Space experts believe they have identified the bizarre ‘UFO’ debris discovered by a North Carolina groundskeeper and his coworker at a luxury campsite.
Justin Clontz found the three-foot-wide panel, fuzzed with burnt and frayed carbon fibers, in the middle of a trail in the town of Canton last week.
And now an astronomer has told DailyMail.com that the mangled metal is likely pieces of a storage trunk from one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX spacecraft.
‘The debris matches the expected location of these reentries,’ Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr Jonathan McDowell told DailyMail.com, adding that he was ‘very confident’ in this ᴀssessment.
The charred black, metal object also resembles two pieces of debris found in Canada and Australia, which are now known to be from SpaceX Dragons.
‘We have coincidence in time and place. They look similar to each other and to the Australia debris which is confirmed to come from a Dragon trunk,’ Dr McDowell said.
Clontz was working on grounds maintenance at Glamping Collective, a luxury campsite in Haywood County, when he made the eerie discovery.
The career groundskeeper and landscaper told local news he was ‘just shocked as to what it was,’ adding: ‘It’s once in a lifetime, you know, it don’t happen every day.’
The UFO-like debris’ carbon fiber looked almost like some kind of weird fur, as initial reports described the now very likely identified mystery object.
‘We don’t know what it is,’ Clontz told local news earlier this month. ‘We just know that it’s not from up here.’
Although this piece of SpaceX debris fell safely about a half-mile down a remote trail on Glamping’s property, Dr McDowell noted that both governmental and private space programs have become dangerously lax with their space junk in recent years.
‘The risk to life and property is fairly small — because the Earth is a big target and is mostly not covered with people — but it’s not tiny,’ Dr McDowell wrote via email.
‘We have seen some close shaves,’ he said.
Dr McDowell’s work, which involves collecting and analyzing data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope observatory and other space-based astronomy platforms, often includes paying some attention to space traffic in Earth’s orbit.
‘The government is also taking unwarranted risks,’ noted Dr McDowell, who publishes a monthly newsletter on space launches, ‘as shown by the incident in Florida earlier this year when a bit of ISS came through the roof of someone’s house.’
That incident, this March, involved a 5,800-pound battery pallet plunging into a Florida home. The heavy metal object was later confirmed to have been discarded by the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021.
Naples homeowner Alejandro Otero was on vacation when he received a call from his son, saying he heard a ‘tremendous sound’ and there were gaping holes in the ceiling and floor. Otero’s son reportedly told him that whatever fell almost hit him.
SpaceX has not yet confirmed whether the object found in Canada earlier this year, or the object found in North Carolina, were debris from their spacecraft.
But, ground tracking of the SpaceX Dragon ‘trunk’ that made its re-entry this February would indicate that both of these crash debris objects came from the trunk as it burned up in the H๏τ friction of its descent back towards Earth.
Dr McDowell told Space.com that the most likely sites for debris from this descent could include US states from Tennessee through Virginia and West Virginia, but North Carolina was certainly within the realm of possibility.
SpaceX’s Dragon ‘trunk’ has storage space of over 350 cubic-feet internally, with an extender option that expands its capacity to over 1200 cubic-feet.
This cargo container comes with mounted radiators — electrical and fluid connections that allow it to regulate its storage space’s internal temperature to accommodate a variety of sensitive payloads, including small satellites that can be released in orbit.
Clontz had to improvise to tow this apparent cargo hull panel from the SpaceX Dragon’s trunk out of his trail area, just because it was so mᴀssive.
‘I just tied a rope to it and drug it out with a lawn mower,’ as Clontz explained to WLOS.
He added that the ‘UFO’ had landed perfectly in the middle of the trail and that none of the trees or leaves looked like they had caught fire in the crash.
Nobody had even heard the object land, he told reporters, which surprised him, given its size and weight.
‘It’s a one in a million chance that it lands, especially if it landed somewhere off the trail in the woods you’d have never found it,’ he told the local news team, ‘but it just happened to land on the trail.’
