Fourteen years later, the US space agency NASA showed pictures taken in the Utah desert for a circular object that fell from the sky and crashed on the ground. NASA shared the photos by posting them on its site on Sunday in the "Today's Space" picture.
The images showed what was believed to be a strange cylindrical object that fell from space, but the agency made clear it was an "airplane plate".
The plane crashed on the ground in 2004, Wangers said, half of it in the sands of a remote and uninhabited area of Utah.
The plane was a capsule sample from the Genesis probe, which was launched into space in 2001 to obtain a sample of solar wind, NASA said.
"The spacecraft (Genesys) from space crashed on the ground in the Utah desert after it was tracked down by radar, followed by helicopters and confirmed there were no space creatures in it," NASA said on its website.
She explained that the plane's plate fell near the Granite Pick in the training and testing area of Utah.
Genissys orbited the sun and collected particles from the solar wind, which normally move away from the earth by the Earth's magnetic field.
Despite the plane's crash, many of the samples it collected were analyzed, NASA reported.
Some discoveries have been made, including new details about the structure of the sun and the abundance of different elements in the solar system, she said. She also provided details on how the sun and planets formed billions of years ago.
NASA said the probe, Genesys, had crashed as a result of design errors, as the parachute failed to take off and flew toward Earth at 186 mph.
