What are Out-of-Place Artifacts (OOPArts)?
An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is an artifact radically out of time or place, often to a seemingly impossible extent. An example would be an alleged human sandal print found in the Wheeler Formation, which dates to the Middle Cambrian, about 500 million years ago. In the “print” are two apparently crushed trilobites. Another famous out-of-place artifact is the Coso artifact, a spark plug from the 1920s found encased in a lump of hard clay or rock that one of the discoverers claimed had to be 500,000 years old. A more recent example is the Kensington runestone, a Norse artifact that is alleged to be from the 14th century, found in Minnesota, USA. Out-of-place artifacts are beloved by fans of anomalous phenomena (Forteans) and creationists, who see antediluvian human artifacts as evidence that man really did exist in the earliest days of the Earth’s existence, as Genesis claims. The problem with most OOPArts is that they can rather easily be identified as hoaxes or instances of pareid
