14 DAY TRIAL // An unidentified flying object crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home and although one possible explanation has now been provided, no one knows how it got there. It's more the case of a "falling" object instead of a "flying" one, since the brick-sized hunk of metal was not exactly self-propelled.
The owners of the house were watching television when he heard a loud bang in the next room. When he entered the room, he saw a cloud of dust and a hole in the roof, made by a chunk of metal, 3 1/2 inches (8.9 cm) by 5 inches (12.7 cm), with two hexagonal holes in it.
So it was not exactly looking like a piece of an alien spacecraft, but it managed to frighten the owner and to leave NASA and Federal Aviation Administration officials scratching their heads. As Henry Kline, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said at the time, the object didn't look "very space-y [...] It's obviously made for something ... But we wouldn't know what to do with it."
The mystery was finally solved after many hypothesized that it could have been part of an airplane or from a construction site near the Bayonne house. A colleague in FAA spokesman Jim Peters' office concluded that it was part of a commercial woodchipper. It seems that the same part, but belonging to another woodchipper, had already caused confusion last year, so the fact that this new one was found was a real lucky break for officials.
Now, it seems that woodchippers in the US are not only reducing wood (generally tree limbs or trunks) into smaller parts, such as wood chips or sawdust, but they can also learn to fly. Or at least parts of them.
The flying woodchipper part was then taken into custody by the Bayonne Police, since "it belongs to somebody," as Police Director Mark Smith said.