The disc over Tarbaca

A construction worker’s phone catches a pale disc above a hillside. Watch the brief recording, follow the witness account and compare two very different readings of its motion.

World: Earth
Location: Costa Rica
Case date or period: 22 November 2007

A break in a working day

In La Teja’s interview, Marvin Badilla recalls seeing the object while working on a house in Tarbaca. He says it was silent and roughly the size of a tractor wheel, perhaps 75 metres away. Those are witness estimates, not distances recovered from the recording. He also describes turning to call a colleague, moving the phone as he did so.

What survives on screen

The published clip gives us a small pale shape, foreground vegetation and a changing camera view. It is short enough to watch repeatedly without losing the whole sequence. Start by describing where the visible outline changes; deciding what produced that outline is a separate step. The upload’s claim to be unedited is useful provenance information, but it does not replace access to the original phone file.

The case for a photographed object

Josep Guijarro’s 2024 reassessment discusses Serg Toporkov’s stabilisation and optical observations. He treats the image’s behaviour as consistent with an object filmed in the scene. This addresses one possible manipulation route; it cannot by itself distinguish a small physical model from a distant object. Guijarro also places the shape alongside older disc photographs, a resemblance rather than an identification.

The model hypothesis

In a separate Metabunk discussion, Mick West proposes a small suspended model and examines its tilt. Other contributors debate whether the motion requires that explanation. This is an interpretation of the available clip, not a recovered prop or a demonstrated reconstruction of Badilla’s recording. A useful test must account for the visible motion, camera movement and scene geometry together.

Where the uncertainty sits

A nearby small object and a larger distant object can occupy the same area of an image. This copy alone gives no independent range measurement. Keep a note of which observations would change your preferred explanation: another viewpoint, the original file, a measured camera position or a reproducible model test. Badilla’s private worksite is not given an invented map pin.