Somebody up there … is throwing rocks at me?

I have always been profoundly aware of how tenuous our continued existence on this planet is, and how abruptly it could be called off, ever since I came across a photo in a children’s magazine — possibly National Geographic World — of a girl standing next to a dent in the ground where a teeny, tiny meteorite had just missed her. So I have a special interest in stories like this one, which appeared in the Daily Mail today:

A Bosnian man whose home has been hit an incredible five times by meteorites believes he is being targeted by aliens.

Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the rocks Radivoje Lajic has handed over were meteorites.

They are now investigating local magnetic fields to try and work out what makes the property so attractive to the heavenly bodies.

But Mr Lajic, who has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house he owns in the northern village of Gornja Lamovite, has an alternative explanation.

He said: “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.” . . .

For some reason this is reminding me of the brouhaha over the upcoming film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and the question of whether the evolution of life on Earth can be “best” explained by an “intelligent designer” rather than random chance, as well as the corollary question of whether this intelligent designer might be an alien rather than God. Certainly, in an earlier era at least, Lajic might have been inclined to assume that he had “annoyed” someone other than extra-terrestrials.

Two other stories of meteorite near-misses come to mind, both of them from four years ago. This one concerns a “grapefruit-sized black space rock” that “crashed through the living-room ceiling” of a home in New Zealand and “plunged on to a leather sofa . . . before bouncing back up to the ceiling and rolling under a computer table.” And this one concerns an elderly British woman who may have got “a one-inch gash along her forearm” from “a walnut-shaped metallic rock”. No doubt there are others, too.