In 1961, three people were out searching for geodes for their gem and gift shop in Olancha, Calif. One of them picked up a geode common to the area, “but it somehow seemed different,” explained to Leonard Nimoy in an episode of his TV show “In Search Of …”
Mike Mikesell, one of the three, broke a diamond saw blade cutting through it back at the shop, and he made a shocking discovery. Within the geode he found what appeared to be a modern device later compared to a spark plug—but how old must it be encased as it was in the geode?
It could be as ancient as 500,000 years old, hundreds of thousands of years before advanced civilizations are thought to have inhabited the Earth. Virginia Maxey, another of the three discoverers, said at the time that a geologist examined the fossils around the device and dated the device at 500,000 years old or older.