14-Year-Old Boy Smote By Meteorite 435
eldavojohn writes "Winning the lottery requires incredible luck and one in a million odds. So does getting hit by a falling space rock. A 14-year-old German boy was granted a three-inch scar by the gods. A pea-sized meteorite smote young Gerrit Blank's hand before leaving a foot-sized crater on the road. The boy's account: 'At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand. Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder. The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards. When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road.' Curiously, the rock was magnetic, and tests were done to verify it is extraterrestrial. The Telegraph notes the only other recorded event of a meteorite striking a person was 'in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized fragment crashed through the roof of a house, bounced off furniture and landed on a sleeping woman.' Space.com lists a few more anomalies and we discussed the probability of these things downing aircraft recently."
quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, there was a 99.9999% of it killing him!
Seriously, surely the odds of being struck are much smaller than one in a million? Isn't it closer to one in a few billion, since there's a population of 6 billion and only 2 occurrences?
I wonder (Score:2, Interesting)
how many people consider asteroids a real threat to humankind? Granted, two human occurrences of extraterrestrial pebbles are not cause for concern but, what about when the pebble turns out to be a 200m rock?
It won't be Aphophis, most likely, but it will happen one day.
I'm calling BS on this one. (Score:3, Interesting)
So let me get this straight: a meteor strikes a boy's hand, bounces off, and then impacts the ground with enough force to make a 1 ft crater in the ground, and a noise loud enough to leave his ears ringing for hours.
Somehow, I think any object with enough kinetic energy to do that kind of damage to the road would have completely obliterated a soft, fleshy hand, or at least blown clear through it. But just leaving a 3 inch scar and bouncing off, yet packing enough force to knock him to the ground? No way. Not unless this kid is Iron Man.