The Buga Sphere

Spring 2025. Videos of a metallic ball over the Valle del Cauca department of Colombia began to circulate. In early April, Reddit posts said it "fell rapidly from the sky, and landed in this field." By May the story was in Spanish-language newspapers. By late May it had reached Fox News and Newsweek. It became known as the Buga Sphere.

March 2, 2025. The Alto Bonito sector of Guadalajara de Buga. The people credited with filming it are María Bedoya and José Arias Restrepo. Arias Restrepo sells peanuts and hunts for old coins with a metal detector. With a friend, he recorded an eight-minute video on a mobile phone.

They described a sphere hovering several meters up and giving off colored lights. No sound was reported. It moved erratically, zigzagging. Then it came down vertically. It touched a 10,000-volt power line. A spark flared, and the sphere was left with a small hole. It came to rest on the ground.

Up close it was silver-grey, about the size of a bowling ball. Its surface was engraved with circles, triangles holding circles, crescent moons and unknown letters. Thirty-one holes ran along a dividing line. There were no visible welds.

Arias Restrepo said the sphere weighed about 2 kg when he picked it up. Later, he said, it weighed about 10 kg. After handling it he reported dizziness, vomiting and a metallic taste in his mouth. He passed it to his cousin, David Vélez, known as "El Potro," who runs a metal-detector business in Cali. Vélez handled it in a lead protective suit.

No Colombian authority ever commented. Instead the sphere went to Jaime Maussan, the Mexican journalist and ufologist. "We have in our hands one of the most important cases in history," he said. "I don't ask that you believe or disbelieve, I ask for patience." Radiologist José Luis Velásquez X-rayed it and reported three metal-like layers and nine microspheres inside. "I've never seen a piece like this," he said. Other accounts counted 16.

On 30 May 2025, a report presented with Rodolfo Garrido and Ignacio Figueroa of UNAM described 52 optical fibres inside and called the object a sophisticated technological device. A later claim dated resin from the 31 holes to 12,560 years ago. The University of Georgia, where that test was attributed, has published nothing.

On Metabunk, users traced the videos to the YouTube channel of Germany Company, a Colombian seller of metal detectors. In its "lab" footage the logo is visible, staff wear branded shirts and the sphere sits in a lathe chuck. The flight clip shows jump cuts and a repeating soundtrack. Suggestions included a silver ball on fishing line or a balloon towed by a drone. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid found the markings "sloppily etched chemically, not laser engraved." Scientists were cautious too. Julia Mossbridge said, "It looks so human made to me." Garry Nolan of Stanford put the chance of an Earth-made object at 99%. Colombian astrophysicist Santiago Vargas called its compounds very terrestrial.

Maussan never wavered. On 15 March 2026 he presented the sphere live at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City, with Steven Greer billed to appear. More spheres were claimed over Tuluá and Yumbo. No published analysis has settled it. The Buga Sphere remains a sensation and a question.