“The debris matches the suspected location of these returns.”
Experts say they have identified a “hairy UFO” that crash-landed in the US state of North Carolina.
Space experts believe they have identified strange «UFO» debris discovered by a North Carolina gardener and by his colleague at a luxury campsite.
As the Daily Mail reports, Justin Clontz recently found a three-foot-wide panel covered in burnt and frayed carbon fibers in the middle of a trail in the town of Canton.
And now an astronomer has told DailyMail.com that the twisted metal is most likely parts of a trunk from one of Elon Musk's SpaceX spacecraft.
“The debris matches the suspected location of these returns,”, – commented Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Jonathan McDowell. DailyMail.com, adding that he is "very confident" in this assessment.
The charred black metal object also resembles two pieces of debris found in Canada and Australia that are now known to belong to the SpaceX Dragons.
"We have a match in time and place. «They are similar to each other and to the Australian wreckage that has been confirmed to be from the Dragons trunk,» Dr McDowell said.
Clontz was working as a groundskeeper at the Glamping Collective, a luxury campground in Haywood County, when he made a terrible discovery.
A professional gardener and landscaper told local news that he was «just shocked that it was,» adding, «It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, you know, it doesn't happen every day.»
The carbon fiber of the UFO-like debris almost looked like some kind of strange fur, as initial reports described a now likely identified mysterious object.
"We don't know what it is, Clontz told local news earlier this month. “We just know it’s not from here.”
Although the SpaceX piece landed safely about a half-mile off a remote Glamping trail, Dr. McDowell noted that both public and private space programs have become dangerously lax in dealing with space debris in recent years.
" The risk to life and property is quite small because the Earth is a large target and is mostly not covered by people, but it is not tiny either,” — emphasizes Dr. McDowell.
«We've seen several cases where people are on the verge of breaking down,» he said.
Dr. McDowell's work, which includes collecting and analyzing data from NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope and other space astronomical platforms, often includes the study of space motion in Earth orbit.
«The government is also taking unnecessary risks,» said Dr. McDowell, who publishes a monthly newsletter on space launches, «as evidenced by the incident in Florida earlier this year when part of the ISS hit the roof of someone's house.»
In March of this year, an incident occurred involving the fall of a 5,800-kilogram pallet of batteries in a house in Florida. It was later confirmed that a heavy metal object was ejected from the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021.
A homeowner in Naples, US, Alejandro Otero was on vacation when his son called him to say he heard a «horrible sound» and there were holes in the ceiling and floor. Otero's son reportedly told him that whatever had fallen had almost hit him.
SpaceX has not yet confirmed whether the object found in Canada earlier this year or the one found in North Carolina was debris from its spacecraft.
But ground tracking of the «trunk» of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which re-entered the atmosphere in February this year, would show that both of those pieces of debris fell from the «trunk» as it burned up from the intense friction of its fall back to Earth.
Dr. McDowell told Space.com that the most likely locations for debris to fall could include US states from Tennessee to Virginia and West Virginia, but North Carolina is certainly within the realm of possibility.
The interior volume of the "trunk" SpaceX's Dragon is over 350 cubic feet and expandable to over 1,200 cubic feet.
This cargo container is equipped with built-in radiators — electrical and fluid connections that allow the internal temperature of the vault to be adjusted to accommodate a variety of sensitive payloads, including small satellites that may be launched into orbit.
Klontz had to improvise to get this obvious cargo hull panel out of the trunk SpaceX Dragon because it was so massive.
"I just tied a rope to it and went over it with a lawn mower," Klontz explained to WLOS.
He added that " ;UFO" landed exactly in the middle of the track and that none of the trees or leaves looked like they had caught fire as they fell.
No one even heard the object fall, he told reporters, which surprised him given his size and weight.
"The chance of him falling is one in a million, especially if he fell somewhere off the path in the woods, you would never find him, he said local news group — but he just happened to fall on the path.»