concretions of clay and rust grow around iron in decades, not epochs.
The Hammersmith Ghost and the Smith Case
Through the winter of 1803–04 a figure in white went about Hammersmith throwing itself at passers-by; it was said to be a suicide from the churchyard. The parish organised night patrols, and in the early hours of 3 January 1804 the excise officer Francis Smith fired at a white shape in Black Lion Lane and killed Thomas Millwood, a bricklayer walking home in the white linen of his trade. Smith was sentenced to death for murder, commuted to a year's hard labour, and the case served English law for two centuries as the standard problem of whether an honest mistake can excuse force. The ghost itself was accounted for soon afterwards by a shoemaker, John Graham, who admitted wrapping himself in a sheet to frighten his apprentice.
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