A spectator at a cricket match had a close encounter of the painful kind, as he was hit by a chunk of a meteorite. 51-year-old Jan Marszel and 52-year-old Richard Hayneswere were standing on the boundary at a cricket match when they saw an object hurtling out of the sky. The meteorite, a few inches long and believed to be up to 4.5 billion years old, broke in two when it hit the ground in front of them close to the pitch.

Mr. Marszel, an IT consultant, remembers: “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. It came across at quite a speed – if it had hit me full on it could have been very interesting."  Mr. Haynes adds: “We were quietly supping our pints, both looked up at the same time and saw a black object coming towards us – we didn’t know what it was. 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.”

Marszel and Hayneswere have kept the extraterrestrial pieces of rock for posterity and say they would be happy to let experts examine them. Dr Matthew Genge, of Imperial College, London, a meteorite expert, says: “If this turns out to be a meteorite it’s very exciting and would be the first fall in the UK since 1992. ”Potentially it contains secrets as to the formation of our solar system."