Two cricket fans had a narrow escape when a meteorite crashed to earth next to them as they supped pints on the boundary last week. The 4.5 billion-year-old rock came hurtling out of the sky as Jan Marszel and Richard Haynes watched Sussex bat against Middlesex in a county game at Uxbridge.
It is thought to be the first meteor to land in Britain since 1992 and the stellar projectile could hardly have chosen a more incongruous landing site than the pastoral surroundings of an English cricket ground.
Marszel and Haynes were watching Monty Panesar and Luke Wright bat for Sussex on Wednesday when they saw the object. They could have been forgiven for thinking it was a cricket ball, but in fact it turned out to be a rock from outer space, which ploughed into the turf in front of them.
Marszel, 51, said: "We were sitting at the boundary edge when all of a sudden, out of a blue sky, we saw this small dark object hurtling towards us. It landed five yards inside the boundary and split into two pieces.
"One piece bounced up and hit me in the chest and the other ended up against the boundary board. It came across at quite a speed – if it had hit me full on it could have been very interesting."
Haynes, who is retired, said he was in no doubt that the rock came from space. "If it had come from the other direction we might have suspected someone had thrown it," he told the Brighton Argus. "But we saw it come in straight over the ground from quite a way out – it was definitely a meteorite."
Dr Matthew Genge, a meteorite expert at Imperial College, London, said that if the rock was verified as a meteorite then it was "very exciting".
"Potentially it contains secrets as to the formation of our solar system," he explained.
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