Chad Tombyll, the owner and proprietor of the injection molding facility, came out to talk the deal over with Bozzy Willis. But when they met, the man with the strange name looked familiar.

One day, almost a decade ago, a middle-aged man and woman walked into Tombyll Plastics in San Bernardino, California. The man introduced himself to the floor manager as Bozzy Willis. He turned to the fake testicles hanging on the wall.

For those who don't know Truck Nuts are fake testicles that hang down from the back bumper of a truck, usually from the hitch. They are popular in what some would consider "redneck" culture. Driving through Alberta, Texas, or Florida you are bound to see a pair of knackers flopping from the back of a jacked up half-ton cruising down a highway.

Sure, the concept is perhaps a little rough around the edges—some might even say immature—but to the two men in question, those swaying plastic nutsacks were their livelihood.

In one corner stood David Ham, the fiery owner of YourNutz.com and in the other, John D. Saller, the intense founder of BullsBalls.com . There's also a third player in the Truck Nuts game, Wilson Kemp, an 81-year-old retired high school administrator. By all accounts he's a nice man who keeps to himself. In the great Truck Nuts war, he was Switzerland.

Like any good war, this one started with two charismatic leaders. Two leaders who could not stand the sight of one another. Two leaders who both claim to have invented Truck Nuts.

These were some of the first shots fired in a great war that lasted almost a decade. A war of great importance. One that you are undoubtedly just learning about now.

When I recently asked David Ham about this story, he just angrily chuckled and asked me a question.

Bozzy looked at Tombyll and panicked. He was then promptly escorted out of the building.

"Do people call you by another name, Bozzy? Do they also call you... David Ham?"

In 2012, a man was pulled over in South Carolina and ticketed for his balls. The Deputies' Report had a section that read, "The vehicle was displaying an obscene object from the rear bumper. The object was a pair of large fleshy testicles." The simple fact that people were attempting to emasculate these trucks almost certainly increased their popularity.

Ironically, the people who were the most offended by the product may have played one of the biggest roles in their success. Before the boom of Truck Nuts, lawmakers in several states tried to make them illegal by deeming them "obscene." In 2008, Florida attempted to ban the sacks and soon, politicians in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina jumped on Truck Nuts proverbial jock. A few states even went as far as ticketing people and in 2011, a woman in Virginia was fined $445 for having a pair of hang-downs swinging from her truck.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the product hit a tipping point and Truck Nuts exploded. Seemingly overnight, the product went from being an occasional accessory to a massively successful novelty. As time went on, Truck Nuts popularity just kept growing. The product was featured on several television shows and the term seemed to enter our public vernacular. Now you can even get a set of nuts for your bicycle .

Truck Nuts were created as a marketable commodity in the late 1990s. For a long time, the plastic gonads were just a small niche market. Only the most fashionable drivers of kitted-out 4x4s would have sacks a swayin' from the back of their lifted trucks.

"He approached me as a professional. I was in the manufacturing business at the time, and he approached me in a way not to offend me because he didn't know if I was going to be receptive of the idea," Tombyll told VICE recently. "So he just spent more time trying to describe it tactfully and it took me a long time to know what he was talking about.

Saller was inspired by the women, and brought the idea to Chad Tombyll, a man who works with injection-molded plastics.

"As far as I've been able to find out, there was a woman in northern Nevada who started selling them in the mid-'80s, but smaller, in a different look," Saller stated in an interview in 2008.

The story behind John Sallers' bid for a dangly bits empire is similar to Ham's, but not nearly as flashy. The company lore is that Saller, who passed away last year, allegedly was out 4x4ing with his buddies when someone yelled, "Go Ernie, show'em you got balls!" With that, Saller had an epiphany of a truck with a set of nards flopping around. How Saller realized this vision is actually much more monotonous.

David Ham (occasional alias Bozzy Willis) told VICE that he came up with the idea to create these "large fleshy testicles" after seeing a pair of custom nuts on the truck in front of him during a desert rally in the '80s, and then brought the idea to life in 1996. It was a struggle: at first, he couldn't find anyone to manufacture his faux nads. But in the tenth molding shop he found somebody willing to make them. Eventually, he started selling them online and was eventually taken aback by their success.

After all, is their a better way to stick it to the man than shoving a big ol' set of nuts in his face?

"He called me on the phone one day. He said, 'Your nuts don't look enough like bulls' balls.' I told him that he was the only person to ever tell me that, and then he got all indignant, and he says, 'I tell you what. I'm going to make my own Bulls Balls, and I'm going to bury you," said Ham.

Regardless of who was the initial inventor of these plastic gonads, neither took kindly to having direct competition. According to Ham, the two first came into contact in the very early 2000's when Saller called him wanting to sell some of the knackers.

Ham told me multiple times that he has documentation to prove that he was the original inventor, but when I asked him to show me proof he got angry.

Using domain registrations I was able to see that Saller's Bulls Balls website was founded in 1999, and Ham's in 2002. Ham attributes this to the fact that he had an AOL website up until this point which he stopped using in 2002. When I asked him for more details of the domain, he told me that "the [website] was taken down so long ago that you'll never find it." It is important to note that this is not a definitive measure of who invented the product, but simply who appears to have been online first.

Here is where this story begins to go off the rails. The two companies launched within a couple of years of each other, and both attempted to mark the truck nuts territory as their own.

"We were probably talking for an hour and a half before I realized he was talking about balls."

"I wished him the best and, sure enough, about six months later I get these balls in the mail that look like he went to a slaughterhouse and put a mold on a dead bull... And that's how Bulls Balls was born."

On the opposite side of the trenches, Saller and the people at Bulls Balls have a different narrative. There was no godfather-esque delivery of a coin sack to Ham's door. Tombyll said that he did hear from Saller of a phone call taking place, but in this story it was Ham calling Saller.

"David Ham had contacted J.D. saying he was the first on the internet and all this stuff, and he told him it wasn't true, so they developed some disagreements," said Tombyll.

For a few years the two allegedlyfought through emails and, at some points, angry phone calls. I asked Ham to show me some of the emails but again he wouldn't. Then in 2009, shit got real on the fake gonads front.

Ham started the website AlltheNutz.com; it was to be a place where he had a one-stop destination for all your fake ballsack needs. But to do that, he needed, obviously, all of the "nutz."

Ham's attempt to grab a handful of everyone's balls to sell on a website is where everything gets tricky.