Continuing Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa Experiment

According to history, Italian Scientist Galileo having dropped two objects of differing sizes and weights found that the heavier ball hit the ground first, but only by a little bit. Except for a small difference caused by air resistance, both balls reached nearly the same speed. And that surprised him. It forced him to abandon Aristotelian ideas about motion. Galileo discovered through his experiment that the objects fall with the same acceleration, proving his prediction true, while at the same time disproving Aristotle's theory of gravity (which states that objects fall at speed proportional to their mass). Because Galileo died, he never finished his work, I became part of a human endeavor to continue these experiments. I managed to conduct a few science experiments serving in engineering spaces at sea in my time. After having properly set the initial conditions for the experiment, I postulated that anyone: - either standing on a machinery room platform that was suspended over any inaccessible area of engine room bilge or machinery room foundation, or transiting between same, - who was handling a small metallic object, such as a nut or a writing pen, - would suddenly lose their grip on that object at the precise moment they reached apogee. Defining the apogee as the highest distance between the object and the bilge. The experiment showed that the descent of this object would occur in such a manner to avoid a straight path: - taking at least 4 ninety-degree turns during the descent, and - finally coming to rest in a location of the where no light was shining or - where water in the bilge was at its deepest. The object would not be located until: - you had spent countless hours looking for it everywhere else, - had missed an entire meal, or - had given up all hope for its recovery, or - managed to acquire a suitable replacement. While I served in the Navy, it was proven to my satisfaction that this experiment was repeatable. My understanding is that experiment had been continued by countless others.