Ok, so the title may be just a little misleading, but I need your full attention as I’m hoping the brain trust of Three Wheeler World can solve a mystery that is now 16 months old.
I was in a small city called Parras de las Fuentes this weekend and a local friend told me a story that peeked my interest big time. Fortunately this was not “friend of a friend of a friend’s cousin” story, but a firsthand experience with physical proof to back it up.
After speaking with three people that were there when it happened the story as I understand it is as follows:
The extended family was having dinner around 2:00pm on Dec. 25, 2016 when a loud crash was heard in the parking area of the home. It was described as if someone had dropped a metal drum from the roof and that it shook the cement house.
They ran out back to see what had happened and saw that there was part of a very shiny metal disc lying next to a crater in their cement floor. It was emitting enough heat that they didn’t try to touch it for a couple of hours.
They contacted the local airport to ask if there were any incidents and even sent NASA photos and a letter asking if they knew what it was, but had not received an answer, so it’s been sitting in their garage for over a year collecting dust.
So of course after hearing this story I asked if there was any way I could see this thing to which he replied that it was a 5 minute drive away, so off we went. This is what I was shown.
This is the object
It passed between the wood beams without hitting any
This is the impact spot. It's hard to tell in the photo, but it's about 4" deep in the lowest point. It looks like the pad cracked from the impact as well.
Here are a bunch more photos. Obviously its man made, but what the heck is it? As you will see if you look closely it's not from a jet or a satellite as the chamfer on the bolt holes was made by someone using a hand drill, but the rest of the machining is impressive.
Here are my observations, please correct me if you disagree and please let me know what you think it might be and how it dropped out of the sky on a Christmas afternoon in a residential part of a small city.
- It's made of very hard steel as it holds a magnet and rings when you strike it with steel. It also hidden bend from the impact and the one brake is so clean it almost looks like the edge of broken glass. As you can see rust has started to form, but not much. They say it was very shiny when it landed and only recently started to oxidize.
- The bolts are probably 3/8" UNC and the threading the part is nothing special as I can run the broken studs in an out with my finger tips.
- As mentioned, the bolt champers are rough and you can see the metal chipped in some spots indicating that maybe the drilling was done after the hardening process.
- There is no signs of damage from the impact, nothing! Not even a chip, or mushroomed edge.
- There are four rings of grooves on the flat edges, two on each side. One of them are pointed like an equilateral triangles and the other three are shaped like right angle triangles. They are not all angled in the same direction. At first I thought that they turned something, but there are no wear marks whatsoever, not even a stain. This leads me to believe that they are used to set the timing of other discs, or drums that bolt to this disc.
- In the first photo you will see as you scroll down from here, there appears to be some metal stuck in the machined teeth. This is what I think caused the failure of the part which I will hypnotize about at the end of this post.
Please look these photos over, ask me any questions you have and lets try to solve this mystery for the good people of Parras.
My guess is that this was part of a coupler between two very large pieces of machinery and that the machined teeth were used to set the timing, or synchronize the equipment. I'm guessing it failed because something came loose and something metallic like perhaps a bolt fell in-between the disc in the photo and another disc that was still held in place by the now loosened bolts, but at some point the rotating assembly wobbled and the foreign metallic object was pinched causing the hardened disc to snap and brake off the last of the bolt heads that were holding it in place and head towards space.
I don't know what process were used to machine the part, but I can tell you that the small teeth are so precise you might think they were investment cast, but you can clearly see marks that would indicate to me that they were machined into the plate.
Any insight is appreciated.