She saw a car-sized object above a Texas farm and found a wayward hunk of NASA equipment

When Ann Walter looked outside her rural home in West Texas, she didn’t know what to do with the massive object slowly drifting across the sky.

She was even more surprised when she saw what had actually landed in her neighbor’s wheat field: a boxy piece of scientific equipment the size of a sport utility vehicle, attached to a massive parachute and decorated with NASA stickers. She called the local sheriff’s office and learned that NASA was already searching for a missing piece of equipment.

“It’s crazy, because when you’re standing on the ground and you see something in the air, you don’t realize how big it is,” she said. “It was probably a 30-foot canopy. It was huge.”

Walter said she soon received a phone call from NASA’s Columbia Science Balloon Facility, which launches large, unmanned research balloons at high altitudes more than 20 miles into the atmosphere to conduct science experiments.

Officials at NASA, affected by the ongoing government shutdown, did not respond to messages Thursday. A message left with the balloon facility was also not immediately returned.

A launch schedule on the balloon facility’s website shows a series of launches from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) west of where the equipment landed.

Hale County Sheriff David Cochran confirmed that NASA officials contacted his office last week looking for the equipment.

Walter said she eventually spoke with someone at the balloon facility who told her it had been launched the day before from Fort Sumner, and uses telescopes to collect information about stars, galaxies and black holes.

“The searchers came out with a truck and a trailer that they used to pick her up,” she said.

But not before Walter and her family, who live in Edmonson, Texas, were able to snap some photos and videos.

“It’s surreal that this happened to us and that I was a part of it,” she said. “It was a very wonderful experience.”