The summer of 1984 in Homosassa was already weirdly humid, but it got downright surreal the day LeRoy Larson dug up the first ball.
  LeRoy was out behind his shed, trying to exhume a rusted lawnmower engine, when his shovel struck something metallic. Except it wasn't metal. He reached into the sandy Florida dirt and pulled out a perfectly round, strikingly white sphere. It was made of clay, baked rock-hard, and measured exactly one inch in diameter. Ten minutes later, he found a one and a half-inch version. By nightfall, LeRoy’s kitchen table looked like a pool table for ghosts.
"They're too white, LeRoy," his wife, Pauline, said, poking one with a wooden spoon. "It’s unnatural. Like teeth."
  Word travels fast in a small town, especially when there is absolutely nothing else going on. Within forty-eight hours, the Larson carport became the epicenter of global speculation—global, in this case, meaning anyone within a twenty-mile radius of the Citrus County line.
The theories started normal and rapidly degenerated.
  Old Man Huggins, who claimed to have been abducted by aliens in '72 (though everyone knew he had just fallen asleep in a ditch), insisted they were extra-terrestrial scout vessels. "They shrink themselves down to spy on us," Huggins whispered around town. LeRoy pointed out that if aliens wanted to conquer Earth, starting with Homosassa seemed like a poorly optimized strategy.
  Then came the local history buffs. A self-proclaimed archeologist from the bait shop declared they were ancient Calusa Indian marbles. This theory held weight until LeRoy accidentally dropped a one-inch ball onto the concrete. It didn't break. Instead, it bounced high enough to clear the carport roof and vanish into a nearby swamp, narrowly missing a very confused egret. Calusa pottery was notorious for not behaving like a Spalding handball.
  By week three, a rumor started that the balls were actually fossilized dinosaur eggs from a highly specific, albino reptile species. This brought out a guy named "Three Finger Jim," who tried to hatch one of the one and a half-inch balls by keeping it under a heat lamp in his living room for a month. He eventually gave up when the only thing that hatched was a massive electricity bill.
  The peak of the madness arrived when a local reporter ran a front-page story headlined: THE WHITE ORBS OF HOMOSASSA: PIRATE TREASURE OR SOVIET SPIES? Suddenly, LeRoy had tourists parked on his lawn. People offered him twenty bucks just to hold a ball. One guy tried to eat a piece of a broken one, claiming it cured his arthritis. It didn't, but it did require an emergency trip to the dentist.
In reality, nobody knew. Were they industrial components from the old sugar mill? Leftover ballast from a Spanish galleon? A forgotten art project from an eccentric hermit?
  LeRoy didn't care anymore. The tourists were trampling his azaleas. One evening, after a long day of fielding questions about whether the balls hummed at night (they didn't), LeRoy gathered up all the remaining white spheres, packed them into a burlap sack, and walked down to the city dock. With a mighty heave, he threw them straight into the river.
  To this day, if you dive deep enough into the Homosassa waters, you might see a flash of bright, unnatural white nestled in the limestone. And if anyone asks you what they are, just tell them the truth: they're LeRoy’s marbles, and the town is still looking for them.