RECOVERING THE MYSTERIOUS BUGA SPHERE

THE INSIDE STORY, PART ONE

The small city of Buga in western Colombia has less than a thousand full-time inhabitants. But its sprawling Basilica of the Lord of Miracles is one of the Catholic Church’s most impressive pilgrimage sites, with more than a million visitors annually. And on March 2, 2025, while traversing Buga’s rural outskirts, a middle-aged man named Don José Rompo experienced his own miraculous moment. His life has not been the same.

José is an amateur archaeologist, who has discovered a number of artifacts through the years using a metal detector along Buga’s hills and valleys. Treasure hunting is what he and a partner were doing at 1:15 on a Sunday afternoon - he recalls the time precisely - when something whooshed not far from his ear at a high rate of speed. At first José thought it must be a bird. Then it zoomed past a second time right behind him. He looked up. A small metallic blue object was moving rapidly across the sky, making an arc as it went east and then south in the direction of the township’s Army base, The Buga Palace Battalion hosted some 1,500 soldiers and a wide range of armaments.

José was not a neophyte in making odd observations. Years ago at the age of thirteen, he’d watched in awe as a beam of light climbed into the heavens. Later he’d witnessed two orbs at night in the same region. “That is the reason I think I was prepared for the Buga sphere,” José would recall. “I realize now that she was making herself known to me, like a signal.”

His phone had low resolution and would soon need to be charged. So he asked his companion to start filming with the new IPhone-11 the fellow had just purchased. He did so for about eight minutes, including several pauses. The object began rotating and for a time disappeared behind the hills. Then, as it returned and approached some high voltage lines, José heard a crackling sound and saw a spark. The object, not much bigger than a basketball, had apparently short-circuited, losing its navigational or levitational system. It began to descend, trying unsuccessfully to ascend again, and came to rest along a steep slope between two branches. Landing on planet earth took about ten seconds.

José approached cautiously but filled with curiosity. He reached out and touched the single piece of metal. It was lukewarm, and felt “like an egg that had just been laid.” Overcoming initial trepidation, he picked it up. José makes his living selling peanuts, and was well aware of weights and measures. The object wasn’t exactly light as a feather, but he estimated it at around two kilos (4.4 pounds). José walked over to his companion and said: “We should stop our treasure hunting, because we already found something important.” Where the sphere had come down, José realized later, all the grass beneath it had dehydrated and died.

They drove with the sphere to José’s home some miles away. He didn’t experience any direct communication. However, “It made me feel totally at peace, and that was curious.” Seeing strange symbols on the sphere, “I was concerned that what I had in my possession was probably not human.” That evening, shirtless, for a time he walked around holding the sphere against his bare stomach. It wasn’t long before he began feeling nauseous and vomited, along with a slight headache and an aluminum taste in his mouth. Portions of skin turned red with a rash.

José’s cell phone wouldn’t turn off because it seemed not to recognize his fingerprint. This was when he realized that his fingerprints, all of them, had disappeared. It would be two days before he recovered them.

José placed a call to his first cousin, an electrical engineer with a company that manufactured his metal detector and had pioneered digital radiation technology. David Vélez, known locally as El Potro (young horse), wasn’t a “believer” in UFOs, but he knew José wasn’t the kind to invent such a story.

José told David that he needed to go to a doctor. The next morning, he remained discreet. His physician suggested it was probably an allergy or perhaps a virus, gave him some pills and told José to rest up. He reached out to his cousin again. “Can you come pick it up as soon as possible?” José asked. He was afraid the sphere’s energy field, whatever it was, might make him sicker or even kill him.

• Dr. Steven Greer (left) interviewing Don José Rompo in Mexico City, June 21, 2025, for a forthcoming documentary.

David lived in Cali, about sixty miles from Buga. He gathered a small crew of men from his office. They put on protective suits against possible radiation or electromagnetic fields, boarded a van, and headed off. Putting their masks on tight, they entered José’s house, where David placed the sphere inside a bag and tied it up.

Back at his company’s lab, the sphere went into “quarantine” behind locked doors. David would remember: “When we realized we were looking at something completely different than we’ve ever imagined, we wanted to split it in half [to see the inside] - but everybody told us no, it could explode and kill us all.” Which wasn’t true, but kept the sphere pristine.

When they put the sphere on a scale again after twenty days, inexplicably it had tripled in weight - to six kilos. Eventually, it would continue escalating as high as ten kilos (22 pounds). Why and how this could happen remains a mystery.

As they were conducting some tests, a video of the same sphere in flight taken by a woman on the opposite side of town went viral. And with word getting out, David was getting strange calls. From Spain came an offer of a substantial but unspecified sum to purchase the sphere. A representative claiming to be with the Brazilian air force invited them to do a documentary series but wanted David’s company to cede all rights to the sphere. Another organization alleged they were part of a private corporation to whom the sphere previously belonged; they’d reverse-engineered it before it got out of their control and flew several hundred miles away to where José picked it up. Now they were demanding its return. David knew if he acceded to any of these requests, the sphere would likely never be seen again.

- Dr. Greer with David Vélez (El Potro) at the home of Jaime Maussan.

David knew he was in over his head: somebody was taking exposure of the discovery as a very serious threat. His social media accounts were hacked and he began waking up to more calls in the middle of the night. “Many different people telling me this was a hoax,” David says, and threatening the reputation of his company.

He was familiar with the work of a renowned journalist/UFOlogist in Mexico City named Jaime Maussan. David made arrangements to turn over the sphere for scientific study to Maussan, who flew to Colombia to retrieve and place it in a guarded safe inside his office complex. Then, in June 2025, Maussan called a press conference. Before a roomful of cameras, he introduced José, David and scientists connected to several of the leading institutions in Mexico. Prominent Americans including U.S. Representative Eric Burlison (R., Mo.), Dr. Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project, and attorney Daniel Sheehan also attended.

David had put out word that he hoped to receive film taken by others who’d witnessed such spheres. “People have sent me videos of ten different spheres, from all over Colombia,” he revealed.

“Could we be on the path to contact?” Maussan asked at the gathering. “That is the extraordinary question we are asking today.”

• A blowup of some of the symbols on the Buga sphere.

NEXT: WHAT THE SCIENTISTS ARE SAYING.