You know I feel sorry for him and all but how cool....I mean if you gotta get knocked down....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31322855A 14-year-old German boy says he was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that scared the bejeezus out of him and left a scar.
"When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road," Gerrit Blank said in a newspaper account published Friday. Astronomers analyzed the object and concluded it was indeed a natural object from space, The Telegraph reported.
"It's a real meteorite," Ansgar Korte, director of the Walter Hohmann Observatory in Essen, Germany, was quoted as saying.
The report drew skepticism from experts on meteor falls: "It's absolute nonsense," Darryl Pitt, curator of the Macovich Collection of Meteorites, told msnbc.com. "It's theoretically impossible."
Pitt took issue with reports quoting Blank as saying that he saw a bright flash before he was struck, or that the meteorite sped through the atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Neither of those claimed observations match up with what's known about falling space rocks, Pitt said.
"Who knows what's going on in this young man's mind, but he's not telling the truth," he said.
Most meteors vaporize in the atmosphere, creating "shooting stars," and never reach the ground. The few that do are typically made mostly of metals. Stony space rocks, even if they are big as a car, will usually break apart or explode as they crash through the atmosphere.
There are a handful of reports of homes and cars being struck by meteorites, and many cases of space rocks streaking to the surface and being found later. But human strikes are rare. There are no known instances of humans being killed by space rocks.
and of course there has to be an ol wet blanket....
