Let’s say you’re on your couch enjoying a quiet afternoon. Suddenly, an infernal sound wakes you up just a moment before you see how a rock violently destroys your bookshelf, your old “vintage” radio and bounces towards you. It will take you a little longer to realize that the rock has passed through the ceiling before hitting you. And as strange as this story may seem, it is totally true.
It was a clear afternoon in 1954 when a meteor struck Ann Elizabeth Hodges. The woman was lucky and only received a huge bruise on his waist. But he could have experienced a consequence as tragic as that of his poor radio. After all, we are talking about a piece of rock that fell at hundreds of kilometers per hour, burning on its frictional path towards the surface of this small planet.
Ann ended up in the hospital but not because of the blow, but because of a small nervous breakdown caused by the huge crowd that came to see what had happened. Let us remember that in the 1950s, the Cold War was in full swing and conspiracy theorists did not miss an opportunity to see Soviet planes fly over (and explode) in American skies. So, after the sighting of the meteorite, a small host of curious people gathered around the Hodges house.
And here began the adventures of the famous Sylacauga meteorite, whose name is due to the Alabama town where it fell. The fragment that hit Ann was called “Hodges meteorite“, while the complete meteorite, which broke into three about nineteen kilometers above the surface, it was much larger, probably almost half a meter.
After the commotion, the assistance to Mrs. Hodges and the uncertainty, the United States Air Force sent a team to collect the remains of the meteorite. The stone’s fame rose incandescently over the next few days, continuing until a couple of years later. The media and residents of the entire region echoed the impact and there were those who wanted to buy the meteorite. For his part, Eugene Hodges, Ann’s husband, hired a lawyer to recover the rock from the hands of the State.
At the same time, finding out about the mess, Bertie Guy, the landlord of the house, claimed ownership of the stone, much to the chagrin of the Hodges, with the intention of covering the repairs that the meteorite had cost her. The stress caused by all this diatribe and as attention on the meteorite faded, along with the potential buyersthey pushed Ann to donate the Sylacauga meteorite fragment to the Alabama Museum of Natural History. But Ann, according to the chronicle, never stopped being afraid of something falling through her ceiling again.
Other “lucky” people in the history of extraterrestrial impacts
Anna E. Hodges is the first and only person (at least reliably) to have been injured by a meteorite. But it is not the only case related to an extraterrestrial rock described in our history. Luckily for the rest, none of them have been hurt, if we can believe their version. Let’s go back to August 1992, in Mbale, Uganda. A boy was heading to the village when a fireball thundered in the sky. Shortly after, a pebble hit the top of a banana and fell on his head.
According to reports, a huge meteorite weighing almost a ton would have exploded fourteen kilometers from the surface, disintegrating. Did the fragment belong to that meteorite? We will never know for sure. This is what happens with hundreds of other testimonies that ensure the impact of a meteorite: unlike the Sylacauga meteorite, there is no evidence or analysis that demonstrates the origin of these rocks.
That does not mean that there are, as we said, dozens and dozens of stories about meteorites (many of them with tragic endings). An example can be found in the 2016 Indian story in which it was stated that a bus driver had killed by space rock impactafter an explosion was heard. NASA, however, confirmed that this was not possible since the incident did not coincide with any detected or predicted astronomical event.
The protagonists of other documented cases have had much luckier in which the meteorite passed very closely, without hitting them. We are talking, for example, about Michelle Knapp, whose Chevrolet was pierced by a meteorite to his surprise, in 1992. Not so long ago, in 2004, an alien rock happily entered through the roof of the Archer family home in Auckland, New Zealand. The rock just bounced and she remained lying, expectant, on the floor of her living room.
If you want to join the club of those “hit by a meteorite” you better be patient. Just like calculation an engineer at the German Aerospace Center named Christian Gritzner, a while ago, the chance of this happening is 174 million. To do this, it calculated the surface area we occupy, our average life expectancy and the habitable surface area. That, added to the calculations of meteorites that fall per year, provided the result we were talking about.
Fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite
It is estimated that up to 10,000 tons of material interstellar crashes to Earth every year. It is not a trivial number. Why aren’t stories of meteorites falling on us more frequent? The first and most important reason, without a doubt, is the fact that almost everyone does it at sea. After all, water occupies most of the earth’s surface. On the other hand, a large amount of this material disintegrates in its fall, leaving a faint trail of dust and gas.
As we mentioned, there are many testimonies collected in the press and reports from people who have had a supposed meteorite fall on them. In fact, many of the versions date back a long time, even from other times when “the stars fell from the sky.” But we can assure you that Ann Hodges’ case is unique and special. Nobody would want a monster like the one from Chelyabinsk, which entered at no less than twenty kilometers per second, to hit their house, much less their person. And if not, ask the 1,491 injuries caused by this car, a stone that did not need to hit anyone to show its devastating potential.
Images | Pxhere, University of Alabama, Wikimedia
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