Saudi Arabia.Saudi Arabia · King Faisal keeps a fallen metal sphere

In mid-October 1967, the US consulate in Dhahran, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, sent Washington airgram A-46 with a report by James Mandaville, an employee of the oil company ARAMCO, about an object that had fallen from the sky. It was, according to the report, "a spherical tank or pressure vessel about two feet in diameter with a one-inch threaded orifice in its surface" and two lines of stenciled letters and numbers. The author did not know what it was: it might be oil company equipment, a part from a high-altitude aircraft, or debris from a rocket or satellite. The object was left with the local emir, Bin Jiluwi, in Dammam.

In November, the State Department asked the embassy in Jidda (then the diplomatic seat, not Riyadh) to request the object from the Saudi authorities for analysis, because the letters and numbers suggested it came from a US space vehicle. That began a diplomatic tussle lasting more than a year. In June 1968, the Department gave the embassy its provisional identification: based on the lettering and the re-entry track, the object appeared to be a pressure bottle from the US object registered with the UN as 1967-70B, and it recalled that the General Assembly's 1963 Declaration of principles obliges a state that finds a space object to return it to the launching state.

On June 20, Ambassador Hermann Eilts passed on what Omar Saqqaf, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs since April 1968, who had discussed the matter with the king, told him that day: Faisal had taken an "unexpectedly adamant stand." The object was no longer in Dammam but in his office in Riyadh, the king held there was no evidence it was American, he was annoyed that ARAMCO had told Washington, and he intended to keep it. Eilts added that the object seemed to have "captivated" the king, who was very interested in space.

On October 29, 1968, the Department specified that, according to NASA, the fragment was very probably a pressure bottle from the launch vehicle of the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) satellite launched on July 19, 1967, and said a press kit on the satellite was being pouched in case the embassy needed it.

On November 19, at the end of an audience in Riyadh, Eilts raised the subject. He explained that the identification rested on the still-legible numbers on the object and joked that, unless the king was planning a space program of his own, the United States would like it back to run tests on it. According to the telegram, Faisal laughed, said he had no space plans and at first disclaimed knowledge of the object, until Prince Nawwaf and adviser Rashad Pharaon identified it as "that big round thing" in the office of the royal Diwan, the king's court.

The Saudis still doubted it was American. The king finally ordered it handed over after Prince Nawwaf verified the part numbers the ambassador had given him, and on January 8, 1969 the embassy reported that the 95-pound (about 43-kilogram) object was boxed up as commercial air freight, at a cost of about 190 dollars.

The satellite catalog of astronomer Jonathan McDowell confirms the identification. The satellite was Explorer 35 (AIMP-E), which was placed in lunar orbit; the designation 1967-070B belongs to the second stage of its Delta rocket, of some 777 kilograms, which stayed in Earth orbit and re-entered at about 12:15 UTC on August 31, 1967, with Saudi Arabia recorded as the place of fall (in a comment on the National Archives blog, McDowell gives about 12:20). The date fits a find reported in mid-October.

A metal object fell from the sky in Saudi Arabia without anyone seeing it fall, and the ARAMCO employee who reported it did not know what it was. Seen from the ground, the episode had everything that feeds a UFO story: an unexplained metal object, a king who refuses to hand it over, a superpower that insists on recovering it and more than a year of quiet negotiations.

The State Department telegrams, which the U.S. National Archives published in 2022, show what lay behind it: a pressure bottle from a Delta rocket, identified by its stenciled numbers, and a dispute over who owned the space junk. Washington knew the object was its own, said so in writing and claimed it in the name of a legal principle, the obligation to return space objects to the state that launched them. The June 1968 telegram says it plainly: there were "certain principles involved which we don't wish let fall by wayside." What Washington was defending was, above all, the precedent.

The case also shows how Saudi Arabia's relationship with space debris changed. In 1968 the king would not accept without proof that the object was American; in 2001, when a rocket stage from a GPS satellite fell in the country, it was the Saudi mission to the UN that notified the Secretary-General, and Ted Molczan's catalog of observed re-entries records other falls or visible re-entries over the country in 2014 and 2017.