HEAVENLY ROCK HITS PASTOR'S HOME.

Byline: Richard Stewart The Houston Chronicle

A heavenly visitor arrived at the home of the Rev. Howard Cameron, but it wasn't spiritual - it was a marble-sized rock from outer space that slammed through the roof.

As Cameron was shaving the morning of May 2, he felt more than heard the shock of what since has been dubbed the Beaumont Meteorite. It punched a hole in his roof, crashed through the ceiling of his bedroom closet and embedded itself in a wall.

``At the time, I thought it was a plant explosion,'' recalled Cameron, pastor of the nondenominational Trinity Church. It took several days and the help of a Lamar University geology professor who studies meteorites for Cameron to find out what shook his house that morning.

His wife, Marilyn, and his 7-year-old daughter, Caitlyn, both said the noise woke them up. Thinking it came from an explosion, Cameron turned on the radio to listen for news of an industrial disaster. Nothing.

Seeing no damage around his home, Cameron didn't think much more about it.

But the next day as he was cleaning his gutters, he saw a half-dollar-sized hole in his roof. ``It was as neatly cut out as if somebody had used a punch,'' he said. Looking around inside, he found a hole in the ceiling of his bedroom closet.

``The only thing I could find was plaster dust,'' he said.

Believing that something had fallen out of the sky, he contacted Lamar University. His inquiry was turned over to geology professor Jim Jordan, who studied meteorites for 6-1/2 years at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

Although about 3,000 meteorites strike Earth every day, Jordan said, only a few thousand have ever been found, and only a handful have been observed as they fell.