What's the Debris That a New Jersey Man Believes Fell Out of the Sky?

The workers at a waste water treatment plant in Secaucus, New Jersey, have seen some crazy things beyond what one might expect to find at such a facility. But what fell out of the sky this week has them more baffled than usual.

“We had a turkey, couple of foxes, snapping turtles, couple of snakes, ground hogs,” Steve Bronowich, a worker at the plant, told WINS radio of previous unusual events. “We’ve been dropped on by seagulls, crabs, they fly over, they drop the remains of the crab. One of my guys got hit in the head with it. Dive-bombing seagulls."

What fell from the sky Wednesday though had workers going to the authorities to test for radioactive activity.

After seeing the thin metal piece that fell while he and other workers were walking on the plant grounds, Bronowich said they went online to try to find more about it.

This burned-looking piece of metal fell on the New Jersey waste water treatment plant Wednesday. (Image source: WINS via WCBS-TV)

“What they show online for a space shuttle tile, it’s a little thicker than what we actually have here, but it certainly looks like it,” Bronowich told the radio station. “I don’t know if it’s actually a tile, but I know it did come out of the sky.”

While Hudson Regional Health Commissioner Carlos Rodriguez told WINS that the tile looked like something that could come from a spacecraft, but he added that it had "no radioactive readings coming off it."

An aerial view of the treatment plant. (Image source: Google)

The Federal Aviation Administration said it didn't receive any reports of anything falling from the sky, and NASA also told the radio station that it's probably not space debris.

"[W]e have not flown the space shuttle since 2011, we had a highly accurate accounting of the tiles, and this does not appear to be a tile," a NASA spokesperson said, noting that there would be a number on the tile if it belong to the space agency.

The source of the debris is still a mystery, but WINS reported that the health commission will be investigating the situation.

Watch this report about the incident from the affiliated news station WCBS-TV: