Recently viral Buga, Colombia, "alien" metal balls

[NorCal Dave]

Look he's measuring 2,3 Hz on a multimeter in diode/continuity mode

Indeed! Which looks completely ridiculous to us, but the demonstration isn't for us, this is for Maussan's audience. He's not interested in skeptics, he's interested in people that will just watch this demonstration and believe it. Most of them wouldn't understand the difference between Ohms and Hertz, they don't know what a diode is and more importantly, they don't care.

I don't think Maussan has ever backed down on a claim he's promoted, he just pushes on. As noted in other threads, his Be Witness 4 hour pay-per-view TV special with UFOlogists including Don Schmitt, Richard Dolan, Tom Carey, and Bragalla revealed a photo of a Roswell alien. It was quickly determined to be a photo of a mummified 2 year old indigenous child that had been on display in a museum in the late '40s. Several of the UFOlogist apologized, but not Maussan. He doubled down, offering $10k to anyone that could dig up the since reburied child.

For his audience the set looks like a lab, the guy cos-playing a scientist looks right, and the meter makes a tone when the probes touch the sphere. It's good enough.

 

[FatPhil]

Indeed! Which looks completely ridiculous to us, but the demonstration isn't for us, this is for Maussan's audience. He's not interested in skeptics, he's interested in people that will just watch this demonstration and believe it. Most of them wouldn't understand the difference between Ohms and Hertz, they don't know what a diode is and more importantly, they don't care.

I believe it's set to beep on aliens, and it beeped, that's good enough for me!

 

[FatPhil]

You believe he has any?

My spanish is near non-existent, but I can cope with the "charlatan" and "empressario pseudoscientifico" in the first sentence here: https://pseudociencia.miraheze.org/wiki/Rodolfo_Garrido well enough to think that it's worth pasting the rest of it into a proper translator to see what it says...

 

[flarkey]

Maybe this is his co worker soldering....

Slightly off topic, but ... My father was a radio ham. I remember one day as a 7 year old child I found him working in his shack soldering something. "Dad, whats this?" I asked and proceeded to pick up the soldering iron in the same way that this woman is holding it.

 

[NorCal Dave]

My spanish is near non-existent, but I can cope with the "charlatan" and "empressario pseudoscientifico" in the first sentence here: https://pseudociencia.miraheze.org/wiki/Rodolfo_Garrido well enough to think that it's worth pasting the rest of it into a proper translator to see what it says...

I can sorta pick my way thought some Spanish, but yeah, if someone is a "fundador" of a "fraudulentas y anticientificas" company it's pretty obvious:

Es socio fundador de empresas fraudulentas y anticientíficas como Bionano Technologys

In English for the rest of us:

Rodolfo Garrido is a charlatan and pseudoscientific entrepreneur born in Chicago, Illinois, but of Mexican nationality, who pretends to be a science communicator. He is the host of a radio program called Frontiers of Knowledge . He is a founding partner of fraudulent and anti-scientific companies such as Bionano Technologies, a company that develops dietary supplements and for which some skeptics dubbed him "Nanogordo"; and Genoma Cells, a company about which nothing can be found on the Internet. [ 1 ]​

Garrido is one of the intellectual accomplices of another renowned charlatan, Jaime Maussan . He presents himself as a connoisseur of science but lacks the healthy skepticism required to be a scientist.

Seems a 50/50 chance that "Nanogordo" (fat nothing) is acting in a purposefully fraudulent manner or he has no idea how the meter works.

 

[Mendel]

Seems a 50/50 chance that "Nanogordo" (fat nothing) is acting in a purposefully fraudulent manner or he has no idea how the meter works.

representing you know what it does when you don't is fraud, too
this is 100% fraud

 

[John J.]

Posted by @ThomasH:

BREAKING: The Buga Sphere might not just be strange it may be transmitting signals to space.

If it's been monitoring its immediate environment, I wonder what it has to say.
I'm not sure Jaime Maussan and the German Company of Buga are necessarily representative of human culture and learning in the broadest sense.

 

[ThomasH]

Slightly off topic, but ... My father was a radio ham. I remember one day as a 7 year old child I found him working in his shack soldering something. "Dad, whats this?" I asked and proceeded to pick up the soldering iron in the same way that this woman is holding it.

Auch!! - it smells like burned pig, I've burned my fingers a lot of times through the years when working

 

[jarlrmai]

Do did they just inadvertently leak that the sphere is aluminium, which has resistance of 2.6 ohms..

 

[Ann K]

Slightly off topic, but ... My father was a radio ham. I remember one day as a 7 year old child I found him working in his shack soldering something. "Dad, whats this?" I asked and proceeded to pick up the soldering iron in the same way that this woman is holding it.

A craft-type activity of my youth was woodburning, and from the ages of about eight to ten I had blistered fingers on a regular basis.

 

[Mendel]

Do did they just inadvertently leak that the sphere is aluminium, which has resistance of 2.6 ohms..

that feels like bunk. resistance depends on material, cross-section and length of the circuit.

 

[MonkeeSage]

Do did they just inadvertently leak that the sphere is aluminium, which has resistance of 2.6 ohms..

In the PDF document embedded in https://maussantelevision.com/esfera-de-buga/ there appear to be metallurgical analyses that show the outer shell is A413 aluminum.

Direct PDF link: https://maussantelevision.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/COTEJOESFERAOK.pdf

E.g., p. 83:

 

[NorCal Dave]

In the PDF document embedded in https://maussantelevision.com/esfera-de-buga/ there appear to be metallurgical analyses that show the outer shell is A413 aluminum.

A casting alloy of aluminum for high pressure components:

A413 aluminum is a die-casting alloy design engineers specify as an alternative to A380, allowing them to cast components with high pressure tightness.

https://www.gabrian.com/a413-aluminum-alloy/

A pressure vessel of some sort?

Maybe the ends of something like this:

https://www.amalco.com/gallery/deep-drawn-aluminum-pressure-vessel/

 

[MonkeeSage]

A pressure vessel of some sort?

I have seen some folks speculate that it may have originally been something like a hydrazine propellant vessel. Most of them seem to be made of titanium, but at least one company makes them from aluminum.

Moog – ISP's rolling diaphragm tanks are fabricated from commercially available aluminum alloys providing a low-cost short leadtime alternative to titanium propellant tanks.

Source: https://www.moog.com/products/propu...components/rolling-metal-diaphragm-tanks.html

 

[OriginalManc]

Do we know what the bottom of it looks like? Have they shown a full 360º view? A continuous video showing all angles on it? All the up-close imagery I've seen is showing the top part with the engraving on it. What about the other side?

I just searched "metal sphere decoration" on Ebay and this is the first result:
View attachment 80128
Source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/3654775154...=2047675&ssuid=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

First thing I thought of when I saw the ball was a large jingle bell with some decorative engravings on it.

e.g.:
View attachment 80123
Source: https://www.vintage-character.com/products/copy-of-oversized-gold-sleigh-jingle-bell-large

There's also buoys:
View attachment 80124
Source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/385352293648

And ground visibility markers for utilities:
View attachment 80126
Source: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b00011108/

And aerial cable markers:
View attachment 80127
Source: https://pr-tech.com/product/spanguard-al-high-temperature-marker/

Found this on ebay.
TC4 Titanium Alloy Titanium Ball Pressure Vessel Liquid Oxygen Tank
Source https://www.ebay.com/itm/186845654363

C4 Titanium Alloy Titanium Ball Pressure Vessel Liquid Oxygen Tank

 

[jdog]

I have seen some folks speculate that it may have originally been something like a hydrazine propellant vessel. Most of them seem to be made of titanium, but at least one company makes them from aluminum.

Moog – ISP's rolling diaphragm tanks are fabricated from commercially available aluminum alloys providing a low-cost short leadtime alternative to titanium propellant tanks.

View attachment 81899
Source: https://www.moog.com/products/propu...components/rolling-metal-diaphragm-tanks.html

Would the thickness of that kind of aluminum tank hold up to the sort of etching and hammering that's obviously been done to add surface detailing to this prop? I don't see a thickness listed on the Moog site.

I did look on Etsy to see if anyone was, um, crafting these in aluminum or titanium and there's nothing that large, though I found you can order a 1-lb. bar of titanium for $65 (delivery included) for all your desktop titanium needs.

 

[RobertBillyBob]

Found this on ebay.
TC4 Titanium Alloy Titanium Ball Pressure Vessel Liquid Oxygen Tank
Source https://www.ebay.com/itm/186845654363

C4 Titanium Alloy Titanium Ball Pressure Vessel Liquid Oxygen Tank

The aliens are getting their drone parts from eBay?!

 

[Mick West]

Do did they just inadvertently leak that the sphere is aluminium, which has resistance of 2.6 ohms..

Someone on X pointed out that the multimeter is set to diode testing mode, so it's actually measuring voltage drop between two points.

 

[FatPhil]

Someone on X pointed out that the multimeter is set to diode testing mode, so it's actually measuring voltage drop between two points.

I've always used it for its audible binary readout - beep or no beep - so not paid attention to the numbers before. They're only really meaningful for actual diodes - that voltage drop is effectively the switching voltage, the level where they "turn on". I would presume it's near meaningless for an actual conductor. A quick test shows that everything metal and solid in my flat gives me an identical 0.007-0.008 on my Fluke 77, seemingly independent of the separation between the probes, and the shortest short I can trivially create - jamming one probe into the other probe's connector - gives me 0.005-0.006. So I don't understand how he can be measuring either significantly more (if he's reading VDC) or significantly less (if it's mVDC, which would be unexpected, diode threshold voltages are quite tightly range bound, there's no need to scale the values).

Not that it really matters, he's incompetently arriving at irrelevant figures by doing illogical tests, that's the bottom line.

 

[John J.]

I have seen some folks speculate that it may have originally been something like a hydrazine propellant vessel. Most of them seem to be made of titanium, but at least one company makes them from aluminum.

Found this on ebay.
TC4 Titanium Alloy Titanium Ball Pressure Vessel Liquid Oxygen Tank

The examples above and the footage of a sphere found in a Buenos Aires shoe shop found by @Starflint (here) might imply spheres/ near-spheres with some generic resemblance to the sphere in the German Company workshop aren't massively rare.

The LOX tank and the shoe shop showpiece both, like the Buga sphere, appear to have been made by two hemispheres or bowls joined at their rims or to an "equatorial" ring. -Not sure about the hydrazine tank.
The equatorial holes or indents on the Buga sphere are also evident on the hydrazine tank and the shoe shop thing.

The examples found by @MonkeeSage and @OriginalManc indicate, I think, that the Buga sphere started life as some sort of pressure vessel (or at least was made by a similar process). -The sphere that we see being examined anyway.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

MonkeeSage reliably identified a hydrazine tank... but have we seen the other side? I worry about these things...

 

[Ravi]

... like the Buga sphere, appear to have been made by two hemispheres or bowls joined at their rims or to an "equatorial" ring. -Not sure about the hydrazine tank.

The non-sphericity aspect of the two parts stuck together tells me is its not made from or with engineering parts, possibly more culinary related..

 

[NorCal Dave]

The non-sphericity aspect of the two parts stuck together tells me is its not made from or with engineering parts, possibly more culinary related..

I was thinking culinary bowls would likely be stainless steel. IF the report up-thread is correct about this being aluminum, it turns out bowls and even cake molds are a thing after all:

 

[John J.]

...indicate, I think, that the Buga sphere started life as some sort of pressure vessel

Having said that...
Maybe some sort of float ball? Some have a superficial similarity to the Buga sphere, but the 'equator' is simpler and not perforated (holes in a float ball being a bad thing). Most of the examples I found online are a few inches across, but larger ones are made.

From Varco Supply website, a Virginia, USA company.

Found an Indian company, Stainless Steel Float Balls.

Most of the examples on the SSFB website are a few inches across like the two above, but larger ones are made:

The stainless Steel Float Balls website gives some examples of usage:

Float Valves – In liquid based systems, control and measurement of the material flow is vital to the operations. Float valves, with specially designed stainless steel float balls inside, can play a critical part of the process...

Liquid level measurement – We supply floats with through tubes, threads, hooks or other fittings that can be attached to a measurement device. Common connections are by a stainless steel rod or cable. The device determines the level of the liquid based on the position of the ball floating within a tank or other chamber.

Vacuum tanks – Stainless steel float balls work as a primary shutoff for the vacuum pump in tanks that carry liquid or sludge. The ball floats in a cage and when the liquid level becomes low it seals against a gasket which signals the pump to stop.

Sump Pumps – These are designed to pump liquid outside a chamber. Floats are often attached so that the pump knows whether or not to activate, based on the liquid level inside the chamber.

Steam traps – Where steam is used in heavy industrial settings there are often float balls integrated into the system that control the amount of liquid that could be building up.
...
Art projects – We have supplied float balls for the raw materials of a number of art projects. You provide the imagination and we supply the material to create your design.

That last use- art projects- is interesting!

Admittedly, after a quick look online most of these things seem to be steel, not aluminium.

 

[Starflint]

Maybe some sort of float ball?

I believe the ball initially displayed by Mausson, found in the lake, is most likely a buoyancy ball. This is evident from its color, the crude welding marks, and the environment where it was discovered (around Lake Bustillos, there are numerous water plants, hydroelectric power stations, municipal water supply facilities, agricultural irrigation systems, and ecological monitoring installations—all of which utilize buoyancy balls)

Additionally, regarding the "bizarre" motion of the original Sphere 0, I conclude that this is a typical phenomenon of a weighted metal ball rolling on the ground (no matter which direction you push it, as long as it rolls a certain distance and gradually stops, the internal weight will cause the sphere to spontaneously rotate, bringing the heaviest side to the bottom, keeping the center of gravity directly below the geometric center—like a "walking roly-poly toy").

Additionally, counterweight buoys do exist, but I could only find ones made of stainless steel：https://chandlervac.com/products/weighted-stainless-steel-float-ball

This interview from back then can truly be considered the origin of the Buga Ball's initial lore: both involve "being sent to a university for testing and yielding results of high-purity aluminum," "exhibiting changes in weight on its own," "the strange justification for passing airport security," and "some kind of bizarre radiation."

 

[MapperGuy]

I believe the ball initially displayed by Mausson, found in the lake, is most likely a buoyancy ball. This is evident from its color, the crude welding marks, and the environment where it was discovered (around Lake Bustillos, there are numerous water plants, hydroelectric power stations, municipal water supply facilities, agricultural irrigation systems, and ecological monitoring installations—all of which utilize buoyancy balls)

Additionally, regarding the "bizarre" motion of the original Sphere 0, I conclude that this is a typical phenomenon of a weighted metal ball rolling on the ground (no matter which direction you push it, as long as it rolls a certain distance and gradually stops, the internal weight will cause the sphere to spontaneously rotate, bringing the heaviest side to the bottom, keeping the center of gravity directly below the geometric center—like a "walking roly-poly toy").

Additionally, counterweight buoys do exist, but I could only find ones made of stainless steel：https://chandlervac.com/products/weighted-stainless-steel-float-ball
View attachment 81999

This interview from back then can truly be considered the origin of the Buga Ball's initial lore: both involve "being sent to a university for testing and yielding results of high-purity aluminum," "exhibiting changes in weight on its own," "the strange justification for passing airport security," and "some kind of bizarre radiation."

In the fine print under the "ADD TO CART" bar the text includes "No Spud", which I would assume means this is a totally smooth surfaced object with no attachment point for an anchor line or any other connection. Perfect for making an 'orb' after suitable surface decoration.

For only $77 you can have a 6-inch orb of your very own! (Alien hieroglyphics not included)

 

[ThomasH]

I think the ball flying around is bigger, it's not the same they are showing

 

[JMartJr]

I think the ball flying around is bigger, it's not the same they are showing

I'd agree that it looks bigger, but one thing we ought to know better than most folks is that it is really hard to judge size by appearance, without knowing the distance. So that appearance may be erroneous.

 

[ThomasH]

I'd agree that it looks bigger, but one thing we ought to know better than most folks is that it is really hard to judge size by appearance, without knowing the distance. So that appearance may be erroneous.

I know. But I don't think it looks like it's never more than 15-20 meters away.

 

[John J.]

I think the ball flying around is bigger, it's not the same they are showing

Yes, I'm persuaded by other posters here that the "static" sphere we see in close-up, with the symbols, is unlikely to be the sphere seen "flying". The latter is probably a lighter object, perhaps a balloon with some added buoyancy, suspended from a drone.
As @JMartJr points out, though, judging the size of an unfamiliar object on film when we don't know its distance is very difficult.