“…In addition to our main purpose, there are several points of interest in the present study. First, we note that there are a number of interesting studies of the Apéry numbers concerning congruence properties and their analogues (see, e.g., [6,7,9,3,4,1,16,12,13] and references therein). These studies suggest that the congruence originates from automorphic forms associated with some algebraic surface (see, e.g., [5,20]).…”