#strange objects

“They Have Landed”  Photographed by  Me.

The Betz Mystery Sphere.

On May 26, 1974, Terry Mathew Betz, a 21 year-old pre-med student, along his mother Gerri and his marine engineer father, Antoine, were inspecting the damage caused by a brush fire that had raged across an 88-acre swathe of woodland that they had recently acquired on marshy Fort George Island, which is nestled just east of Jacksonville, Florida.

At first the trio found nothing out of the ordinary, but before their expedition was over they stumbled across a peculiar highly polished, metal orb that was just under 8-inches in diameter. The only delineating mark that the three could find on the eerily unblemished object was an elongated triangular shape stamped into its surface.

Stunned, Terry and his parents wondered whether or not they might have stumbled across some kind of downed NASA or maybe even Soviet satellite...The trio then surmised that it might be an “old fashioned cannon ball, which someone had silver plated,” as a souvenir. Intrigued by this extraordinary find, Terry decided to heft the 22 lbs., bowling ball sized sphere into their car and take it back home...The young medical student then placed his strange prize on a window seat in his bedroom, and there the anomalous object remained, virtually forgotten, until approximately two weeks later when Terry decided to entertain his friend, Theresa Fraser, with an impromptu guitar recital in his room, eliciting some decidedly unusual reactions from this enigmatic orb.

According to Terry’s report, moments after he began strumming his guitar the metallic ball started to “vibrate like a tuning fork,” and began emitting a curious throbbing sound in response to certain notes... In the days that followed this strange performance, the Betz family began to notice some of the sphere’s other peculiar attributes. They observed that when the orb was pushed across the floor it would stop, vibrate for a moment, change direction (often more than once) and invariably return to whoever first rolled it....