London, July 26: A county cricket match in Britain had an unexpected visitor. A 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite hurtled down from the sky landing just inches away from the boundary ropes and hit one man on the chest.
The rock broke into two when it hit the ground in front of Jan Marszel, 51, and Richard Haynes, 52, senior members of the Sussex County Cricket Club (SCCC). The two were sitting near the boundary watching England cricket team players Luke Wright and Monty Panesar bat when they spotted the black, five-inch rock hurtling towards them.
"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 inside the boundary and split into two pieces," Marszel, an IT consultant, was quoted as saying by the Telegraph.
"One piece bounced up and hit me in the chest and the other ended up against the boundary board," he said.
The pair have kept the extraterrestrial pieces of rock for posterity and said they would be happy for experts to examine them.
"If it had come from the other direction we might have suspected someone had thrown it, but we saw it come in straight over the ground from quite a way out - it was definitely a meteorite," Haynes said.