A piece of iron that smashed the roof of a house in New Zealand continued to have police and aviation experts puzzled on Friday, news reports said. ( dpa )
Police initially thought the small rectangular object that plunged through the lounge ceiling in George Cunningham's house at Whakatu, near Hastings, was from an aircraft.
A small plane that had taken off from Napier was identified shortly before and the pilot made an emergency landing in Palmerston North to check his undercarriage, which proved intact.
Police called in Wattie Solomon, head of a local aviation company, who told the Hawke's Bay Today newspaper, "It's not something I've ever seen. It's made of cast iron and very little, if anything, is made out of cast iron on a plane."
The Civil Aviation Authority in Wellington sent an aeronautical engineer to look at it and he also said it had not come from a plane.
"It must have been a hell of a powerful hit," Cunningham, a night shift worker who is deaf and slept through the incident, told the paper. "Anyone standing here would probably have been killed."