A dog digging in her owner’s backyard unearthed an object much rarer than a bone.
Homeowner Mathew Sims said his pup, Baby, was playing in his backyard in Jacksonville, Florida, when she dug up a rusted object near the fence line, said police.
‘You couldn’t tell what it was until you started pulling it up,’ Sims told FOX 30.
‘Once I got it halfway out, I was like oh, I know what this is, let me gently put this backdown.’
It turned out to be an unexploded military bomb that was decades old.
‘OK is this live?’ recounted Sims, who had picked up the ordnance with his hands last Wednesday. ‘You panic, then you drop.’
Sims carefully lay the weapon where his dog found it and called authorities. He said it weighed about 10 pounds and was roughly one foot long.
The amount of decay on the weapon suggested that it had been underground for years, according to a police report.
A bomb squad was recorded arriving at the home on 15th Street E and evacuatingthe neighborhood. Sims said he was relieved that his dog discovered the bomb and that it was removed from his property.
Meanwhile a neighbor, Carla Smith, said the strange discovery did not worry her.
‘We just watched. I wasn’t scared because I’ve been around people who have found artifacts in the land,’ she told the news outlet.
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‘To me, it was interesting to watch. They did their thing and they were out of here in minutes.’
Baby found the antique bomb about two months after a man discovered what he believed was a rusty rocket in Bellevue, Washington state, which was actually an old Cold War nuclear missile.
And last year, a nine-year-old boy in Yarcombe, East Devon, uncovered an unexploded hand grenade in his garden. His mother called police, who removed the grenade and detonated in a field close by.
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