Boy struck by meteorite in Florida The family of a 7-year-old Florida boy say he was struck by fragments of a meteorite while playing outside. IN the land of comic books and their Hollywood spin-offs, nothing ever comes to earth without it being a Moment. There's a whoomp!, followed by a hisssss, and often the glow of something unearthly, often green. This is the moment when the young small-town boy or girl - or the ordinary man or woman - comes into contact with the Alien Power and becomes Transformed. The Greatest American Hero was transformed when a mild mannered teacher (William Katt) had an alien encounter. None of that happened in this case. Or at least, not yet. Florida man Wayne Lippard reports that his seven year old son Steven was struck by a shower of tiny meteorites while playing in the driveway of the family home in Loxahatchee, west of Palm Beach. "He's playing in the driveway and I walk into the house and about four minutes later, he comes to the window screaming," Lippard told FoxNews.com. The gash looked pretty bad, but it wasn't bleeding a lot so we didn't panic. The wound later took three staples to close. The meteorites which hit Steven Lippard. Trying to determine the cause of the injury, Lippard noticed a bunch of small rocks on the driveway. Tests on the rocks at Florida Atlantic University confirmed that they were magnetic, which strengthens - although does not prove - the hypothesis that they were meteorites. Lippard said Steven thought the idea of being hit by a meteorite was "cool." But he could've been killed. It hit cement and shattered; it grazed him," he said. But meteorites can do far worse damage than that. Steven's galactic encounter resulted in a nasty wound. Wikipedia reports that the massive Chelyabinsk meteor which exploded in the atmosphere over southern Russia in February 2013 caused damage to 7200 buildings. Some 1500 people were injured, either directly or indirectly, during the incident. Astronomers have since identified 20 other near-Earth asteroids that might one day follow a similar path to the one taken by the Chelyabinsk meteor. Another meteorite that fell to earth in 1992 in Peekskill, New York, crashed through the bonnet of a parked car. The remnant of that meteorite weighed 12 kilograms.