History Main / NotOfThisEarth

There are several ways to handle this trope plausibly: the substance could be made of known elements that are present on Earth but are far too rare to make an object as big as the one being investigated, or perhaps in isotope ratios not typical of Earth or the Solar System, or else it should be a manufactured substance using techniques beyond Earthly science. Any substance said to be a "new element" is almost by definition implausible, as all matter is made up of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons; the number of protons is what determines what element the atom is, and the periodic table is very well-mapped out; anything that shows up should slot in exactly where such an element would be predicted to[[note]]Known elements above a certain point are (so far) all highly unstable, and would decay into "lower" elements at almost the same time they came into existence, so they would not make good building materials, at least not without some kind handwaving or lampshading along the lines of "I don't know how it isn't decaying, but it isn't"[[/note]].

* In ''Literature/{{Sphere}}'', a sample of the hull of a supposed alien ship is analyzed and found to be made of common elements, but they've been worked into a composite form that nobody yet knows how to duplicate.

* A recurring trope in the WebOriginal/SCPFoundation. Though they're usually pretty good at identifying the materials (or at the very least their presentation, i.e. being alloys or mixtures) their physical anomalous artifacts are composed from through mass spectrography testing, sometimes they find themselves unable to ascertain.
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* A recurring trope in the [[WebOriginal/SCPFoundation]]. Though they're usually pretty good at identifying the materials (or at the very least their presentation, i.e. being alloys or mixtures) their physical anomalous artifacts are composed from through mass spectrography testing, sometimes they find themselves unable to ascertain.
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* [[folder:Web Original]]

There are several ways to handle this trope plausibly: the substance could be made of known elements that are present on Earth but are far too rare to make an object as big as the one being investigated, or perhaps in isotope ratios not typical of Earth or the Solar System, or else it should be a manufactured substance using techniques beyond Earthly science.

* A historical real life example is [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium Helium]] -- the second most common element in the entire universe as we currently understand it -- which was detected and identified as a new element by analyzing the spectrum of the Sun's chromosphere in 1868, fourteen years before the same spectral line would be first detected on Earth as well and twenty-seven before the element itself could be properly isolated here. In fact, all the other Noble Gasses were similarly unknown as elements until well after much rarer ones had been discovered and studied.