Back when I was a younger pup, I used to be interested in all manner of weird phenomena, ghosts especially, and I figured I would grow up to go study at Duke’s now-defunct school of parapsychology. That didn’t pan out; as I grew further away from the ground, so too did I grow apart from the deep interest I held in the abnormal.

I did manage to pick up a few things along the way, however: Borley Rectory, for example, is probably the most haunted house in the world. One of the coolest photographs ever is of spontaneous combustion victim Dr. John Bentley’s charred leg. And! When the UFOs crashed in Roswell, NM, in 1947, along with aliens in various stages of death and dying, the federales also found a strange, lightweight metal that was tough as diamonds but pliable as paper. It looks like the cloned offspring of the Nazi scientists we poached before they could face the music at Nuremberg after World War II have finally managed to replicate it.

Meet graphene, a “new” (read: to humanity) metal composite that’s, yes, tough as diamonds but pliable as paper. The stuff is made of pure carbon atoms bonded into a hexagon shape and connected ino a honeycomb pattern, one atom-thick. Graphene is so light that a single gram can cover an entire football field. To put that into perspective, consider how much ground a gram of flour could evenly cover; a few square inches or so, maybe?

Graphene also conducts electricity 100 times faster than silicon chips, making it a future contender for the substance that powers the world’s electronics. The material will have to make it around the powerful silicon lobby, which holds more sway on Earth than the cloned Nazi scientist offspring do these days. It’ll be a little while before Graphene Valley breaks ground over the bulldozed remains of Flint, Mich., in other words.

Thanks to SYSK listener Candace Fladager for sending the article on what the aliens made.

More on HowStuffWorks.com:
How UFOs Work
How Ghosts Works
How Spontaneous Human Combustion Works