Three UFOs allegedly fell from the sky on Friday morning, residents of villages in the Heilongjiang province of China reported.
According to the China News Service, "the circular, metallic objects crashed to the ground of two counties after 'villagers heard...a huge piercing sound, and then some villagers saw a big fireball' that eventually fell in a vegetable garden owned by one of the residents," Huffington Post reported.
"I saw a huge ball of fire, I thought it was a meteorite," one villager said, Chinatopix.com reported. "I hid inside my house and waited until the object...landed."
The ball-shaped objects were described to be silver-gray and "surrounded by jagged edges and burn marks," China News reported.
The object pictured in this story is reported to be "about 2-and-a-half-feet wide and weighing nearly 90 pounds," according to OpenMinds.TV.
As speculations about the foreign object began to arise, investigators arrived on the scene of the vegetable garden to examine the wreckage.
"Altogether, eight of these unidentified objects fell in the city of Qiqihar. State-run media outlets reported that one of the balls was a little over 2 feet in diameter and weighed about 90 pounds," Huffington post reported.
Shortly after a Russian Proton-M rocket, carrying a communications satellite, launched Friday morning, it experienced engine failure and began to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
The Chinese village residents witnessed unidentified flying objects in the sky above them following the incident, according to Ecns.cn, the official English-language website of China News Service.
Although Russia maintained that their rocket mostly disintegrated above Earth, China media claimed that some unburned portions of the rocket accounts for those objects that crashed in the ground.
The head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (commonly called Roscosmos), Oleg Ostapenko, told RIA Novosti, "Reports have been confirmed that the carrier rocket, the booster and the satellite completely burned up in the atmosphere. This happened over Chinese territory. Taking into consideration the altitude of the orbit, we can definitely say that nothing reached Earth."
