The Buga Sphere

The Buga Sphere is a metallic orb that surfaced in Valle del Cauca, Colombia in early 2025. Videos showed it allegedly flying near the city of Buga before being recovered. Mexican broadcaster Jaime Maussan promoted it as a possible non-human artifact. Skeptical investigators describe it as a manufactured object and a marketing campaign. No claim about the sphere has been supported by peer-reviewed science.

Videos of a small silver sphere allegedly flying near Buga began circulating in March 2025 and went viral that April and May. The sphere was recovered and ended up in the custody of David Vélez, a shareholder of Germany Company, a metal detector business in Cali that runs a treasure hunting YouTube channel. José Arias Restrepo publicly identified himself as the finder.

Maussan's team later took the sphere to Mexico. At a June 20, 2025 press conference in Mexico City, Maussan presented the sphere alongside its discovery videos. Promotional claims included possible non-human origin, levitation, and an age of 12,560 years based on radiocarbon testing of an associated resin sample.

On June 7, 2025, a second sphere was allegedly filmed in nearby Yumbo by William Zúñiga. That object was never recovered. Vélez and Zúñiga afterward formed a UFO hunting group called Cazadores de Ovnis.

In 2026 a third sphere entered the story. Zúñiga said he recovered it in the Las Baldías highlands outside Medellín after farmers reported a falling object. It was sent to Mexico and promoted as a second recovered sphere. U.S. researcher Mark Sokol of Falcon Space, invited to examine it, drilled it open and declared it a hoax. He described it as scrap cast dirty aluminum covered in epoxy. The finding caused a public falling-out among the principals.

The evidence consists of the discovery videos, the spheres themselves, and testing arranged by the promoters. A materials report attributed to the Institute for Materials Research at Mexico's National Autonomous University (IIM-UNAM) circulated widely in 2025. It identified the Buga Sphere's material as standard cast aluminum alloy A413, with sandblasted engraving and polymer components that degrade at ordinary workshop temperatures. The 12,560-year radiocarbon claim came from a resin sample submitted through UFO promoter Steven Greer's own organization, with no independent chain of custody. A related physics preprint was posted to SSRN, which has no peer review.

No government agency has authenticated the sphere. Colombian and Mexican authorities have not treated it as an anomalous object.

Skeptical investigators traced the original videos to Germany Company's own YouTube channel. Writer Brian Dunning and analysts at Metabunk have documented company branding throughout the "laboratory" footage and describe the case as a viral marketing campaign. They note that the chemically etched surface markings and common aluminum alloy are consistent with commercial fabrication. Skeptics also point to the 2026 Las Baldías sphere, which was declared a hoax by a researcher the promoters themselves invited to examine it. The promoters have continued to stand by the original Buga Sphere. The claims of flight, levitation, non-human origin, and extreme age have no independent verification.