Item found on beach, thought to be rocket booster, disappears

Monday, February 28th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

(Corpus Christi-AP) -- You could call it a Tex-File. At the center of the mystery is a cone-shaped item that looked like it belonged to a spacecraft. It washed onto a Mustang Island beach last Friday.

The object's outer covering was made of a dense Styrofoam-like material. On the inside top end of the cone was the name "Aerospatiale Matra," a French aerospace company that developed the Exocet anti-ship missile and the Ariane Five commercial rocket.

Port Aransas Coast Guard officials could not identify it, and NASA was called in. NASA expert Nicholas Johnson says the object could have been a nose cone from an Ariane Five solid rocket booster.

But authorities may never know for sure, because the mystery object has now disappeared. Police believe two men loaded the object onto a trailer Saturday morning and hauled it away. They haven't been seen since.