North Carolina groundskeeper Justin Clontz discovers mysterious space debris along hiking trail near Glamping Collective

US News

By Richard Pollina

A glamping groundskeeper stumbled upon a bizarre space object along a remote trail in the North Carolina mountains.

Justin Clontz and a co-worker were handling maintenance around the Glamping Collective, a luxury campsite in Haywood County, when he was “shocked” to find the massive object covered in dense metal sheets held together by unearthly-looking bolts.

“It’s once in a lifetime you know, it don’t happen every day,” Clontz told WLOS. 

The strange object appeared to be covered in burnt carbon fiber, is about an inch thick, and stands at nearly 4 feet tall, according to the outlet.

“We don’t know what it is. We just know that it’s not from up here,” Clontz said.

The men were forced to lift the heavy object by tying a lawn mower and rope.

“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 but it just happened to land on the trail,” Clontz said.

While the object itself appears to be burnt, Clontz said the surrounding area showed no trace of damage, raising even more questions about how the mysterious piece of metal ended up deep in the woods.

Clontz said no one at the glamping site reported hearing any unusual sounds.

A similar-looking charred piece of debris was discovered on a farmer’s field in Saskatchewan, Canada, in February. 

Experts speculate the object could have fallen to earth from SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, according to Space.com.

SpaceX did not confirm whether the object found in Canada was from their craft.

However, ground tracking of Crew Dragon’s “trunk” made re-entry in February suggests it could be from the pioneering space technology company, the outlet reported.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the outlet that areas from Tennessee through Virginia and West Virginia have the highest chances of being impact zones for debris from the Crew Dragon.

North Carolina is not excluded from possibly being an area where the debris may have fallen.

In March, an airplane passenger claimed she spotted a possible UFO soaring above the Big Apple while on a commercial airline flight above LaGuardia Airport.

She claimed another person on the flight saw the out-of-this-world object and was stunned.

The states with the most UFO sightings in 2023 were California (440), Florida (293), Texas (230), Washington (212), and New York (156), according to the National UFO Reporting Center.

Lincoln County, Nevada, saw the most UFO sightings across all US counties between 2000 and 2023, at 820.9 per 100,000 residents, the non-profit reported.