Lyn Hiner's children collected some rocks during an outing to San Onofre State Beach on Saturday. Hiner put them in the pocket of her cargo shorts after picking them up from the floor inside her home, four hours later, she felt something weird.
"And all of a sudden, something hot on my leg just sort of started to bother me and so I started to think it was a bug bite and so I started slapping it and the next thing you know my shorts are on fire," said Hiner.
Lab tests revealed at least one of the rocks was covered with phosphorus. That's the flammable orange chemical found on the tip of a match.
"It'll burn right through flesh, bone, and skin. I've never heard of anything like this before," said Michio Kakai, Ph.D., from the City University of New York.
Another scientist believes that Mother Nature is not to blame, he says the phosphorus wasn't naturally part of the rock and he believes that it was human made.
