MINNESOTA FARMER COMBINES HIS CORN AND FINDS AN 11-FOOT SCORCHED METAL DOME

A farmer in Scott Township, Minnesota was combining corn on October 14 when he ran into something that was not corn. Deputies got the call around 3:30 p.m. and confirmed a charred metal object roughly 11 feet in diameter, which the Stevens County Sheriff's Office officially described as "presumably a space object." That is the whole statement. Presumably. The timeline is the good part. The farmer figures the thing had been lying there about six weeks, based on the corn growing underneath it. An 11-foot piece of burnt spacecraft sat in a Minnesota field for a month and a half and nobody noticed, because it's a cornfield and nobody walks around in there until harvest. It has serial numbers on it, so somebody out there knows exactly what it is. Sheriff Jason Dingman says he can't name which federal agencies responded because it's an open investigation, which is cop for "they didn't tell me either." The leading theory from people who track this stuff is a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket that launched September 15 and sent its upper stage back through the atmosphere over Kansas and Minnesota. The diameter lines up. Nothing has been officially confirmed, and until it is, western Minnesota gets to keep a flying saucer in the evidence pile.

Why you should give a shit: A rocket part the width of a minivan fell out of the sky and sat unnoticed for six weeks, which means America's early warning system for orbital debris is one guy on a combine.