Aluminum reacts readily with oxygen. This is beneficial for Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie users since any aluminum surface exposed to air will immediately form a thin layer of aluminum oxide, sealing the inner metal from further rusting (a process called passivation). However, this reactivity means aluminum, although the most common metal in the earth's crust, is never found naturally here in its native metal form. Relatively advanced electrolytic technology is needed to separate the metal from compound, thus aluminum was unknown to the uninitiated public of post-Atlantean, pre-industrial societies.
So how come geologists found a flake of aluminum foil embedded in a 250-million-year-old rock in Bulgaria?
"(a) Photograph of the specimen with deep-green phlogopite and Al⁰ flake (at the center); (b) close-up of the Al⁰ flake shown at a. The Al⁰ flake protrudes from the phlogopite matrix. Scale bar = 1 mm. The specimen (no. M.008465) is kept in the Laboratory for Geocollections at the Geological Institute of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences."
The above figure is from "Native Aluminum: Does It Exist?" (PDF) by Vesselin M. Dekov, Vasil Arnaudov, Frans Munnik, Tanya B. Boycheva, and Saverio Fiore (American Mineralogist, Volume 94, pages 1283–1286, 2009). The specimen was found in the Rila mountains of southwest Bulgaria -- incidentally, a country that was home to the earliest European human civilizations that orthonoid science is willing to acknowledge.
Where did the foil flake come from? Dekov et al. try to explain it using natural processes, namely the "desilication of pegmatite, resulting in its Al residual enrichment; and [the] serpentinization of an ultramafic body, providing a strongly reduced front (H2 and hydrocarbons) toward the serpentinite/pegmatite contact". But I'm not convinced by such a pat answer. There's more going on here than conventional geochemistry can account for. I think what we are looking at is an OOPArt (out-of-place artifact), fossilized hundreds of millions of years ago when the Balkan Peninsula formed. The question is who or what made it?
The extreme age of the rock certainly rules out even the earliest Atlantean human technology. What non-human agency then could have been making aluminum foil in the Paleozoic era? Could this be a flake from the subdermal psychotronic shielding augmentation which gives Reticulans their characteristic gray color, deposited with the long-deteriorated bio-remains of an unlucky visitor from the Reticulum system who succumbed to a dimetrodon attack? Or is this finally hard evidence of Yithian mind-transference shielding technology, the likes of which have only been hinted at by paranoid pulp-fiction writers? Or perhaps a more depressingly prosaic explanation will suffice, such as a human chrononaut litterbug who carelessly dropped a gum wrapper?
The answer must remain elusive for now. The specimen is too small, at little over a millimeter, to determine it's original form or use, and hence give us clues to its maker. This is not unexpected, as it's improbable that something like an entire AFDB could survive the deformations of mountain formation intact. (Fortunately, it would be too impractical for agents of mind control to use such tectonic forces to debeaniefy living paranoids!)
If this flake wasn't the result of a freak event, but instead represents as-yet-undiscovered wider deposits of fossilized aluminum foil throughout Bulgaria left by some ultra-ancient, electrolytically-competent, unhuman society, this might explain the early rise of human civilization in the region. Perhaps the Varna or other neolithic culture discovered the flakes -- or even larger deposits -- while mining gold and salt. Eventually they would come to understand the relation between this strange metal and its dumbing of the natural psychotronic influence of the grasses, which had been manipulating humanity into agriculture (and hence their own selfish propagation) for millennia.
This understanding would lead to the development of primitive psychotronic technology, probably based on simple crop-field alignments along trade routes. A ruling elite of aluminum gatherers able to clear their minds of the Poaceaen whispers by lining their head-dresses with aluminum-foil flakes would have the means to mold disparate bands into a civilization. However, not being able to produce their own aluminum to develop psychotrons for more direct mind-control, this limited technological advantage would be useless against invasions by aggressive horse-riding warriors. As their civilization sunk into a dark age of war, its knowledge of aluminum would be safeguarded by secret societies, keeping it hidden in occultic rites and cryptic cave glyphs, until later civilizations arose that were better able to apply the knowledge to unlocking the secrets of recovered Atlantean tech.
Predictably, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences refuses to comment on these theories, much less allow paranoid researchers access to specimen #M.008465 for further study.
(BT Stephan Zielinski.)