The odd of being hit by a meteorite are, quite frankly and for lack of a non pun inducing term, astronomical. In fact there is only one known case in all of recorded history of a person actually being hit by a meteorite. This makes what is happening to one Bosnian gentleman so incredible, that it defies all reason and logic. Radivoje Lajic’s house in the village of Gornja Lamovite has been hit by meteorites no less than 5 times since last November. All of the rocks brought by Mr. Lajic to Belgrade University have been verified by experts as being meteorites. Adding to the strangeness of this already bizarre tale, the meteorites seem to only fall during heavy rains. Scientist from the university are investigating the area looking for any magnetic anomalies that could possibly attract the space rocks to the house. Mr. Lajic has a less Earthly explanation for the strikes, claiming that he is being attacked by extraterrestrials.

“I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate.” Lajic told reporters. He has since had his roof heavily reenforced.

There is obviously something going on in this Bosnian village, though I don’t know if anyone is on the right track looking for a cause. I would imagine that a magnetic field strong enough to repeatedly guide meteorites in to a specific location would have other tell-tale signs of its existence (watches malfunctioning, compasses not pointing true, etc) that are not being reported in this case (but I am not a scientist, so I may very well be wrong). However, I don’t think there is any real evidence to point to extraterrestrial involvement. The incredible statistical improbability of the strikes does not reliably point to anything other than some outside force influencing the meteorite’s travel. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of what that force may be, only that it exists. Hopefully further study can reveal its identity. For now all we can do is wildly speculate.

Man ‘targeted by aliens’ [via BoingBoing]

Technorati Tags: attack, Bosnia, extraterrestrial, meteorites, UFOs

The Seattle Post-Intellengencer is reporting that the FBI has a new lead in the 37 year old D.B. Cooper hijacking case that raises more questions than it answers. A south west Washington resident’s children found a parachute while playing in a rural field he had recently plowed. The FBI believes the parachute is possibly of the same type used by a passenger identifying himself as Dan Cooper during the hijacking of a 727 in 1971. After receiving $200,000 in ransom money and releasing the jet’s passengers, Cooper instructed the pilot to take off, eventually jumping from the jet’s rear stairway mid-flight, ransom in hand. The recent parachute discovery is within the area where Cooper would have landed. If found to belong to Cooper, this new parachute raises some new issues that add to the theory that Cooper was not killed during his escape as the FBI claim. In 1980 a young boy on a picnic with his family found $5,880 of the ransom money along the Columbia River. Experts agree that because of the money’s shallow depth that it could not have been placed on the shores of the Columbia River any earlier than 1974, three years after the hijacking. The lack of a body at the parachute discovery site and its distance from the spot where the ransom money was discovered makes the possibility that Cooper survived the jump quite plausible if the parachute can be linked to the ones given to him in 1971. I personally think that Cooper made the jump, escaping with the ransom and the cache of money found on the banks of the Columbia was a back-up stash placed by Cooper if he felt he needed to run from where ever he settled. While we may never know what happened to D.B., please feel free to share your own theories in the comments.

Possible D.B. Cooper Chute Investigated [via Phantoms and Monsters]
More about D.B. Cooper @ Wikipedia

Technorati Tags: crime, D.B. Cooper, hijacking, mystery, News

Last week it looked like Spirit, one of two remote controlled NASA rovers currently exploring Mars, might not make it out of its winter hibernation. The worst part of this robotic near death experience is that it had nothing to do with technical difficulties on the aging rover. Budget cuts at NASA were to blame. Fortunately, NASA rescinded the letter it sent last week mandating budget cuts that would have abandoned Spirit and greatly reduced Opportunity’s (Spirit’s sister rover) exploration of the red planet. Both rovers have long outlasted their intended lifespan of only a few months, sending back valuable scientific data for 4 years. Gimping the rover program at this point would have been an incredibly stupid move. Especially when considering the cost of sending another rover to Mars (one of the reasons for the budget cut) when you have two healthy robots already in place whose yearly operating budget is fractional in comparison. I would hope that NASA came to this conclusion on its own, but I feel that it is more likely that outcry over the incident from the scientific community and the general public caused NASA to reconsider giving Spirit its walking papers just yet. While the loss of an incredible scientific tool is nothing to scoff about, this incident puts a light on a much larger issue: How the US government allocates it’s citizen’s tax dollars.

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Technorati Tags: budget, conspiracy, Mars, NASA, News, politics, Space