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source: Teenager survives meteor hitTeenager survives meteor hit
Matthew Benns
June 14, 2009
A 14-YEAR-OLD boy has survived being struck by a red-hot meteorite the size of a pea as he walked to school.
Gerrit Blank saw a "ball of light" hurtling towards him from the sky in his home town of Essen, Germany.
The tiny meteorite (pictured) hit his hand, causing a seven-centimetre-long gash, before bouncing off and causing a 30-centimetre-wide crater in the ground.
"At first I just saw a large ball of light and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand," he told Britain's Daily Telegraph. "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."
Scientists are studying the small piece of rock. Chemical tests have already proved it came from space.
The only other time a person survived a meteor strike was in 1954 in the US state of Alabama when a tennis-ball-sized chunk of rock crashed through the roof of a house and landed on a sleeping woman.
wow, what are the odds?