Last week, the Sheriff’s Office in Stevens County, Minnesota made a startling Facebook post.

“On October 14, 2026, at approximately 3:30pm, the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call of foreign debris that was found in a cornfield in Scott Township,” it wrote. “Upon responding, deputies confirmed that a large, metallic object, approximately 11-feet in diameter, presumably a space object, was present in the cornfield. The Sheriff’s Office is working closely with several state and federal agencies to identify and notify the owner of the debris and to plan for removal from the field.”

The post, which included a photo of a banged-up metal object surrounded by yellowed stalks of corn, quickly started picking up traction on social media due to the implication that the object had come from space.

Now, Ars Technica has the receipts: the object was almost certainly chunk of a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket that launched from the Gobi Desert, deployed 10 satellites, and then headed back Earthward, where it was spotted burning up in the skies over Kansas and Minnesota.

As launches get more common and rockets get larger and sturdier — the model built by LandSpace, which deposited the debris in the cornfield, is a workhorse spacecraft meant to ferry cargo to Earth’s orbit — the chances of their detritus surviving the journey back to the ground increases.

These chunks of spacefaring equipment can sometimes crash down in populated areas. In 2024, a NASA component from the International Space Station withstood reentry and crashed through a home in Florida where a family was sleeping. Space wreckage has previously been discovered previously on farms in Canada and Australia.

Nobody has yet been injured by a piece of falling space debris, but as commercial ambitions for Earth’s orbit increase — the Chinese rocket had been launched to deploy satellites for a connectivity constellation meant to rival SpaceX’s Starlink — it’s probably only a matter of time.

More on space debris: Space Junk Now Almost Constantly Crashing Down to Earth

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Donald Trump’s Twitter clone, Truth Social, is in serious trouble.

The company has weathered bad news before, hitting all-time low stock prices on multiple occasions over the past year. But those days now look balmy in comparison, with the social network’s shares sliding more than 7.5 percent on Monday alone and setting a new rock bottom of just $6.40. Zooming out doesn’t paint a prettier picture, either: over the past month, the company’s stock has fallen a stomach-churning 29 percent.

It’s easy to empathize with any investors looking to ditch the company. It never had much of a raison d’être beyond “funnel some money to Trump,” and the president’s declining political fortunes — not to mention looming midterms that are likely to undermine his remaining power — have weakened even that grift-era pitch.

As the Daily Beast reported last week, not even its users are sticking around, with analytics data suggesting that its daily traffic has cratered by more than 30 percent over the past year. For a company that was already posting huge losses every quarter, that’s grim news — and it sounds like the company’s remaining investors may now be seeing the writing on the wall.

As its fortunes have soured, Truth Social has tried a series of eyebrow-raising pivots into gambling and crypto that failed to gain traction. It also moved to merge with a nuclear fusion company and started selling early access to Trump’s messages on the platform, in a move that was widely derided as an attempt to profit off his position as president.

So far, none of those moves have showed any signs of turning around the company’s fortunes. Add it all up, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Truth Social will survive as long as Trump’s second administration.

More on Truth Social: Trump’s Failing Truth Social Was Doing Much Better Under Biden

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