Look, I know how this sounds. But I'm telling you exactly what happened. My name's Derek, I'm calling from Jacksonville, and back in 1974 I was a twenty-one-year-old pre-med student living with my parents on Fort George Island. Beautiful place, all moss-draped trees and tropical scrub, real secluded. And on March 27th of that year, we found something in the woods that changed everything. There'd been this small brush fire on our property, nothing major, just burned through some of the underbrush. My parents, Marcus and Helen, they wanted to walk around and check the damage, make sure nothing important got scorched. I went with them, the three of us walking through the charred grass and burnt scrub. That's when I spotted it. This metal sphere, just sitting there in the grass. Perfectly round, about the size of a bowling ball, but heavy. Real heavy. When I picked it up, I'm guessing it weighed maybe twenty, twenty-two pounds. Bright silver, smooth all over except for this tiny triangular mark, maybe three millimeters long. At first we figured it was an old cannonball, you know, the island's got history going back to the Spanish missions in the 1500s. Seemed like a cool souvenir, so I carried it back to the house and put it in my room.
It sat there for about two weeks, just a weird metal ball on my shelf. Didn't do anything, didn't move, nothing strange at all. Then one afternoon I was in my room playing guitar, just messing around with some chords, and I swear to you, the sphere started humming. Not loud, but you could hear it. This low throbbing sound, like it was resonating with the music. Our family dog, a poodle, she started whimpering and covered her ears with her paws. I'd never seen her do that before, not once in all the years we'd had her. My mom came running in asking what was wrong with the dog, and that's when we realized the sound was coming from the sphere. We took it down off the shelf and put it on the floor, and that's when things got really weird. The ball started [ By itself. No slope, no vibration from the house, it just moved. Rolled maybe four feet, stopped, then turned and rolled in a different direction. Changed course on its own. moving on their own is unsettling - Tyler' We started experimenting with it. My dad would roll it across the floor to me, and sometimes it would change direction halfway and roll back to him. We put it on our glass coffee table once, and it rolled all the way around the edge without falling off. Just navigated the perimeter like it knew where the edge was.
My mom, she was the one who decided we needed to call someone. This was April by then, maybe three weeks after we'd found it. She contacted the Jacksonville Journal, figured maybe they could help us figure out what this thing was. They sent a photographer, guy named Larry Edwards. My mom put the sphere on the floor for him and told him to wait. It rolled a bit, stopped, turned by itself, rolled to the right about four feet. Stopped again. Then it turned and rolled left maybe eight feet, made this big arc, and came right back to Leo's feet. After that, the phone didn't stop ringing. I mean, within a week or two we were getting calls from all over the country. International papers picked it up. Everyone wanted to know what this thing was, where it came from. People were showing up at our house. A guy named Kevin Wallace came out from some holistic institute in Baton Rouge, spent six hours examining the ball. He said it had a magnetic field around it and was transmitting radio waves. Radio waves! Coming from a metal sphere we found in the woods. The U.S. Navy base was right across the water from us, so my mom called them. Figured maybe it was theirs, maybe it fell off a ship or something. They came and took it to Naval Station Mayport, ran all kinds of tests. X-rayed it, did metallurgical analysis. They told us it was hollow, stainless steel, about half an inch thick shell. Measured exactly 7.96 inches across, weighed 21.34 pounds. High grade steel, but nothing unusual about the material itself. They said it wasn't Navy property and gave it back.
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