Originally published at: Mysterious metal sphere washes up on Japanese beach, baffles authorities | Boing Boing
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I mean, it’s pretty clearly a buoy when you see it from the right angles, but it’s also obviously a kaiju egg.
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If that had been Alaska we’d have hit it with a missile first. Mystery? What mystery?
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Still mysterious? An identical sphere was found back in 2011 in Namibia, where it “fell from the sky”. Seems to be space junk indeed (sorry, can’t include links in this posts - why?), just google for “metallic-space-ball-drops-from-sky-in-namibia”.
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I believe the Beachcombing Museum on the Olympic peninsula has a few of these, they’re just large fishing floats.
[ETA: trying to find it now, but I remember seeing a pic of him with two of these giant metal spheres]
[ETFA: and here we are, from the book “Washed Up” by Skye Moody.]
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It’s Art! It really doesn’t matter what ever it was to start with. It looks like something fun and I’d love to have it in my garden. Maybe it’s just someone having fun by messing with people minds. If thats the case it’s all the more special
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Tales from The Loop is calling on a rotary dial phone… do you answer?
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Hydrazine - Toxic for humans, but satellites love it!
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I was very confused for a while by the AI illustration that has nothing to do with what it actually looks like, as I thought that was a real image. It suggested something of significant mechanical complexity, when the reality is just a hollow metal ball that’s obviously some sort of buoy.
The image in the post isn’t of anything - the actual ball is just a plain sphere without any real detail (that isn’t just surface weathering).
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Ditto! Boooooo.
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Well Shit! There goes another dream shot to hell by reality.
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Boing has pretty much the worst Shutterstock game. So often images have little or nothing to do with the story. The image made me click, only to get me to the story, for which I had to click on a Twitter link, that shows an ocean buoy. Sorry to be so critical, but this is an ongoing editorial weakness of Boingboing.
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Click on the twitter link? It’s expanded in the main article (not the BBS) for me, with a preview that clearly shows the ball.
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Well that was a misleading thumbnail. It’s just a floating buoy, not a spikey art looking thing.
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Neptune’s gazing ball?
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Now it’s AI-generated images, so it’s not even Shutterstock. Normally they have a kind of ironic surreality that works, but in this case it was so real (and interesting) looking that I forgot the AI images are routinely used for the above-the-fold illustrations.
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Is Laika still in it?
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How many zoo animals is 4.9 feet?
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