THINK ABOUTIT UFO SIGHTINGS REPORT

1972: Man Finds “Space Nugget” After Seeing Bright Light Near the Stanislaus River

Tom McCully was fishing alone before dawn along the Stanislaus River in the high Sierra when a pulsating light reflecting off the water grew brighter, flashed, and pelted the area around him with something like hailstones. Frightened, he bent to retrieve his dropped fishing pole and found what looked like a gold nugget nearby, tucked it into his shirt pocket, and forgot about it, the nugget itself seemingly lost, until it fell out of a rolled-up sleeping bag four years later. What followed was a strange and ultimately never-resolved chain of laboratory testing, complete with a gemologist who said the object wasn’t metal at all, and a later lab result declaring it 99.4 percent iron.

Date: 1972 (reported four years later, in 1976); reported in the Modesto Bee, September 13 and September 30, 1976

Sighting Time: Approximately dawn

Day/Night: Night into early dawn

Location: High Sierra Nevada mountains near the Stanislaus River, California

Urban or Rural: Rural

No. of Entity(s): Not Applicable

Entity Type: Not Applicable

Entity Description: Not Applicable

Hynek Classification: NL — Nocturnal Light. A pulsating luminous source observed reflecting off water before dawn, with no structured craft directly described by the witness.

Duration: Undocumented

No. of Object(s): 1 light source; no craft was directly observed

Description of the Object(s): A pulsating light reflecting off the river water, growing brighter and dimmer, initially mistaken by the witness for a forest fire despite the absence of crackling sound or smoke smell, followed by a sudden brilliant flash and an impact of small hail-like objects in the surrounding area

Shape of Object(s): Undocumented (light source only; no craft shape described)

Size of Object(s): Undocumented

Color of Object(s): Undocumented beyond “bright” and “pulsating”

Distance to Object(s): Undocumented

Height & Speed: Undocumented

Number of Witnesses: 1 (Tom McCully)

Special Features/Characteristics: Witness found a golf-ball-sized nugget-like object at his feet immediately after the light and hail-like event, and separately noted fresh scar marks on nearby tree bark resembling bullet grazes; the object went missing for four years after the witness placed it in his shirt pocket, reappearing when a sleeping bag was unrolled for a subsequent camping trip; a Merced gemologist initially tested the object and reported it was not metal; a Merced Community College geology instructor’s spectrographic analysis could not melt the sample with a carbon arc due to its high melting temperature and speculated it had the appearance and density of pure silicon, while explicitly declining to guess its origin; a later analysis reported through the International UFO Registry and attributed to the University of Chicago’s Argonne Laboratory found the object to be 99.4 percent iron, non-magnetic, and undetectable by a metal detector, a result described by the UFO Registry’s own director as something that “can’t even exist”; McCully stated he was negotiating to sell his story to the National Enquirer; no further published follow-up on the promised Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory or NASA testing has been located

Case Status: Insufficient Data — a single witness, a physical object with directly contradictory laboratory findings across its own reported testing history (not metal, then 99.4% iron), a four-year gap in the object’s custody, a stated financial motive, and no located resolution of the promised further testing

Source: Modesto Bee (Modesto, CA), “Merced man puts ‘nugget’ from space to the real test,” September 13, 1976; Modesto Bee, “Tests show space nugget ‘can’t exist,'” September 30, 1976

Summary/Description: Tom McCully of Merced said that while fishing alone before dawn near the Stanislaus River in 1972, he saw a bright pulsating light reflecting off the water, followed by a sudden flash and something like hailstones pelting the area. He found a gold-nugget-like object at his feet, which went missing for four years before turning up in a rolled sleeping bag. Subsequent testing produced contradictory results: a gemologist found it was not metal, while a laboratory analysis reported through the International UFO Registry found it to be 99.4 percent iron, a result the registry’s own director called impossible. No documented resolution of further promised testing by the Smithsonian or NASA has been located.

Related Cases: None documented

Full Report

“Merced Man Puts ‘Nugget’ From Space to the Real Test” — Modesto Bee, September 13, 1976

Tom McCully of Merced does not claim to believe in unidentified flying objects, but he has what he thinks could be a fragment of something from outer space. The object, about the size of a golf ball, was sent by McCully to the International UFO Registry in Hammond, Indiana, which in turn turned it over to the University of Chicago’s Argonne Laboratory for tests.

McCully said it was previously examined by a gemologist in Merced, who tested it and said it is not metal. McCully also had a letter dated July 7 from Robert Lemmon, Merced Community College geology instructor, who mentioned further tests. In the letter, Lemmon said the sample was checked with a spectrograph but the melting temperature was so high the carbon arc wouldn’t melt it, and suggested more sophisticated equipment than the college had access to. He noted the sample had the appearance and density of pure silicon, one of the few elements whose melting temperature is too high to run through the spectrograph, calling it a guess, and said he wouldn’t hazard a guess as to where it came from, since many compounds contain silicon.

According to McCully, who owned an appliance store on Crows Landing Road in Modesto, he found the object four years earlier while fishing in the high Sierra near the Stanislaus River. He had gone camping alone and was up before dawn fishing when he first noticed a bright pulsating light reflecting off the water. He said the light seemed to grow bright and then dim, and at first he thought it was a forest fire, though he neither heard crackling flames nor smelled smoke. Then he said there was a sudden brilliant flash and something like hailstones pelted the area around him.

Frightened, he bent down to pick up his dropped fishing pole and noticed what appeared to be a gold nugget. He picked it up, put it in his shirt pocket, and rolled up his sleeping bag to leave the area. As he did so, he noticed the bark of nearby trees had fresh scar marks, similar, he said, to what would happen if they had been grazed by bullets.

Once home in Merced, McCully told his wife of the incident, but when he searched his pockets for the nugget, it was gone. Since he couldn’t prove what had happened, he kept quiet, and over time he forgot about it. That is, he said, until early July, when, while preparing for another camping trip, he got out the sleeping bag; as he rolled it out on the driveway, the nugget rolled out with it.

McCully subsequently showed the object to other people, including a friend who told him that Dr. J. Allen Hynek had offered, through several magazines, a $50,000 reward to anyone able to prove the existence of UFOs through physical evidence. That led McCully to have the object tested by the gemologist and the geologist, and eventually to chiseling off a smaller piece and sending the larger piece to the UFO Registry. He said he was willing to show the fragment he kept to anyone interested, and that he was negotiating to sell his story to the National Enquirer.

“Tests Show Space Nugget ‘Can’t Exist'” — Modesto Bee, September 30, 1976

The mystery of Tom McCully’s space nugget deepened with word that laboratory tests show the nugget, which is non-magnetic and cannot be detected by a metal detector, is 99.4 percent iron. McCully said he received word of the lab tests in a telephone call from Dennis Hauck of the UFO Registry in Munster, Indiana, who told him the nugget had been tested by scientists at the University of Chicago’s Argonne Laboratory and that the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory was the next step in testing. McCully said NASA was also interested in examining the object.

McCully said Hauck’s reaction to the Argonne test results was one of amazement, quoting him as saying the result was silly and that the nugget couldn’t even exist. McCully said there was a theory that the nugget seemed to have been manufactured, though no one appeared to know by whom, and that Hauck told him NASA was dealing with material so secret the space agency wouldn’t even discuss it.

McCully, then a Merced resident, restated that he found the object four years earlier while fishing alone along the Stanislaus River around dawn, describing the same pulsating light, sudden flash, and hail-like impact as in the earlier account. He said he did not rediscover the nugget until the previous July, when he found it in a sleeping bag, apparently having fallen out of his pocket while he rolled the bag up four years before. He said he showed it to various people and was urged to send it to the UFO Registry. Though he started with one chunk, McCully said the extremely hard but brittle material broke into three pieces, one of which was sent to the registry, with the other two kept in a safe deposit box; he said he had been advised by Hauck to safeguard the remaining pieces and not to return to the Sierra site where the original nugget was found.

RESEARCHER’S NOTES

The Stanislaus River Nugget — 1972 and a Physical-Evidence Case That Contradicts Itself

• The two lab findings directly contradict each other. The Merced gemologist’s initial finding that the object was not metal is flatly at odds with the later reported Argonne result of 99.4 percent iron. Both cannot be correct about the same unaltered material. Neither the newspaper coverage nor any later source located for this entry addresses or resolves this contradiction, and it is presented here as an unresolved internal inconsistency in the case’s own physical-evidence chain.
• The four-year disappearance and reappearance is a notably convenient plot point. The object going missing immediately after the sighting, with no proof retained, and then resurfacing years later at the exact moment McCully was preparing for another camping trip, is the kind of narrative structure that closely tracks a well-worn “lost and rediscovered artifact” storytelling pattern. This does not prove fabrication, but it is worth naming plainly as a feature of the account’s structure.
• A stated financial motive is directly on the record. McCully’s own reported intention to sell his story to the National Enquirer is not an outside inference; it is stated plainly in the original newspaper coverage. This does not by itself invalidate the account, but it is a relevant factor the archive notes rather than omits, consistent with how financial incentive is weighed in other cases in this collection.
• The promised follow-up testing appears to have gone nowhere on the record. Both the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory analysis and NASA’s stated interest are described only as forthcoming next steps in the September 30, 1976 article. No subsequent published report of their results, or any final resolution of the case, has been located for this entry, leaving the object’s ultimate scientific disposition unknown.
• The geologist’s own caution is worth preserving. Robert Lemmon, the one credentialed scientist quoted directly and by name in the contemporaneous coverage, explicitly declined to guess at the object’s origin and noted that many ordinary compounds contain silicon. His measured, non-committal assessment stands in useful contrast to the more dramatic framing of the story’s later stages.

What survives of the Stanislaus River nugget is two newspaper articles three weeks apart, a physical object that was reportedly found not to be metal and later reported to be 99.4 percent iron, a four-year gap with no proof of custody, and a witness openly negotiating a tabloid sale even as testing was ostensibly still underway. Whatever pulsed and flashed over that river before dawn in 1972, the nugget it apparently left behind never resolved into anything more than a contradiction on paper.

“He told me it’s silly, it can’t even exist.”

— Tom McCully, relaying UFO Registry director Dennis Hauck’s reaction to the Argonne Laboratory test results