A maintenance worker with the Glamping Collective, a fancy domed rental home company in the mountains of Western North Carolina, found the very strange object below. The worker, Justin Clontz, spotted it on a remote hiking trail and apparently had to use a lawn mower to pull it from its resting place.
"We don't know what it is," Clontz told WLOS. "We just know that it's not from up here."
Made of metal and carbon fiber, the origin of the three-foot object remains a mystery. However, The Debrief reports that it it does resemble the storage "trunk" of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that landed in a Saskatchewan, Canada farmer's field in April.
"It looks right and the reentry on Tuesday night passed right over this location," agrees Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell who previously commented on the Canada debris.
While the FAA has said that this kind of space junk usually "burns up in the atmosphere over the open ocean posing minimal risk to public safety," the recent discoveries suggest that "the materials from the trunk regularly survive reentry in large chunks," McDowell says.
Previously:
• 'Alien obelisk' found on Australian farmland likely SpaceX space junk that fell from the sky
