Biologist Counting Turtles Finds These Instead

Florida, a place that has long had a reputation for strange goings-on, can add a tale of smugglers, sea turtles, a million dollars in drugs, and Space Force to its collection. A few weeks ago, Angy Chambers, a wildlife manager surveying sea turtle nests near Cape Canaveral found something besides a turtle nest: A bale of something white wrapped in tape and plastic. And then she counted more than a dozen more. She called the Space Force station there, the Guardian reports. In all, there were 24 packages of, yes, cocaine, according to the Brevard County Sheriffs Office.

Lt. Col. Timothy McCarty said it was “the biggest one that we’ve ever had at Patrick Space Force Base in the entire recorded history,” News Channel 8 in Tampa reports. And that’s probably true, as Space Force was only founded in December 2019. Authorities speculated that the bales of cocaine were dumped off a smuggler’s boat, which is a fairly common thing in that area. They estimate the drugs could have sold for $1.2 million. (More Space Force stories.)