Fort George Island is a low, wooded island at the mouth of the St. Johns River on the northeast edge of Jacksonville, Florida, crossed by one main road. On March 27, 1974 Antoine and Jerri Betz and their 21-year-old son, Terry, went to look at damage from a brush fire near their property there. In the burned undergrowth they found a smooth, silvery metal ball about the size of a bowling ball. Guessing it might be an old cannonball, they took it home.
What happened
The ball was just under eight inches across and weighed a little over 21 pounds. It was hollow, with a wall roughly half an inch thick, and its only marking was a tiny triangle a few millimeters long. Within days the family began to say it did not behave like a cannonball. When Terry played guitar nearby, they reported, the sphere gave off a pulsing hum. Set on the floor, it would roll a short way, stop, and change direction, and at times it seemed to follow people through the house. Struck with a hammer, it rang. The family kept it in a trunk and showed it to friends, and by April the wire services had the story.
Reporters came to the house, and so did people from UFO groups. One visitor, described in later accounts as a researcher from a small organization in Baton Rouge, claimed the ball produced a strong magnetic field and a radio signal. No other examiner confirmed either claim, and later researchers could not even establish who he was.
The investigation
At Jerri Betz’s request the US Navy took the sphere for examination. It was X-rayed and tested by a Navy metallurgist, who identified the metal as type 431 stainless steel, a hard, corrosion-resistant alloy used in pumps and valves. The Navy found it was not military property and returned it. A Navy spokesman added that a ball so evenly balanced would naturally roll on the old house’s uneven stone floors. In mid-April a Navy representative told reporters it was simply a large ball of the kind used as a check valve in industrial piping. The family did not accept that, and the St. Petersburg Times summed up the standoff in a headline: the Navy said it was just a ball, and its finders said it was not.
More ordinary candidates appeared. A Florida woman produced a similar ball that technicians at a paper mill recognized as a check-valve ball from scrapped equipment, and a Jacksonville equipment supplier showed a UPI reporter a new eight-inch stainless steel ball, made by Bell & Howell, that weighed just over 21 pounds. In June the National Enquirer, then offering a $50,000 prize for proof of an alien artifact, put the sphere before its panel of scientists in New Orleans. J. Allen Hynek, the Northwestern University astronomer best known for his UFO research, said afterward that none of the five panelists thought it was anything but man-made. The only oddity they noted was a faint rattle when it was shaken.
The explanations
In size, weight, wall thickness and alloy the sphere matches an industrial ball check valve, the part that sits in a pipe and lets fluid flow in only one direction. That leaves the question of how one ended up in the woods on Fort George Island. In 2012 the writer Brian Dunning of Skeptoid identified a candidate: James Durling-Jones, an artist from Taos, New Mexico, who made sculptures from industrial steel balls and said several had fallen off the luggage rack of his Volkswagen bus as he drove through the Jacksonville area around Easter 1971. He also put the rattle down to metal chips left inside after drilling and repair. His story fits the place and the object, but no one has shown that this ball was one of his.
The reported movements need no special cause. A near-perfect sphere on a floor that is not level will roll whenever it is nudged or the house shifts, and a hollow steel shell can resonate with nearby sound. Reports said that while the ball was on public display it stayed put unless someone handled it.
Where it stands
In 2019 Odd Ball, a podcast from WJCT Public Media in Jacksonville, reopened the case. It found that the full Navy report could no longer be located, that an early write-up by a UFO organization contained errors, and that a later claim by another panelist, James Harder, about exotic heavy elements inside the ball did not appear in any source from 1974. Jerri Betz herself came to suspect the Navy had held something back. The ball’s present whereabouts are unknown. On the evidence that survives it was a piece of stainless steel hardware, and the only real mystery is whose.