CAIRO — Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat found an odd stone in the vast desert of southwestern Egypt in December 1996. At first glance, the shiny object seemed to be Libyan desert glass, a unique type of rock mainly composed of yellow silica and common in this area east of the Sahara.

“The Libyan glass area is filled with strange material of unknown origin,” Barakat told Al-Monitor. “One day, after the fajr prayer, I started walking around. And I saw a small black but bright rock on the ground.”

Subsequent studies of the stone, the first of which were carried out by Barakat himself at his own expense, discovered that the object was of extraterrestrial origin. The Egyptian geologist says he suspected as much from the beginning. Barakat continued to study the stone until 2012, when he published a book on it, and he then passed the baton to a group of researchers from Italy and South Africa, who have continued to study and expand knowledge about Hypatia to this day.

“Fragments of the stone, found by Barakat to consist mainly of micro-diamonds when he studied it for his PhD, were shared with [other scientists], including Romano Serra, the curator of the Natural History Museum in a town near Bologna," Marco Andreoli, an honorary research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, told Al-Monitor. In Serra, he said, "I received small fragments taken off Aly’s stone, which I then studied with state-of-the-art techniques [in] South Africa.”