Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw “ball of light” heading straight towards him from the sky. A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.

The teenager survived the strike, the chances of which are just 1 in a million – but with a nasty three-inch long scar on his hand.

He said: “At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand. “Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder. The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards. When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road,” he explained.

Scientists are now studying the pea-sized meteorite which crashed to Earth in Essen, Germany.

This article mentions other close encounters of the outerspace rocky kind. The kind that brought life here to Earth?