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Mystery object crashes through the roof

— PHOTO: AP

ORIGIN UNKNOWN: The metallic, rock-like object, about the size of a golf ball, awaits analysis.

FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP: A mysterious metallic object has crashed through the roof of a house in the eastern U.S. State of New Jersey.

Nobody was injured when the golf-ball sized object struck the home and embedded itself in a wall on Tuesday night. Officials sent to the scene said it was not from an aircraft. The rough-surfaced object has a metallic glint.

"There's some great interest in what we have here," said a police officer. "It's rather unusual. I haven't seen anything like it in my career." He said he hoped to have the object identified within 72 hours.

(According to the New York Times News Service, the object was dense with a rough metallic surface. The oblong object was only about two inches long and would fit into the palm of a hand, but weighed almost a pound. A police officer used the term Quadrantids with respect to the object. These have to do with meteor showers that peak in early January when the northern skies are cold and cloudy over the region. Said Gareth Williams, an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts: "Actually, you can see them around January 1 to 6. In a good year, there are 100 meteors an hour." Many meteorites fall to the earth every day, he said, most of them into the sea or the vast unpopulated parts of the earth. Once or twice a year, they hit a house or a car, he added.)

Approximately 20 to 50 rock-like objects fall every day over the planet, said Carlton Pryor, a Professor of astronomy at Rutgers University. "It's not all that uncommon to have rocks rain down from heaven," he said. "These are usually rocky or a mixture of rock and metal." He said laboratory tests would have to be conducted to determine if the object was a meteorite.

The object punched a hole in the roof of the single-family, two-story home, damaged tiles on a bathroom floor, and then bounced, sticking into a wall.

It was heavier than a usual metal object of its size. No radioactivity was detected.

A man who lives at the home found the object at about 9 p.m. after returning from work and hearing from his mother that something had crashed through the roof a few hours earlier.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which sent in investigators, did not know where the object came from. "It's definitely not an aircraft part," a spokeswoman said.

In the neighbourhood later in the day, residents chatted with one another in the streets about the fallen object.

Robert Nalven, 55, said nothing this exciting had happened in the six years he had lived in the affluent development. "I'm happy it didn't hit my house."

AP

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