Do we really need a Valdivia Sphere Too?

I told myself that I wouldn't write another piece on UFOs (aka UAPs) for a while, yet here we are.

I couldn't help myself with the recent news about the discovery of yet another odd sphere in Colombia. The Valdivia sphere. Not to be confused with the original Buga sphere. Or any actual anomalous object for that matter.

So, I've been an enthusiast in the UFO space for a long time, and to me the original finding and now this one represent a textbook example of the problem with this field: The classic credibility laundering pipeline of events that includes questionable motivations, bad science, hyperbolic claims, murky provenance, and misdirection. All of it. The end result is confusion, obfuscation of the truth or if you're more generous, maybe just wishful thinking, but the end result is always the same: Damage to the credibility of the UFO field overall.

Let me lay out exactly how the UFO credibility laundering pipeline works. It's typically a 5 step process. We've all seen this before:

Civilian finder -> influencer-ufologist -> "friendly" lab -> press conference -> social media amplification

This is the point where a story takes on a life of its own and is repeated ad nauseam with different "hot takes" across the UFO zeitgeist.

BTW - the irony isn't lost on me that I'm admittedly one of these takes...but let's move on, shall we?

I'd like to start with a recap of the origin story on these spheres for those who might not be plugged in. This is a bit lengthy, but the details are important.

A tale of two spheres. The origin story: In March 2025, residents of Buga, a small city in Colombia's Valle del Cauca, reported a small metallic object zigzagging through the sky, allegedly clipping a high-voltage power line before falling to the ground in an area called Alto Bonito.

The object was recovered by a local peanut vendor and amateur metal-detector hobbyist named José Arias Restrepo, who passed it to his cousin David Vélez, a Cali-based UFO enthusiast who runs the Facebook page Cazadores de Ovnis Latinoamérica.

Within weeks the sphere, a roughly basketball-sized metallic orb etched with symbols that have variously been compared to runes, cuneiform, and even "proto-Sanskrit," had crossed an international border without any documented customs paperwork and ended up in the Mexico City offices of Jaime Maussan, the veteran Mexican TV ufologist best known internationally for presenting allegedly non-human bodies to the Mexican Congress in 2023. (Side note: these non-human bodies were later forensically identified as constructions of animal and human bone, modern glue, and synthetic resin).

Since then, Maussan and the notorious Dr. Steven Greer have advanced an escalating set of claims about the object. Specifically that it:

• is 12,560 years old
• levitates
• emits anomalous electromagnetic fields
• contains internal microspheres and a central "chip"
• is technology from a pre-human civilization now being "reactivated"

Now let's fast forward. Maussan just announced on his Interestelar program that a second metallic sphere had been recovered in Colombia.

He has branded this one La Esfera de Las Baldías, after the Serrania de las Baldías, Colombia's smallest páramo, a high-altitude moorland in northern Antioquia.

The object has circulated in some English-language UFO communities under the more pronounceable "Valdivia" sphere.

Unlike Buga, the second-sphere story exists almost entirely inside Maussan's own YouTube ecosystem. As of May 2026, no Colombian or Mexican mainstream outlet has reported it; no independent verification of the recovery; no recovery date, size, weight, or chain of custody has been documented; and no laboratory has acknowledged analyzing it.

However, there's no mistaking the framing. The Las Baldías (aka the Valdivia sphere) is being presented as a second version of the same alleged type of object as Buga, confirmation in Maussan's own words that the first sphere was not a one-off.

Okay let's get real here. It's not even a question of whether the spheres are authentic. By sight alone, and by the available evidence, the answer is an obvious no. (I've included links regarding the evidence at the bottom of this article for anyone curious.)

But what's even nuttier than a second sphere itself is how a single influencer with a documented hoax record can manufacture global "non-human intelligence" headlines on demand.

The Maussan and Greer connection is telling as well. I haven't seen a comment from Dr. Greer on the second sphere yet, but his involvement with the first certainly helped with the amplification of the original story.

Let's examine the 5 step credibility laundering pipeline in detail for the original Buga sphere event. Here's the framework again:

Civilian finder -> influencer-ufologist -> "friendly" lab -> press conference -> social media amplification

1) Civilian finder

The origin story IS the authenticity layer. In this case, we have someone who is not at all associated with the UFO field. The original Buga sphere finder, Restrepo, is a regular guy who stumbles across something irregular. This is why the story sounds organic because the provenance is a "discovery", not a "production".

2) Influencer-Ufologist

This is the stage where credibility starts to take a hit. Restrepo hands off the discovered Buga sphere to his cousin Velez who then hands it off to ufologist Maussan. The chain of custody gets super murky here and there are a few different versions of how this came to pass. El Pais de Cali reports that Maussan's team contacted Velez directly, assuring him that they could take the sphere to Mexico to perform an in-depth investigation.

An alternative version casts Velez as being "over his head" after his social media accounts were hacked and he started receiving threatening calls. That he reached out and contacted Maussan directly (as he was familiar with his work) to make arrangements to take the sphere off his hands.

All this raises the question of how the Buga sphere, a purported mysterious and anomalous artifact, escapes government control, gets past the Colombian border and into Maussan's hands. The Maussan account claims that he had permission from the Colombian government, but no Colombian government agency has confirmed this publicly. And El País de Cali, which did the most thorough independent reporting on the case, pointed out that it remains unclear how Maussan was able to remove a supposedly scientifically significant object from the country without any restrictions at all.

Regardless of which version you believe, the outcome is the same. The sphere moved from a private citizen to a UFO influencer without passing through a single scientific institution, government agency, or at the very least a museum. This is how the pipeline works.

There's another thing to note here: There's more going on here with Vélez other than just Restrepo's nearby cousin. After the sphere went viral, he started building a personal brand around UFO content through Facebook and YouTube under the name "Cazadores de Ovnis Internacional." The Spanish magazine AÑO/CERO later reported that Vélez and a colleague named William Zúñiga have since "reinvented themselves as UFO hunters" and claim to have "caught" yet another sphere in Valle del Cauca.

The magazine noted that a fishing line is visible in the recording. Make of that what you will, but the story's closing line says it all: "This story, like so many others, unravels with a simple tug of a thread. Literally."

3) "Friendly" Lab

Let's talk about the "friendly" lab. The best UFO stories need scientific legitimacy and this is how the pipeline manufactures it. And to be clear, by "scientific" I mean data presented in a way that looks like science without actually being science.

The first person to publicly examine the Buga sphere was Dr. José Luis Velázquez, a radiologist. He produced X-ray images showing three layers of metallic material, 18 internal microspheres, and what the team called a central "chip." The imagery looked impressive.

Here's the problem: Velázquez was hired by Maussan. That's not an independent viewpoint. He's not affiliated with a university metallurgy department. He's a radiologist performing an imaging study on behalf of the man who's paying him and promoting the object. It's hard not to be biased in this scenario.

Maussan also claimed that carbon-14 dating performed at the University of Georgia dated the sphere to 12,560 years old. Let's examine this claim more closely. The carbon-14 testing (if it happened) would have been performed on the resin found in the sphere's surface pores, not on the metal itself. Carbon-14 dating does not work on metal. It relies on organic material (like wood, bone, shell, charcoal, etc). So if you're feeling generous and you want to believe the claim, the test likely dated some resin stuck to the surface of the object. Not the object itself.

Maussan also claimed involvement from UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, but no official report from UNAM has been made public. Marino Guarín, director of the Escuela de Astronomía in Cali, directly called this out: "there is nothing with scientific support here, and neither university has produced an official report despite Maussan's claims to the contrary."

This type of scenario is what I mean by the "friendly lab". You don't need real peer-reviewed science. You just need enough lab coats, X-ray images, and institutional names dropped to create the appearance of scientific validation. The audience fills the gaps.

4) Press Conference

This one is straightforward. In June 2025, Maussan called a press conference in Mexico City. Cameras were present. Restrepo and Velez were introduced alongside scientists connected to several Mexican institutions. Steven Greer was there. The presentation had the visual grammar of a legitimate scientific announcement.

But the substance was a media event, not a scientific disclosure. No peer-reviewed findings were presented. No independent replication was offered. No chain-of-custody documentation was released. The format itself is the message: if you put enough people in front of enough cameras in a room that looks official enough, the audience processes it as credible by default.

5) Social Media Amplification

Next step is the social media amplification. In this case, Dr. Steven Greer was also present, and he interviewed the original finder Restrepo for a forthcoming documentary. Involving Greer was a smart move. His name adds weight to any claims made and it helped move the story across the language barrier. Maussan commands a huge Spanish-language audience. Greer commands a massive English one. Together, they turned a regional Colombian story into an international UFO event.

Once the press conference happened, the story took on a life of its own. Fox News, Newsweek, the Daily Mail, the New York Post. All of them ran coverage. The social media algorithms kicked in and the sphere was everywhere.

This is the end stage of the pipeline, and it has a compounding effect. Once a claim reaches the mainstream outlets, it gets cited by other outlets, linked in Reddit threads, featured in YouTube compilations, and rehashed in podcasts. It's like the game of telephone. Each subsequent retelling strips away a little more nuance. By the time Joe public hears the story, the caveats are gone and the headline is "Scientists say Colombian sphere may be alien technology." Which, if you look back through the pipeline, really means "an independent radiologist hired by a TV ufologist X-rayed a metal ball."

What about the Valdivia sphere? As bad as the Buga sphere scenario was, this new discovery is even worse. Let's take the same framework and apply it to the new second La Esfera de Las Baldías (aka the "Valdivia" sphere).

Civilian finder: The recovery was led by William Zúñiga, the same figure connected to Vélez's prior sphere activity. The only witnesses cited are an anonymous elderly couple. No independent recovery date, GPS coordinates, or corroborating testimony has been provided. How did this sphere come to be?

Influencer-Ufologist: Maussan himself, announcing it on his own Interestelar program. There is no intermediary this time. The story originates from and is controlled by a single dubious source.

"Friendly" Lab: None publicly identified. No lab has acknowledged analyzing the object. No imaging, no material composition data, no reports of any kind.

Press Conference: None. As of May 2026, no Colombian or Mexican mainstream outlet has reported the story.

Social Media Amplification: Limited, but it's happening. English-language UFO communities have picked it up under the "Valdivia sphere" name and it's circulating across YouTube and Reddit.

This is the short-circuited pipeline. At least with the Buga sphere, the promoters and influencers went through the motions at every stage. There was a named finder, "lab" analysis, a press conference, and mainstream media pickup. With Las Baldías, the first three stages are essentially null and void. The story jumps straight from Maussan's YouTube channel into the UFO community with very little backstory, and yet it's still circulating. What we're seeing here is that once a buzz is created with an initial run through the pipeline, you don't need all the stages to rinse and repeat. You just need a ready audience to remember that the first go around was presented as credible. The second finding rides on the residual trust that was built.

Insiders are the best skeptics. What's notable about these discoveries is that the primary skepticism has come from inside the UFO/UAP community. That's both rare and significant.

Stanford pathologist Garry Nolan has publicly argued that the Buga sphere is overwhelmingly likely to be a terrestrial artifact, summarized in coverage as "about 99% likely terrestrial". Julia Mossbridge, a neuroscientist known for her research into precognition and presentiment, called it "a really cool art project."

These are not career debunkers. These are researchers who believe that anomalous phenomena deserve serious investigation. When people inside the fold are saying this doesn't hold water, the problem isn't the skeptics. The problem is the object and the people promoting it.

Colombian scientists were equally direct. Santiago Vargas, an astrophysicist at the Universidad Nacional's Astronomical Observatory, stated that the sphere's components are "very terrestrial," pointing to the fiber optics identified in its structure. (Admittedly it's weird that there are fiber optics in the sphere, but this is something we manufacture on the Earth right now, not an exotic unknown.) Marino Guarín, director of the Escuela de Astronomía in Cali, called the entire narrative "stories and charlatanry."

These are all examples of credentialed scientists in the country where the object was found. They've been consistent since the discovery.

Here's the issue: Every time the credibility laundering pipeline runs successfully, it raises the noise floor for the entire UAP field. Every sensational headline makes it marginally harder for legitimate researchers to be taken seriously. Every "ancient alien technology" press conference arms the armchair skeptics who want to dismiss the entire phenomenon as nonsense.

That's what happens. The pipeline doesn't just produce bad stories. It damages the credibility of a field where a lot of real people are doing honest work and trying to find the truth. There are scientists, engineers, and analysts doing careful, methodical work on anomalous phenomena. These are not the people seeking attention and hosting press conferences.

The pipeline works because it exploits something real: people are genuinely interested in this topic and want answers. This curiosity is the reason this field even exists. Curiosity means eyeballs, which also means engagement. This interest gets weaponized into clicks, views, and subscriber metrics. The people who ultimately lose are the ones who actually care about finding the truth.

So, do we really need a Valdivia sphere? No, we do not. But we got one anyway, because the pipeline is proven. It works and there's no downside to running the same playbook over and over again.

If the Buga sphere was the premiere, the Valdivia sphere is the sequel that nobody asked for. The latest discovery is based on even less evidence and promoted through even fewer channels. But if it gets enough traction, there will be a third. And a fourth. Because this model is infinitely repeatable as long as the audience keeps engaging with it.

I didn't write this article to convince anyone that the spheres are fake. The evidence handles that on its own (links below). I'm writing this because the pattern is obvious and matters more than the object itself. If you care about this field like I do, then recognizing the pipeline is the first step toward refusing to be run through it.

This is admittedly an opinionated piece. In the next section there are some primary sources to check out so you can draw your own conclusions.

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The claims themselves (primary sources)

• Jaime Maussan, Interestelar — "Se encuentra una 2.ª esfera en Colombia. La Esfera de Las Baldías" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVRXREkqK9k The actual branding of the second sphere, from Maussan's own program.
• Jaime Maussan, Interestelar — "Se encuentra una SEGUNDA ESFERA en la selva de Colombia ¡EXTRAORDINARIO!" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpBAMFhQJgU The second video on the same object, framed differently (note the "selva" vs "páramo" inconsistency).
• Dr. Steven Greer — "Uncovering Time: Carbon-14 Dating and the Mystery of the Buga Sphere" — https://drstevengreer.com/uncovering-time-carbon-14-dating-and-the-mystery-of-the-buga-sphere/ Greer's own write-up of the 12,560 BP claim.
• Dick Russell's Substack — "A Buga Sphere Update" (interview with Greer) — https://dickrussell.substack.com/p/a-buga-sphere-update The most extensive direct quotation of Greer's framing (Atlantis, Younger Dryas, Vedic mantra reactivity, electrical pulses).
• PR Newswire — Greer's May 8, 2026 National Press Club event announcement — https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/disclosure-event-to-feature-whistleblower-testimony-new-visual-evidence-and-policy-recommendations-302757541.html The official press release for the 25th-anniversary event headlining the sphere.

Skeptical and technical analyses

• Metabunk — "Buga Sphere Carbon Dating" — https://www.metabunk.org/threads/buga-sphere-carbon-dating.14454/ The most detailed technical takedown of the UGA letter, including the addressing oddities (Greer's own LLC, not Maussan's), the "foraminifer/resin" inconsistency, and the uncalibrated 14C BP issue.
• Astrophyzix — "The Buga Sphere Has NOT Been Confirmed to be 12,560 Years Old Using Carbon Dating" — https://www.astrophyzix.com/2026/04/buga-sphere-carbon-dating-explained-.html A clean walkthrough of what the radiocarbon result actually does and does not establish.
• Orbital Today — "Buga Sphere: The Enigmatic Colombia UFO Or An Artful Deception?" — https://orbitaltoday.com/2025/11/02/buga-sphere-anomaly-explained/ Includes Mossbridge's "really cool art project" assessment and the superplastic forming / magnetic pulse welding explanation for the seamless surface.
• Ms8 — "The Buga Sphere: A Crude Scam Exposed" — https://www.ms8.com/the-buga-sphere-a-crude-scam-exposed/ A more pointed skeptical write-up.
• ASIRP Journal Substack — "The Architecture of Disclosure: Following the Money and Ideas Behind Steven Greer's Cosmic Enterprise" — https://asirpjournal.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-disclosure-following The most thorough investigation of how Greer's nonprofit and LLC structure actually works.

Independent press coverage (Colombian and Mexican)

• El País de Cali — "El misterio de la esfera de Buga que terminó en manos de Jaime Maussan: ¿OVNI o montaje, según científicos?" — https://www.elpais.com.co/tecnologia/el-misterio-de-la-esfera-de-buga-que-termino-en-manos-de-jaime-maussan-ovni-o-montaje-segun-cientificos-1241.html The best single Colombian summary, with quotes from Santiago Vargas (Universidad Nacional) and Óscar Amaya Montoya.
• Infobae Colombia — "Este sería el verdadero origen de la esfera hallada en Buga" — https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2025/10/13/este-seria-el-verdadero-origen-de-la-esfera-hallada-en-buga-valle-que-ciudadanos-confundieron-con-un-ovni/ Follows up on the Bogotá laboratory claim that the sphere is theirs from a 2011 experiment.
• Infobae Colombia — "Las teorías detrás de la 'esfera de Buga'" — https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2025/06/14/las-teorias-detras-de-la-esfera-de-buga-el-misterioso-objeto-que-fue-grabado-volando-los-cielos-del-valle-del-cauca/ Includes Garry Nolan's "99% terrestrial artifact" assessment.
• Infobae España — "La esfera de Buga, misterio ancestral o fraude moderno" — https://www.infobae.com/espana/2025/10/17/la-esfera-de-buga-misterio-ancestral-o-fraude-moderno-un-supuesto-artefacto-de-12560-anos-de-antiguedad-que-levita-y-emite-campos-electromagneticos/ A broader skeptical synthesis of the case.
• Eje Central — "¿Qué es 'la esfera de Buga' y qué dicen los científicos sobre su origen OVNI?" — https://www.ejecentral.com.mx/nuestro-eje/que-es-la-esfera-de-buga-y-que-dicen-los-cientificos-sobre-sobre-su-origen-ovni-la-verdad-detras-del-hallazgo-en-valle A Mexican outlet's skeptical summary.

English-language press

• Newsweek — "UFO Discovered in Colombia? Scientist Weighs In" — https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-discovered-colombia-scientist-weighs-2076884 Includes Julia Mossbridge's full "art project" warning about discrediting legitimate UAP research.
• Fox News — "Mysterious sphere in Colombia sparks UFO debate among scientists and experts" — https://www.foxnews.com/us/scientists-discover-mysterious-sphere-colombia-sparking-ufo-speculation A mainstream US framing of the case.
• Higgypop — "What Do We Really Know About Colombia's Mysterious Buga Sphere?" — https://www.higgypop.com/news/what-we-know-about-the-buga-sphere/ A reasonably balanced English-language summary.

Background context: Maussan's track record

• Global News — "'Totally made up story': Mystery of Peru 'alien' corpses finally solved" — https://globalnews.ca/news/10226698/peru-alien-corpses-human-animal-bones-glue/ The forensic debunking of the 2023 Nazca mummies Maussan presented to the Mexican Congress.
• Wikipedia — Jaime Maussan — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Maussan A reasonable starting point for the broader pattern of claims.

Background context: Greer's operation

• Wikipedia — Steven M. Greer — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Greer Covers CSETI, the Disclosure Project, CE-5, and the chronology of the branded entities.