It's a bird, it's a plane ...

What a bummer! To learn that the meteorite that fell through the roof of your house is really just, well, space junk. The world learned last week that the rock-like item 2 1/2 inches by 1 1/2 inches and weighing about 13 ounces that crashed into Srinivasan Nageswaran's home in Freehold Township Jan. 2 was just one of the millions of man-made items floating in space.

The truth was revealed after putting the rock under a new electron microscope at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (And you thought the museum was just a collection of stuff!) The key discovery: The item had chromium, a component of stainless steel. A meteorite would have been nickel and iron.

The homeowner took the news in stride. "That's the nature of science,'' Nageswaran said. "It's still the world's most popular metallic object that fell from the sky,'' he added. But the report does have a down side: its value. As a meteorite, it would have been worth several thousands, a Rutgers scientist said. As space junk, the value falls to zero. What would you expect from a UFO?