Man steals 42,000 golf balls from his local driving range

A 27-year-old man has baffled authorities after stealing $25,000 worth of golf balls.

Nathan Brown of Maryland Heights, Missouri, admitted stealing the balls in three grand heists carried out over the last year.

According to KDSK news, Brown snuck down to his local driving range by cover of night and stole an astonishing 42,000 golf balls - and nobody has any idea what he's done with them.

His first theft came in November of last year, but he struck again in August and then again in October - and while Brown admitted the theft as soon as police tracked him down (thanks to a tip-off) he has so far refused to say what he's done with them.

Some 2,000 of the balls have been recovered. The whereabouts of the remainder is a total mystery.

Now, it could be that he's simply the world's worst hacker. But if so, then assuming that he plays twice a week he's losing roughly 400 balls per round. That's more than 20 every hole - pretty unlikely.

And apart from anything else, range golf balls tend to be cheap, low-compression balls that travel far less than the full distance of normal balls (all those 250-yard signs you see at your local range are adjusted accordingly to keep the illusion going).

As for selling the balls to another range? That's almost impossible, since the driving range hit by the theft had actually thought of exactly that.

"We pay extra to have logos put on a golf ball and we get a different logo every year so that we can know which year these golf balls came from," range owner Carol Boggs told Fox News, admitting that she was totally baffled by the crime.

"That almost put us out of business because you need golf balls to operate,” Carol added.

“We couldn’t imagine that anybody could come in here and pick up that many golf balls without somebody recognizing that there’s somebody out there picking golf balls."