Photo: TikTok /@itsmatthewjacob
A New Jersey man made a strange discovery on the beach while looking for a place to surf. After a storm hit the area on December 19, Matthew Jacob decided to head to Margate, hoping the weather created big waves for him to surf.
As he was walking down the beach, he noticed something odd near the water and went to investigate. As he got closer, he realized it was a row of rusted seats that had washed up on the shore.
"I wasn't sure what it was. I thought it was a tree branch at first. As I got closer, I realized that I was looking at seats. The closer I got, they appeared to be plane seats," Jacob told PEOPLE.
Jacob told that outlet that his first thought was the seats came from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared from radar over the South China Sea in 2014.
He shared a video of his find on TikTok, where commenters suggested that the seats were from TWA Flight 800, which crashed off the coast of New York in 1996.
"4 across means that it has to be from a wide-body plane. TWA 800 had a 3-4-3 economy config, just saying," one person commented.
While people speculated about where the seats came from, local officials do not believe they were from a doomed aircraft.
"The seats are far too heavy to have come from anything like a plane," Margate Police Chief Matthew Hankinson told NJ Advanced Media.
In fact, they may not be from an airplane at all. Instead, officials believe they may be from a railcar and were intentionally dumped in the water by New York officials as part of an effort to build an artificial reef off the coast of southern Long Island.
"The seats are stripped down to the metal with nothing left from cushions, seat belts, or buckles that would indicate they came from a plane crash," Lt. Joe Scullion of the Margate police department explained. "A detective did some further research and found that decommissioned railcar seats are typically stripped down to the metal parts and taken out to sea and dumped to help build artificial reefs."