3 Ancient Egyptian aeroplanes
The Ptolemaic ‘aeroplane’
In 1898, a curious winged wooden object is said to have been found at Saqqara by a French Egyptologist named Lauret in a tomb belonging to one Padiamun, dating from about 200 BCE. When the artefact was sent to the Cairo Museum, it was catalogued (number 6347) and then shelved among other items classed as bird figurines. In 1969, Dr Dawoud Khalil Messiha (1924-1998), an Egyptian doctor with an interest in model aeroplanes, visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, saw the figurine in its display case and was intrigued by its characteristics. He felt that it showed features never found on birds, but which are part of modern aircraft design: it has no legs, its tail and wings are straight and the tail is vertical. Part of the tail is broken, and Dr Messiha thought that a stabiliser might have been attached there. The tail slants slightly towards the right when looked at from behind.
The model is made from a light sycamore wood, weighs 39.1 g and its wing span is 180 mm, while the body is 140 mm long. Dr Messiha made a balsa replica, which flew when he added the presumed missing stabiliser to the tail. He thought that the clearly aerodynamic design of the object, together with its ability to fly, indicated that it was a model of a genuine aircraft, perhaps a glider of some kind, that might have travelled at up to 50 knots.
Or is it a falcon?
There are certainly intriguing features to this figurine. The fact that it can indeed fly suggests that its maker intended it to fly. But did the maker reproduce an aircraft rather than a bird? In favour of the former interpretation is the shape of the tail, as birds’ tails are horizontal. Against that interpretation is the decoration of the front end, which clearly depicts a falcon, with the characteristic markings shown on images of the falcon gods Ra‘ and Horus. The shape of the wings resembles paintings of Ra‘’s wings. It is only the tail which is wrong; perhaps that was deliberately altered to make a model that would fly.
There are also problems about the account of the object’s discovery. I have been unable to find a trace of a French archaeologist called Lauret, although there was one called Victor Loret (1859-1946) who was Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and who conducted excavations at Saqqara in 1898, where he discovered the tomb of Khuit, a wife of the sixth-dynasty pharaoh Teti. I have found several individuals named Padiamun, but all seem to have lived during the Third Intermediate Period, up to eight hundred years earlier than this individual. For an assessment of the object’s ability to fly, follow the link below. Furthermore, Dr Messiha was not a disinterested medical doctor, but a well known practitioner of radiesthesia (diagnosis by dowsing) and other ‘alternative’ medical techniques he claimed were practised in Bronze Age Egypt. In 1967, he carried out ‘psychic investigations’ in the Queen’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid where he claimed to have located an unknown chamber some 20 m below its floor by dowsing. He believed this to be the intact burial chamber of Khufu.
4 The ‘Coso Artifact’
The outside of the ‘geode’
The object sawn in half
The so-called ‘Coso Artifact’ (as an American object, I’ll allow it to keep its American spelling) was found on 13 February 1961, by Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell, who were looking for minerals to sell in their shop in Olancha, California. They were about nine kilometres northeast of Olancha, near the top of a peak about 1,300 m high. The next day, while cutting through one of the geodes, Mikesell ruined a nearly new diamond saw blade. The explanation was soon found: inside the supposed geode, instead of a cavity was a circular section of hard white material resembling porcelain. In the centre of this was a 2 mm circle of bright magnetic metal. Around the porcelain was a layer of corroded copper and, outside that, a layer of mineral that was hexagonal in section. The outer surface of the specimen was encrusted with fossil shells and two nonmagnetic metal objects that appeared to be a nail and a washer.
Radiograph of the
‘top’ end
A geologist informed the finders that the nodule had taken at least 500,000 years to form, but this informal analysis was never published. Later, the creationist geologist Ron Calais examined the object and took photographs and X-radiographs of it. The X-rays showed that there was still more of interest embedded inside the 'geode', including a tiny metallic helix at its upper end and a metal, presumably copper, sheath covering the porcelain cylinder in the other half of the rock. Unfortunately, the location of the artefact is no longer known and Wallace Lane, who seems to be its last known owner, is thought to have died.
Radiograph of the
‘bottom’ end
The discoverers seem to have been ambivalent about the object: Mrs Maxey is quoted as saying that it might be “something that lay in a mud bed, then got baked and hardened by the sun… Or else it is an instrument as old as legendary Mu or Atlantis”. Their later attempt to sell it for $25,000 suggests, though, that they believed it was unusual and in some way important. Paul Willis, the editor of INFO Journal, suggested that that it might have been a spark plug, although some features, such as the metallic helix, puzzled proponents of this hypothesis and led some to speculate that it might have been some type of communications device. Some creationists and others have presented the 'Coso Artifact' as evidence for advanced technology in ancient civilisations.
Unfortunately the whole story can be unravelled very easily. First of all, the object was not a geode. Geodes have very precise characteristics—a thin outer shell of dense chalcedonic silica, and a layer of quartz crystals internally—which the ‘Coso Artifact’ does not possess. The material was described by one of the discoverers as hardened clay that had picked up pebbles, a nail and a washer, with a hardness of 3 on the Mohs Scale, much softer than a geode. Secondly, the resemblance of the object embedded within it to a spark plug is a vital clue. Far from being evidence for internal combustion engines in the remote past, research by Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich of the Pacific Northwest Skeptics has shown that it can in fact be identified with a spark plug manufactured by Champion in the 1920s.