The Bell Found In A Lump Of Coal

 I will let the "Genesis Park" introduce this subject:

In 1944, as a ten-year-old boy, Anderson’s task was to keep the coal furnace stoked at his home in Buckhannon, West Virginia (WV). One evening he went into the basement to refuel the furnace and carried a particularly large lump of coal on his shovel. As he carried the loaded shovel, it wobbled and the coal fell onto the floor, breaking the lump in two. A slender metallic object was revealed, protruding from one of the broken halves. Newton set aside the piece with the curious object and placed the remainder into the furnace.

Over the next couple of days the boy extracted a small bell from the coal, first by whacking it with a  croquet mallet and then by cleaning it with lye and a scrub brush. Unfortunately he scoured all the coal off the intriguing artifact! But his parents and others witnessed the bell that he brought up from the basement and it became an object of conversation, residing on an old secretary desk shelf.

https://www.genesispark.com/essays/update-on-the-mysterious-bell-found-in-coal/

So what we have is a metal bell. The metal bell seems to be real; there are pictures of it. I am not going to dispute its existence. But what is is provenance?

A ten-year-old boy

A ten-year-old boy claims was found in a lump of coal, but no one else saw with any coal on it. The creationists' sole witness here is this boy.

No Coal Residues

The creationists had some analysis done on the bell.

In the 1963–1964 timeframe, a man named Boris Bilas took the bell to the geology department at the University of Delaware at Wilmington, where it was studied and then returned. They confirmed that the bell was handmade. ... He subsequently wrote (Morris, 2010), “Nuclear Activation Analysis determined it to be primarily of bronze with a curious admixture of zinc. A micro probe showed no residual traces of coal.”

No sign of residual coal? Almost like it was never buried in coal in the first place.

Remember, the creationist scenario is that the coal formed by heavy compaction around the bell. This is like putting a load of vegetable matter in a giant press, applying heat and pressure, and making coal. That is going to push coal into every scratch and imperfection in the surface of the bell. Indeed, you might imagine the bell being crushed in the process.

And yet the creationist scientists found no sign of coal on the bell! Either this ten-year-old kid was a master at polishing metal, or he lied.

Composition of the metal

What is the composition of the metal? From the quote above "primarily of bronze with a curious admixture of zinc". See also:

There a nuclear activation analysis revealed that the bell contains an unusual mix of metals, different from any known modern alloy production (including copper, zinc, tin, arsenic, iodine, and selenium).

Unfortunately we do not know if the arsenic, iodine, and selenium are there in percentage levels or ppm, but the earlier reference does not mention them, I would guess they are just impurities in it.

They also do not report the percentage of the metal, but it sounds like gunmetal to me.

Conclusion

So we have a bell made of an alloy that could be gunmetal, found by a kid who claims it was inside a lump of coal, and without any further witnesses and with no residues of coal on it.

It is a fake!