In the summer of 2023, at a small construction site on the outskirts of Da Lat, a young worker suddenly picked up a stone block weighing about two kilograms, with a rough gray surface, interspersed with brick-red fragments. But what stunned the group was not the stone, but the image that appeared right in the middle of it: a Nokia 3310 phone – a symbol of the early 21st century – as if it had been fossilized for thousands of years. That “petrified phone” was reminiscent of the dinosaur fossils that children had seen in books, except that it did not belong to the Jurᴀssic period but to the Technological period. The local press reported the incident on July 5, 2023, and it quickly spread on social networks with millions of shares. Many people called it a joke, but many researchers saw in it a strange sign: evidence of alien “intervention”. Before long—from 1947’s Roswell, 1951’s Lubbock Lights, to the Pentagon report of 2020—humanity had accumulated hundreds of UFO stories. But the “Nokia Stone” became a new symbol: not a light in the sky, but an object in the hand—concrete, heavy, cold, and paradoxical. How could a phone be encased in sedimentary rock if it had only been invented in 2000? Geology suggests that natural petrification takes tens of thousands of years, but initial testing at a local lab suggests that the mineral layer surrounding the “phone” crystallized at least… a few thousand years ago. That, if true, is physically impossible.
Many theories have been put forward. Some say it’s an elaborate fake, an “art performance” by someone looking to get attention. But there are also other voices – smaller but persistent – that suggest it could be an “artefact” left by another civilization, a way of saying, “We were here.” UFO researchers suggest a “time slip,” where objects from the future or past appear out of chronological place. Some scientific papers even theorize that UFOs might be “collecting – remembering – dropping” our technological remains the way we drop devices into the ocean for study.
When we put the “Nokia stone” into the long timeline – from ancient Egyptian engravings of flying objects, to the 1561 UFO over Switzerland recorded in the chronicles, to the “Wow!” in 1977, then “3I/Atlas” in 2025 – the picture emerges like a red thread: intelligent civilizations have made contact with Earth at various stages, leaving traces in places we least expect. And just as the light from Betelgeuse takes 640 years to reach our eyes, these traces may be “slow messages” sent to the future. The “Nokia Stone” is therefore not just a joke or a strange artifact; it is a symbol of the encounter between human technology and cosmic mystery.
UFOs – if they really exist – do not necessarily appear as glowing flying saucers. Sometimes, evidence of alien intelligence can be contained in a stone, a radio signal, or an unusual comet orbit. All these phenomena add up to a “saga” lasting thousands of years, where humanity is both witness and protagonist. When we look at the “Nokia Stone,” we see not just a rock, but the very question of time, of cosmic memory, and of whether we are truly alone. That is why this story, like all UFO stories, continues to live on, continues to provoke debate, and continues to force us to look up at the sky with a mixture of wonder and disbelief.
