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Hi fellow MS'ers, I've had an interesting couple months. It started in September and should be completed in the beginning of November. We were doing a routine oil change back in September. During the oil change my mechanic pulled the oil screen and it was packed with "sludge" and some metal parts. (see picture) This is the first time that the screen had been pulled since I owned the airplane. (more on that later) Upon initial inspection of the metal parts my mechanic could not identify what they might have come from. Most perplexing was this ball that was found in the mix. We then cut open the filter and found that it was clean. My mechanic's best guess was that the ball came from the tappet but that didn't make any sense as if the tappet had come apart there is no way the engine would be running properly. Just prior to doing the oil change I had taken the airplane out for a :30 flight to warm up the oil and everything was perfectly normal. We immediately took pictures of the parts and sent them off to Lycoming for their input on what these parts might be and more specifically the "ball". They called shorty after receiving the pictures and said there is no way that these parts came from this engine. They theorized that either the engine had a catastrophic failure somewhere along the way and these parts were never retrieved or somebody used a dirty funnel to pour oil in sometime without knowing these parts were in the funnel. So the quest for an answer continued. I took it upon myself to email the pictures to many top name engine overhaulers to get their input and they came back with the same thing Lycoming did. One thing was for certain though and that was, I didn't want to fly the airplane anymore until somebody could give us a positive answer or it was torn down and inspected. Lycoming suggested we fly it for another 10 hours and then pull the screen and filter again but that was not an option for me.