It’s not uncommon to find a discarded tool, ancient artifact, or something much more interesting while traveling through the Yukon wilderness.
David Beaudoin, a resident of Dawson City, Yukon, made his own mysterious discovery while hiking in Tombstone Territorial Park recently.
“It was about four to six kilometers from where we started,” Beaudoin said. “A little hunting at first, and then all uphill. And then I saw this thing.”
Beaudoin said it appeared to be an old car battery but he didn’t understand how it would end up in that place, almost on top of a mountain.
“There’s nothing else around,” he said.
“There are no trails. There are no markings made by anyone. There are no vehicles going up there.”
Beaudoin said he turned the object over to inspect it further and said it looked like it hadn’t been there for that long.
It looked like it “literally fell from the sky,” he said.
That’s when another thought came to mind. In February, an unidentified object, later called a “suspicious balloon” by officials, was shot down over the Yukon by fighter jets. The remains of the object were said to be somewhere between Dawson City and Mayo.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s it: I found the space balloon payload, or whatever,'” Beaudoin told Breaking:. “I don’t think it’s that, but it would be cool if it was.”
Beaudoin decided to leave the object where he found it. He took some photos of it that he would then post on social media in the hopes that someone could help him identify what it was.
Many speculations arose, from an excavator battery to a flux capacitor.
One person who saw the photos is Dawson resident Jed Biernaski.
Biernaski is the manager of NAPA Auto Parts in Dawson and thought he knew what it was as soon as he saw it.
“I think it’s a battery,” he said. “With the boards and the connections between the boards, that’s what I would think. It’s just missing its box.”
“In the early ’20s and ’30s, they actually used wooden boxes for their batteries,” he said. “Therefore, it may have rotted away and left the lead plates and connections inside.”
Like Beaudoin, Biernaski was perplexed as to how a battery would end up on the top of a mountain.
“I thought about that too,” he told Breaking:. “Because there were no footprints. Or alternatively, there were footprints once, but over time they grew.”
According to Beaudoin, the more he thinks about it, the object he found is probably an old battery of some kind, but he still has hope for a much more interesting result.
“I was thinking, yeah, it sure is a battery,” he said. “But maybe it’s the battery of the strange satellite that was floating over our airspace.
“It hasn’t been confirmed yet that it’s not cool. It’s unlikely to be as cool as I’d like it to be.”
