One landed only 50 yards from a farmhouse in Georgetown. Like the South African debris, they were thought to have come from a US Delta II rocket. The world champion at inflicting space debris on its own citizens was the USSR, which rained rocket boosters on its necessarily uncomplaining people from the launch site of its Baikonour cosmodrome in what is now the independent country of Kazakhstan. Near another launch site, Plesetsk in the north-west, falling rocket parts are so common that people have used them to repair country cottages or build sledges. For governments and the space industry, however, the issue of the steadily increasing amount of space junk in orbit is more pressing than the amount that falls to earth.
Talk is increasingly of obliging satellite operators to build safe disposal into their programmes.
For Steve and Verona Gutowski, who owned the Texas farmhouse near where one of the 1997 Delta rocket parts fell, the impact was eerily reminiscent of countless extraterrestrial arrivals, from War of the Worlds onwards. It was so hot that the soil around it was baked hard. Sure enough, it wasn't long before the UFO enthusiasts began to flood in. If it ever turns out that the UFOs have been buzzing us all this time, perhaps their banal message is nothing to do with invasion or offers of ancient extraplanetary wisdom.