The team reported that they bombarded americium (element 95) with calcium (element 20) to produce four atoms of ununpentium (element 115). These atoms, they report, decayed to ununtrium (element 113) in a fraction of a second. The ununtrium produced then existed for 1.2 seconds before decaying into natural elements.
Ununpentium was theorized to be inside the island of stability. This probably explains why it was mentioned regularly in popular culture before it was actually created:
In the world of UFO conspiracy theory culture during the 1980s and 1990s, Bob Lazar asserted that ununpentium functioned as "fuel" for UFOs, being "stepped up" to ununhexium under "particulate bombardment," and that the ununhexium's decay products would include antimatter. These processes are considered implausible in terms of nuclear physics.
As a reference to this kind of UFO conspiracy theory, in the X-COM game series there is an element called elerium-115 or just elerium (the name "elerium-115" being an error as in this form the number refers to the atomic mass instead of the atomic number, meaning that elerium would have no neutrons, which is not possible).
The elements have the numbers 113 and 115 and were discovered by a combination of physical and chemical techniques in the Russian nuclear research centre in Dubna.
In a fusion reaction between target and beam particles element115 was born.
As expected, the element115 decayed by emitting an alpha particle to become element 113 and then in further emissions of four alpha particles, to dubnium, element 105.
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