The Day a Soviet Nuclear Satellite Crashed into the Canadian North

By Whit Fraser – The Walrus

Early one morning, on January 24, 1978, Marie Ruman was giving the new CBC building at the south end of Yellowknife a very thorough cleaning. We had moved into the new space a few months before. Everybody loved the sweep of the huge windows on the second floor, spanning ninety degrees from the southwest to the northeast.

Ruman would have been looking south when a fiery, orange ball, with a long blazing tail, came out of the morning sky on her right, westerly, and streaked across on a very low and descending pitch. She couldn’t hear it, and in about a minute, it disappeared in the northeast. She was sure it must have crashed just beyond Yellowknife, likely in Great Slave Lake.