The Buga Sphere

The Sighting

In March 2025, Jose Arias Restrepo, a peanut vendor who supplemented his income hunting for old coins with a metal detector, was working the Alto Bonito sector outside Buga, in Colombia's Valle del Cauca department, when he came across a small metallic sphere. Arias recorded roughly eight minutes of iPhone video of the object, which he later described as appearing to hover or move on its own, "flying, similar to a motorized ball." He reported feeling dizzy, nauseated, and left with a metallic taste in his mouth after handling it - symptoms with no medical documentation attached. Rather than reporting the find to any institution, Arias passed the sphere to his cousin, David Velez, known online as "El Potro," a metal-detector equipment seller with an established following on a social media account called "Cazadores de Ovnis Latinoamerica."

The Investigation

Velez kept the sphere for roughly two months and, according to his own public statements, watched its weight climb from about two kilograms to ten - a claim never verified by any independent, published scale reading before or after. He then connected with Jaime Maussan, the Mexican journalist and ufologist internationally known for promoting the "alien mummies" of Peru, later determined by independent forensic analysis to be fabricated from human and animal bone fragments. Maussan took the Buga sphere out of Colombia to Mexico City, where his team announced a carbon-14 test allegedly dating the object to 12,560 years old, along with claims of internal fiber optics and "polymers" beyond current terrestrial technology - none of it published in any accredited laboratory report or peer-reviewed venue. Colombian scientists responded directly and skeptically: astrophysicist Santiago Vargas of the National University's Observatory said the sphere's components are "very terrestrial," personally identifying the fiber optics inside it; Marino Guarin, director of Cali's School of Astronomy, called the entire narrative "charlatanism" pursued "con animo publicista" - with a publicity motive; Oscar Amaya Montoya, director of Buga's own science outreach center, said it was most likely "a recent technological artifact, manufactured on Earth"; and astrophysicist Lauren Flor Torres pointed to a decisive, overlooked detail - any object that had genuinely entered Earth's atmosphere from space would show ablation and scorching from atmospheric friction, and the Buga sphere shows none.

The Explanations

Independent skeptical writers have gone further, laying out the physical case that the sphere is machined or cast aluminum - plausibly an ordinary industrial or decorative fixture - and that its chain of custody never once passed through an accredited institution: a metal detectorist, a metal-detector salesman with a UFO-hunting following, and a promoter whose own prior headline discovery had already been internationally debunked as manufactured. The claimed weight increase, the undocumented carbon-dating lab, and the total absence of any named, checkable scientific source for the "12,560 years" figure are, to every scientist who has spoken on the record, the signature of a promotional narrative rather than a genuine anomaly. No one disputes that a physical sphere exists; what remains entirely unverified is everything claimed about it.

Why It Endures

Buga went viral precisely because it offered what most UFO cases lack - an actual object, in hand, that could supposedly be weighed, dated, and tested, rather than another blurry light in the sky. But its fame rests entirely on claims made by its own custodians and their handpicked promoter, and every scientist independent of that chain who has examined the case has called it terrestrial and almost certainly staged. UFOMYST lists Buga as contested, leaning hoax: honest treatment of a weak case, in the same spirit that governs every dossier in this archive.