A mysterious, large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.

It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.

Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger.

“It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first,” he said.

Over the past several years, twelve severed feet have washed ashore around the Vancouver area.

Now two of the mysterious feet that have recently have been identified. apparently they belong to a missing Canadian woman.

The woman, whose name was withheld at the request of her family, jumped to her death from the Pattullo Bridge in New Westminster, B.C., in April 2004, according to the Coroners Service.

The woman’s right foot was found in May 2008, and the left was in November 2008, at two different points in the Fraser River near Richmond, B.C.

The feet, which police said detached naturally from the body over time, were in New Balance running shoes.

The Coroners Service identified the woman through a postmortem investigation and DNA analysis, according to a statement.

Eleven feet in all have washed ashore on the Northwestern coast since 2007, when the phenomenon began. Canadian authorities have said that the eight feet in their province are most likely the result of suicide bridge-jumpers in the area’s many water-ways.

After being submerged in water and strong currents, bodies begin to deteriorate, leading to the separation of foot from leg.

Police say the buoyant, lightweight sneakers found on most of the feet account for the recent trend: as the feet separate from the body, the sneakers carry them up to the surface, where they then wash ashore. Heavier sneakers and shoes sink to the bottom.

The BC Coroners Service has now positively identified six of the feet as belonging to four individuals.

Scientists have finally identified the weird orange goo that appeared along the shore of a remote Alaska village.

They believe that the goo is in fact millions of microscopic eggs filled with fatty droplets.

But there is still a mystery as the officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said they don’t know for sure what species the eggs are, although they believe they are some kind of crustacean eggs or embryos.

In fact, the do not even know whether the eggs are toxic or not, or even why they suddenly appeared!

“We’ll probably find some clues, but we’ll likely never have a definitive answer on that,” NOAA spokeswoman Julie Speegle said.

This worries many of the 374 residents of Kivalina, an Inupiat Eskimo community located at the tip of an 8-mile barrier reef on Alaska’s northwest coast.

There’s been at least one report of dead minnows found in the lagoon of the village the night the eggs appeared last week.

Residents also are worried about the community’s dwindling reserves in village water tanks even though the orange mass has dissipated from the lagoon and Wulik River, said city administrator Janet Mitchell.

“It seems to be all gone,” she said. “But if they’re microscopic eggs, who’s to say they’re not still in the river?”

Samples are being sent to a NOAA laboratory in Charleston, S.C., for further analysis. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation also sent samples Monday to the Institute for Marine Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Just as I was beginning to lose hope that we would get a good unidentified ‘monster’ story this summer, along comes this one!

When Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) officials received a picture of the roadkill from Alexandria, Minn., this week, it wasn’t clear what it was.

Lacey Ilse said she was driving near her home on County Road 86, south of Alexandria, when she spotted the mysterious mammal.

“We saw something in the middle of the road, and we knew it wasn’t a dog or a cat, because it didn’t have hair. It had a clump of hair and all the rest was just white skin,” Ilse said.”it’s ear was all mis-shaped. To me, it looked like half-human.”

Ilse said she soon posted pictures of the animal on Facebook, and rumors and speculation took off.

“It just shot out like wildfire. everybody was putting it on their Facebook pages. And then, their friends were putting it on their pages,” she said.

The mystery animal was ghostly white and hairless, its neck bloated out of proportion with the rest of its limp body.

There were five front toes with long nails, so it most likely wasn’t a dog. Several employees, working off the picture, concluded it was a badger.

“If you look at the picture, it is weird-looking,” said Jason Abraham, a fur-bearer specialist with the DNR. “If there were four or five of these found on the road, we might have a bit more interest.”

“The head suggests a canine, very likely a domestic dog,” Abraham said. “However, the right front foot appears to have five toes, which is not typical for canines. Also, the long toenails are not typical for an active canine.”

The badger, assuming that’s what it was, probably lost its hair during the decomposition process, Abraham said. The animal most likely lived in Minnesota, although the species is more commonly found in Wisconsin.

Folks in Alexandria Wednesday had their own ideas.

“First guess was a badger with like, a case of mange. But then, some other people were saying, like a chupacabra. and after looking at some pictures, I was like, ‘you know, it’s possible,” Jones said.

“It kinda looks like a 10-year-old wolf,” Austin Becker of Alexandria said.

“Almost looks like a pig, with paws? I don’t know, or a wolf,” Kaitlin Van Horn of Morris said.

In 2006, residents of the North Shore were perplexed by a hairless animal roaming the woods. It turned out to be a timberwolf with mange.