A homeowner has been issued with a warning after they found what appeared to be a cannonball and were later told it could explode.
People find all sorts of weird things every day, but one lucky, or unlucky depending on how you see it, person picked up what they thought could be a cannonball.
Posting their find on Reddit, the person was quickly inundated with comments as more than five thousand people chipped in to discuss what it might be.
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Plenty of people had their own theories as to what the object could be, with someone suggesting it might be part of mining equipment, specifically rock crushing machines which uses the balls to smash up large rocks into much smaller ones.
Others joked it was either a shot-put or that the homeowner's yard was infested with 'invisible pirates'.
However, when the original poster said they'd found the metal ball in a hay field well away from any mining sites, one user sent them a dire warning that they could be putting their life in danger.
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They said the object seemed very much like a cannonball and said it could still be live despite laying dormant for a long period of time.
The person identified themselves as a former archaeologist with experience covering the American Civil War, and noted that people had been killed by exploding cannonballs 150 years after they had first been fired.
Perhaps luckily for the person who made this find, the ball didn't appear to have any sort of hole in which one might stick a fuse, with the archaeologist suggesting it might mean the cannonball was just a solid shot.
If that's the case then there's no gunpowder in the middle of the spherical lump of metal and therefore no danger of an explosion.
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With the risk of danger hopefully null, people got back to making jokes about what the ball might be and where it could have come from.
Someone joked that since it was a ball you could load and fire from a cannon, that made it a cannonball whatever it might have been before.
Yet more wanted to know more about the dog that appeared in the picture along with the ball, and whether the homeowner's canine companion had been able to play with the ball.
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As it turns out, the ball was much too heavy to play with for the dog as the original poster explained they'd tried rolling it over for a bit of a play without much success.
A more serious commenter pointed out that it might be a 'gate weight', saying they'd seen something just like it before.
Whatever it is, keep your fingers crossed that it won't suddenly explode.
Joe Harker