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This Fox News article says an aluminum metal part discovered in 1970 is 250,000 years old (and then conclude it must be from an alien craft.)

Now tests at a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, have revealed that the strange fragment of metal is made up of 90 percent aluminium and is 250,000 years old.

Aluminium was not produced by mankind until about 200 years ago

Is it really 250,000 years old?

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Chloe
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    There is a huge difference between "is this thing really this old and made of aluminum?" and "was this a part of an alien craft?". Perhaps you could limit the question to validating the authenticity of the find, and avoid the speculative part about aliens? – Batman Oct 25 '16 at 18:16
  • @AlexanderO'Mara Do you mean 3 separate questions? – Chloe Oct 25 '16 at 18:27
  • I've edited it down to one. – Oddthinking Oct 25 '16 at 18:31
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    Maybe point out that this article first appeared in *The Sun*, a UK tabloid, and was republished in Fox News Science. – rougon Oct 25 '16 at 19:19
  • I am not finding any report of this outside of that circulated by the Sun. The most detailed it gets with evidence is that "tests" at "a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland" without saying what tests or what lab, so I assume either a) it is uncredible, b) unprovable. – rougon Oct 25 '16 at 19:39
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    That thing is also referred to as "Aluminium Wedge of Aiud" and is mentioned a lot in the ancient alien believers community. Google it and you will find tons of other claims. – Philipp Oct 25 '16 at 21:48
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    We need to find the "lab in Lausanne, Switzerland" to see what tests were (allegedly?) done. – GEdgar Oct 25 '16 at 21:52
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    Does anyone know what particular measurements can tell us the age of a piece of aluminium? I don't know of any. – hdhondt Oct 26 '16 at 02:45
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    Unsubstantiated hokum gets us nowhere. We need hard scientific facts, not hearsay. So first analyze the metal at an accredited laboratory, by such means as electron microprobe or X-ray Fluorescence. Second, how exactly was the age of accompanying objects determined, and thirdly, what was the exact relationship between the associated objects. As to dating aluminium, no there is no such method of dating an Al artifact. The only suitable radioisotope -27Al is only produced in close proximity to stellar explosions - not the case here. – Gordon Stanger Oct 26 '16 at 03:40
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    Fox can claim that the aluminum in the object is over 6 billion years old, and they would not be wrong. weather or not the *structure* is 250,000 years old is another story. – tuskiomi Oct 26 '16 at 17:29
  • @tuskiomi: You almost never find naturally-occurring aluminum metal. It is too reactive. Even if you did it wouldn't have survived the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago or so. So yes, perhaps some of the aluminum *atoms* are 6 billion years old, but in principle you can't tell the age of stable atoms, and the unstable atoms have too short of a half-life to be useful for dating something billions of years old. – TheBlackCat Oct 27 '16 at 15:51
  • Further down in the article, they say "_local historian Mihai Wittenberger said the object is actually a metal piece from a World War II German aircraft_" – Didier L Oct 31 '16 at 15:50

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