This big piece of beach debris is raising some questions.
Lowcountry Marine Mammal Network
I hate to ruin this for you, but a big, weird object that washed up on a South Carolina beach last week isn't from another planet.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shared this image of research buoys in 2014.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Staff from the Lowcountry Marine Mammal Network (LMMN), a nonprofit dedicated to protecting dolphins, whales and seals, stumbled across a large, mysterious find on a beach at Seabrook Island. It looks like it could have been sliced out of a rocket nose cone.
LMMN is having a lot of fun on Facebook highlighting suggestions that it might be an alien spaceship, space junk or even the foot of a Star Wars AT-AT.
While the debris resembles concrete at first glance, LMMN describes it as soft and foam-like and says there's no metal in the structure. So that should rule out any alien spaceship theories.
One plausible option floated by Facebook fans is that the foam piece is a flotation ring from a marine buoy. Compare it with a 2014 image of marine buoys from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The shape looks like a good match.
While the recent Hurricane Florence spared Seabrook Island, it did churn up the coast along the Carolinas and could easily have battered some buoys into breaking apart.
Seabrook Island town officials removed the object using a trailer attached to a pickup truck. The town hasn't commented yet on a possible origin for the debris.
