According to the American newspaper “New York Post”, Matthew Jacob was walking along the beach last week when he saw metal seats attached to each other, which he believed came from a lost or forgotten plane.

“I think I saw airplane seats washed up on the Jersey shore,” Jacob said in a video clip posted to his TikTok account Sunday afternoon. The video has received about one and a half million likes.

He said: “I don't know what I saw. At first I thought it was a tree branch and when I got closer I realized I was looking at the seats.”

“The closer you get to it, the more it looks like airplane seats,” Jacob continued.

Speculation about the provenance of the seats quickly spread on social accounts, with one person saying: “I was on TWA 800 and I was sitting there,” referring to the fatal 1996 crash on a beach in Long Island. While another suggested: “I'm pretty sure these seats are from a 2011 Kia Soul.”

Margate Police Chief Matthew Hankinson said in a news release that there is a more logical explanation.

He explained: “The seats are too heavy to come from something like an airplane. One of the researchers did further research and suggested that it might be related to the seats of rail cars that were routinely removed. The metal parts were taken out and taken out to help create the artificial coral reefs.

“Recent storms may have dislodged the seats from the rocks,” he said.