Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Norway Man Recovers $100,000 Space Rock Which Narrowly Misses his Home.

A meteorite weighing around two kilos landed right in the yard outside Bj?rn Herigstad's home in coastal J?ren, western meteoritt_jpg_424427h.jpgNorway, over the weekend. It's the second meteorite-landing in Norway in a month, and experts are calling the incident sensational. Bj?rn Herigstad says he found the meteorite just outside his house at Orre, in the J?ren district just south of Stavanger in Rogaland County. When he went outside Sunday morning, he found a crater on his property, about 25 centimeters deep.

"I couldn't understand why there was such a hole and just started filling it in," Herigstad told local newspaper J?rbladet.

But then he found an unusual stone a few meters from the crater. "It's the oddest stone I've ever seen," he said.

Herigstad said he took it into his kitchen and washed it off, then weighed it. "You could see that it had melted and that it's burned on one side," he said. "What if it had hit our house? It would have gone right through the roof. I wonder whether our insurance would have covered it." ... Herigstad, meanwhile, isn't sure what he?ll do with the meteorite, which could be a valuable sales object. A quick check on the Internet revealed prices as high as NOK 700,000 (more than USD 100,000).

"We had just been wondering whether a cabin we're building is getting too expense, and then this falls out of the sky," he said with a laugh.

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