Soyuz rocket fragment recovered after mass sighting across France in 1988

Summary

Around 12:50 AM on December 21, 1988, hundreds of witnesses along a north-south axis across France observed a bright white object with a yellow-orange trail crossing the sky at high speed in complete silence. At the end of its trajectory, the object broke into several fragments. The following day, a farmer south of Bourges found a seventy-centimeter piece of metal in his field. Analysis determined it was a nozzle fragment from a Russian Soyuz rocket launched on December 16, 1988, from Plesetsk to orbit the COSMOS 1984 satellite — an optical reconnaissance satellite of the Yantar 4K2 series that returned to Earth on February 13, 1989.