The orb, roughly 1.5 meters in diameter, has been at the center of speculation since it washed up on Enshu Beach in Hamamatsu, on the country’s Pacific coast, according to local media reports. Fears that it could have been a stray mine were allayed after experts used X-ray technology to examine the interior of the object and found it to be hollow. There are also no indications that he may be involved in espionage activities by neighboring North Korea or China. The presence of two raised handles on the surface of the sphere, indicating that it could be hooked onto something else, suggested a more prosaic explanation: it was a mooring buoy that had simply broken loose and floated away.
Police officers cordoned off the area and called in explosives experts clad in protective clothing to investigate further, but authorities still don’t know what the metal sphere is or where it came from, The Guardian reports. Photos of the object have been sent to the Japan Self-Defense Forces and Coast Guard for study. Meanwhile, the ball is still on the beach.
Police began looking at the orange-brown object with darker rust spots after a local woman spotted it lying on the sand a few meters from the shore as she was walking earlier this week, Asahi TV reported. Meanwhile, a local resident who runs regularly on the beach said he did not understand why the ball suddenly became the center of attention. “It’s been on the beach for a month. I tried to push it but it wouldn’t move,” he told public broadcaster NHK.
There have been suggestions that it resembles an item from the popular Japanese comic “Dragon Ball”, while others believed that it was a UFO that fell from the sky. Television footage of the facility sparked speculation on social media, shortly after Japanese authorities said a number of suspicious spy balloons had been sighted over Japan in recent years.
