An Arizona family called police after discovering that a lump of marijuana pierced the roof of their garage in the middle of the night and landed in an empty dog cage.
Nogales police say the marijuana was dropped by an ultralight aircraft because drug packages are known to be launched by small planes. But the police suspect that this case would be a pilot error because the packages, when discovered by the police, are usually thrown on the outskirts of the city or in the desert.
“They don’t normally land in houses,” Detective Robert Ferros told CNN.
The 30-pound package, wrapped in brown and black tape, “was actually light” compared to other drug packages intercepted by police, Ferros said.
“We have seen marijuana packages loaded by ultralight aircraft with more than several hundred or thousands of pounds,” he said.
Last year, he said, police followed an ultralight who dropped several hundred pounds of marijuana into an iron basket with eight lumps inside.
Smugglers sometimes use catapults to launch drug packages over the border with Mexico, he said.
Nogales is on the United States border with Mexico, and the house where the drug package fell is about 300 meters from Mexico.
The owners of the house told police that they heard a loud noise just after midnight on September 8 but thought it was thunder. The dogs barked a lot, but the family did not review what was happening.
They found the package the next morning, right above the plastic cage and under a hole in the roof of the garage.
Police say marijuana has a street value of around $ 10,000.