If you’re like me, August offered another fantastic opportunity to miss the Perseid meteor shower. With the rash of forest fires, I knew the spectacular event was going to be hard to see through smoke-obscured skies. Coupled with a late sunset and my early farm chores, this astronomer chose a good night’s sleep.

But it did remind me of all the space junk hitting Earth. Estimates vary, but something like 10,000 pounds of alien rock make it to the surface every year, most in small pieces left over after larger objects break up in the atmosphere. Finding a piece is harder than locating a needle in a haystack. It’s more like finding a very specific needle in an Earth-sized stack of other needles. Pieces weighing a pound or so are rare, and larger meteorites even more so.

My colleague has a simple flowchart to determine if you’ve found a meteorite.

“Have I found a meteorite?” It asks.

An arrow points to the only answer: “No, you haven’t.”

They are that rare.

Luckily there are some identifying characteristics, and scientists go out of their way to find rocks that match them. My friend Monika, an astrochemist who studies the origin of these space rocks, spent a summer in Antarctica, hanging out of a helicopter, looking for telltale black specs on the white ice shelf. Rocks on top of the miles-thick ice can only be from outer space, and they’ve been accumulating for millions of years. The white snow provides contrast, and the flowing ice tends to concentrate the rocks in specific areas. And the effort paid off, as she helped gather some of the 22,000 samples collected by researchers like her in the NASA program over the years.

Another great spot is the Salt Flats of Utah’s West Desert. The white salt makes rocks easy to spot, and while there are many more Earth rocks thrown up from such things as volcanoes, meteorites do stick out. But if you think the interesting rock you’ve found out there is a meteorite, I’d suggest consulting the flowchart above.

That said, sometimes folks get lucky. Someone recently brought a find into my office that had all the telltale signs of being a space rock. Heavy for its size? Check. Apparent fusion crust from the heat of entry into Earth’s atmosphere? Check. He’d even cut it open to reveal an interior of solid metal free from any gas bubbles that would have formed had it been made in some geological or industrial process.

Is it a meteorite? Consulting the flowchart indicates no, but he had enough reason to subject it to further tests.

Of course, usually the rocks brought to my office are not from space. Some are weird looking bits of sandstone, and some are iron slag from all the rail building in the West Desert over the centuries.

Sometimes they are even more interesting than space rocks — like the nearly complete stump of a giant cedar tree I traveled to see, dug up from an ancient forest that existed on the shores of Lake Bonneville over 10,000 years ago. The owner was really disappointed it wasn’t from space. After all, he dug it up and dragged the 300 pounds of it from his hunting camp all the way to his home in Morgan. But I thought the reality was even more fascinating.

Of course, whenever someone brings a not-meteorite to my office, and it falls to me to crush their dreams, I’m reminded of the time I called in my sighting of a rare Wood Stork that hadn’t been seen in Utah since the 1930s.

“Are you sure it wasn’t the much more common White Pelican?” Asked the patient man at the Audubon Society.

I was about to say “I’m positive,” until I saw five more of my “rare birds” fly over. I thanked him and ended the call.

And I’m embarrassed to tell you about the time I almost called my undergrad astronomy professor to let him know about the new supernova I had discovered.

It was Venus. Good thing that was before cellphones. I would never have lived that down.

So as the meteors rain down this month, by all means keep an eye out for strange finds. And feel free to contact me if you’d like me to take a look. I’ve got a whole bunch of flowcharts already printed.