A Pembroke man was playing with Google Earth - an online digital map of the planet - when he came across something that seemed out of this world: an apparent meteorite crater in Pawtuckaway State Park in Nottingham.

"I was just searching around on Google, looking at lakes, because I'm a sailor," said Stephen Dupuis, 52. "As I was panning down through the landscape, it kind of caught my eye."

Dupuis, a multimedia artist, has been fascinated with astronomy and outer space since his father, a former engineer, built the heat shields used for the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s.

What he saw in Nottingham stirred his interest. He researched impact craters online and wrote to the Earth Impact Database, which is run out of the University of New Brunswick. Nobody has responded yet.

"They didn't show anything in New Hampshire," he said of the database's maps. "Maybe somebody now will look at this and say, 'Hey that is a crater.' "

So far, Dupuis is favoring a scientific explanation for the site.

"There were no crop circles and no flying saucers involved with it," he said.

ETHAN WILENSKY-LANFORD