'Aliens' Attacking Bosnian Man with Meteorites

Five meteorites have fallen on Radivoje Lajic's house in the past six months. There is only one possible conclusion. Lajic says:

"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."

Belgrade University scientists have confirmed that all of the rocks presented to them by Lajic are meteorites.

The first meteorite smashed into his house last November. Since that time, four more have hit his home.

Lajic has since installed a steel-girder reinforced roof on his home in Gornja Lamovite.

"I am being targeted by aliens. They are playing games with me. I don't know why they are doing this."

Although this story is somewhat hard to believe (it would be helpful to see the meteors in situ, having blown through the house, for example), it is as good a reason as any to discuss orbital kinetic energy weapons.

The first time I read about kinetic energy weapons in orbit was in a science fiction novel; Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote about it in Footfall, their 1985 novel.

"You take a big iron bar. Give it a rudimentary sensor, and a steerable vane for guidance. Put bundles of them in orbit. To use it, call it down from orbit, aimed at the area you're working on..."
(Read more about flying crowbars)

Jerry Pournelle described a weapons system like this in a paper twenty years earlier; it gets its "punch" from kinetic energy alone:

"Thor will impact a target area at about 12,000 feet per second; that is sufficient kinetic energy to destroy most hard targets, with minimum collateral damage and of course no fall-out. Achievable accuracy has been estimated at ten to twenty feet CEP (circular error of probability)."

SF writer Greg Bear made use of a similar technology in his 2007 novel Quantico:

"Lancets - essentially guided steel telephone poles tipped with a chemical warhead. They're designed to fall from low Earth orbit and punch a hole in the ground..."
(Read more about Bear's orbital weapon lancet)

Via Ananova; see also JerryPournelle.com.

(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission of Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction)

• Video Player: The Asteroid Paradox
• Video Player: Take One Asteroid - A Recipe for Space Civilization
• VIDEO: Bootprints on Asteroids