Lottie Williams tells tale after being hit by space junk in 1997

A massive defunct NASA satellite is predicted to make a fiery plunge though Earth's atmosphere and crash land on Friday.

NASA says there is a 1-in-3,200 chance it will hit a person and if it does, it won't be the first time someone has been hit by falling space debris.

Early one morning in January of 1997, Lottie Williams was walking through a park with friends in Oklahoma when they saw a flaming ball shooting through the sky.

"We were stunned, in awe," she tells FoxNews.com, explaining she thought it was a shooting star.

About half an hour later she recalls feeling like she was tapped on her shoulder before hearing something hit the ground.

"The weight was comparable to an empty soda can," Williams tells FoxNews.com. "It looked like a piece of fabric except when you tap it, it sounded metallic."

"The timing and location were consistent with debris from the Delta second stage reentry from which debris was recovered several hundred miles away in Texas," reads the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies website.

CORD analyzed the piece and confirmed it to be part of the fuel tank of a Delta II rocket that launched a satellite in 1996.

Williams says she received a letter from the deputy secretary of defense apologizing for the incident.

This isn't the first time space junk has fallen uncontrolled from the sky.

Back in 1991 USSR's Salyut 7 space station reentered uncontrolled scattering much of its debris over a town about 400 kilometres from Buenos Aires. In 1979, the U.S.'s Skylab sprayed bits of debris over a town in southern Australia. No one was hit or hurt in either of these incidents.

Williams, said to be the only person ever hit by an object from space, just wants to dispel her incident as a hoax. She tells FoxNews.com, "I just want people to know this actually happened."

The piece expected to fall on Friday or possibly Saturday is called Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite and is the size of a bus. NASA predicts at least 26 large pieces will survive the scorching temperatures of Earth's atmosphere.

It could land anywhere between northern Canada and southern South America, but hopefully it lands over water.

(Screen capture of Lottie Williams courtesy of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies website)