Space debris crashes on mountain in Haywood County

May 24—Space debris falling from the sky wasn't one of the visitor experiences Matt Bare planned to offer at his mountaintop campground above Thickety in Haywood County.

However, after an unidentifiable piece of charred metal showed up out of nowhere this week, space seems to be the only explanation as to where it came from.

"Space debris was not on our list of things we expected to be having conversations about," said Bare, owner of The Glamping Collective located in the Crabtree community. "The only thing we've been able to come up with is that it's some type of space debris that fell. It doesn't look like anything off of an airplane."

Though Bare disclosed he's no aeronautical engineer, the piece of equipment looks straight out of a sci-fi film.

Its 4 feet by 3.5 feet wide and made of what Bare and his landscaping crew presume to be carbon fiber.

"It is kind of wicked looking," said Justin Clontz, whose dad found it while they were mowing. "It's just weird to be out in the woods and run across this thing. I was just glad nobody was out walking or it didn't go through anybody's house."

Frayed black strands sprawl out in every direction around the plate, like a tattered piece to an aerodynamic puzzle. On both sides of the plate are burnt nodes along with metal bolts and plates.

"There are some markings on it. I don't know if they're serial number markings or what they are," Bare said.

The piece was found when the crew from J&M Landscaping was doing their weekly maintenance and stumbled upon it.

"It was laying in the trail, in the way. My dad had to move it to mow," said Clontz. "When he came back down, he called and we went up there and got it."

The groundskeeping crew was able to wrangle the piece with some rope and hitch it to the stand-on lawn mower to haul it back down the mountain. It didn't dawn on them they had potentially harnessed up a piece of space junk.

"Once we got it out in the open and got to looking at it, I'd never seen anything like that before," Clontz said. "We were handling this thing and I thought, 'Maybe we shouldn't be touching it.'"

Fortunately, no one was on the trail when the mysterious chunk of approximately 90-100 pounds fell to earth. And no guests had reported it before Clontz' dad Mike found it.

"I know it don't belong up there and I know nobody carried it in there. And so it had to fall from the sky," Clontz said. "I'd say it probably happened like Monday, and then we mowed up there Tuesday. And usually there's people hiking on the trails that are staying up there, and nobody said anything about it, so it must have happened right before we came up there."

Clontz also noted that the grass underneath the piece wasn't dead, a good indication that it was a fresh fall.

Clontz and Bare both noted that the piece smelt like burnt plastic or rubber, though the odor has faded since its discovery.

Until Bare hears word from aerospace experts or someone able to identify the piece, he's holding on to it so that hopefully, when it is identified, whoever it belongs to will be able to figure out how it got to earth.

"It's just kind of taking it a step at a time and just trying to put the pieces together and figure it out," Bare said. "Not literally put the pieces together, there's only one piece, but put the pieces of information together and figure out what needs to happen next."

Bare said that The Glamping Collective will continue business as usual in the meantime.

"For us, we're just doing business as normal at the glamping collective and creating a place where people can come have incredible mountaintop experiences. And for right now that includes seeing space debris," Bare said.

While Bare nor Clontz were willing to wager a guess what the space debris came off of, it is identical in appearance SpaceX debris found on a farm in Canada last month. However, given the increasing number of objects being sent to space, space junk is proliferating, so identification could be tricky.