UFO (unidentified Flashed Object)

I truely have no idea what this thing is.

More pictures after the break

It was found in a house. the middle bit moves around in a circular fashion and if you twist the top knob a little hydrolic plunger goes up and down inside the cylinder.

I truely cant see any purpose of this object, I wonder if it is just some random art orniment that someone has made.

Oh and some of you are probably wondering how I took these photos.

Well it was originally in the boot of my car and then I thought I should do some strobist stuff with it. So I took out my sb900 and set the camera onboard pop-up flash to commander mode, set it to fire off the sb900 in a manual setting as I wanted to have it at a pretty darn high power (Half power)

The reason i wanted it to be a high power is i wanted noone to know i took this shot on the floor of a Tesco's carpark while I was shopping for my lunch.

To get the surrounding area and daylight sun to not affect the image I had the flash on an FP setting so i could go faster than normal sync speed, and shot at around 1/500th of a second and at f13 with my tokina 11-16mm. I do think i looked a tad strange on my knees in the carpark with flash in one hand, camera in the other, shooting a strange object on the floor beside my car, while i still had bits of honey mustard chicken pasta all over my face.

So does anyone know what this is?  I hope it has a cool name, something like "hydrostatic oscillating calibrated neurotransducer-thingy"