How ‘space balls’ launched a sleepy Queensland beach town into the global spotlight at warp speed

When pieces of mysterious space debris washed up on the beach at her sleepy coastal community in north Queensland, Lisa Scobie’s first thoughts were about making sure everyone was safe.

But days later the local takeaway shop owner had settled on another reaction to what had become international news.

“We created a special menu item, the Space Junk Snackbox, and we advertised that with an alien, who was my husband, just as a bit of a laugh,” she says.

“We actually said that we had the space junk at the front of the shop and put an AI picture up on the front and shared that, waiting for everyone to come and clean it up!”

She says the obviously fake image shared on their Facebook page even convinced a few people, much to her surprise, that some of the “space balls” were in the centre of town in Forrest Beach.

In this small town, about 90 minutes north of Townsville, the arrival of the space junk was all anyone was talking about.

Forrest Beach normally boasts a population of 1,364, except in winter, when the population swells to about 2,000 as people from the south flee the cold to their holiday homes.

There are 20 students and three teachers at the local primary school, a single row of shops, a fire station, surf life saving club and a hotel. To go to a hospital, police station or chain supermarket, you have to go to Ingham, 20km away.

It’s the sort of place where everyone knows everyone, Scobie says.

“We’re a sleepy little place, somewhere where your kids can go fishing before school,” she says.

“The same as what we used to do when we were growing up here 30 or 40 years ago”.

But when six basketball-size metal balls were discovered by a local couple walking early in the morning, Forrest Beach became the centre of the universe.

“The people that actually found the objects on the beach contacted me because that’s what people here do at Forrest Beach, and they were asking who they should ring,” Scobie says.

The “space balls” were unmarked, so there was no phone number identifying who to contact to collect them for the couple to call. It wasn’t clear if they were dangerous, or what they were; the closest the couple, who are relatively new to town, had to a local reporting service was their local real estate agent.

Scobie leapt into action.

“My husband was tied up at work, so I rang my dad and he was the one that took the police down to the space balls,” she says.

Part of the beach was quickly roped off, in case of explosion. A platoon of emergency services leapt into action, everyone from the bomb squad to the Australian Space Agency.

Meanwhile, there was a media frenzy.

Scobie took calls from the New York Times, ABC and others, with coverage in the BBC and newspapers across the world.

“Everyone wants to know what are they, that’s the big question still that we really don’t have any definitive answers to,” she says.

“But also making sure that the people that did find it, they haven’t reported any ill effects, and they’re still alive and kicking.”

The space agency said this week that the six balls “appear to be pressure vessels from a space launch vehicle”.

Alice Gorman, an associate professor at Flinders University and a space junk expert, told the Guardian that they are likely titanium alloy balls used to store rocket fuel before being fed into the rocket engines.

All six have been recovered and removed from Forrest Beach. Authorities will now likely offer to return them to sender, Gorman said.

That’s a small source of regret for Scobie. If it were safe, she would have liked to keep one of the balls in her shop as a memento.

She says being at the centre of international headlines was more than just an opportunity to add a new meal to the menu.

“We have one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Our little town is virtually unknown, but it should be known by everyone because it is a magic place, and we’ve been able to share a little glimpse of that,” she says.

“You know, what a way to put yourself on the map!”