A piece of metal tore through his roof. Was it junk from the International Space Station?

Alejandro Otero was traveling overseas when he received a panicked call from his son back home.

“He goes, ‘Dad, are you guys sitting down?’” Otero recalled.

An object tumbling from the sky had struck Otero’s Naples, Fla., house with a bang that startled his son. Otero cut his trip short and returned home to find a hole torn through his roof and second-story floor. The bewildered father searched for the culprit and found an unusual projectile — a dense, cylindrical piece of charred metal a little smaller than a soup can — lodged in a wall.

It didn’t look like a normal piece of debris to Otero. He insisted:“I knew it was from outer space.”

Otero’s theory might not be far off. He learned after searching online that a pallet of old batteries jettisoned from the International Space Station in 2021 had been expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, the day his house was struck. He connected with astrophysicists on social media, and together they wondered: Had his house been hit by a garbage disposal from orbit, several years in the making?

It was compelling enough to warrant NASA’s attention, Otero said. Investigators from the agency came to his house last week to retrieve the metal cylinder and determine whether it came from the ISS. “It’s unreal,”Otero said.

NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday afternoon. Agency spokesperson Josh Finch confirmed to Ars Technica that NASA retrieved the object and that engineers at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center are analyzing it to determine its origin.