Direct hit

A young boy survived a direct hit by a meteorite that was travelling at nearly 50,000 kilometers per hour. Fourteen-year-old Gerrit Blank was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that left him in severe pain and with a three-inch scar. The meteorite bounced off his hand and left a foot-wide smouldering crater in the tarmac. Gerrit was on his way to school when he spotted the fireball hurtling towards him out of the sky. Gerrit, from Essen in Germany said: “I sudd enly felt a pain in my hand. A split second later there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder. When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road.”

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