It could be a trivial question: how many people have been injured by the impact of a meteorite? The official answer, the only documented by NASA, is one. Only one. His name was Ann Hodges. He was taking a nap on the couch of his house, and survived to tell it. However, the dusty files of the Ottoman Empire tell a different story. One that does not end with a great Moraton, but with a death.
The interrupted nap of Ann Hodges. The probability that a rock rock falls is very small, but it is never zero. On November 30, 1954, Ann Hodges was sleeping on the sofa of his house in Alabama when an object of the size of a softball ball crossed the roof, bounced on a radio and hit it on the hip.
The result: a considerable bruise and a legal dispute between Hodges and her homemade. Tired of media care and curious tourists, the woman ended up donating the meteorite to Alabama Natural History Museum In 1956, where it can still be visited.
Two subsequent cases. From the interrupted nap of Ann Hodges there have been two doubtful cases. In 1992, a Uganda child said he was reached in the head by a small rock fragment. The Meteoritus rain existedbut the child suffered any damage.
In 2016, a man died in India for the alleged impact of a meteorite. NASA It ended up determining that had not been a meteorite, but an explosion on land.
A death in Ottoman archives. In 2020, a team of researchers diving in the state archives of Türkiye found something unexpected. Three manuscripts written in Turkish Ottoman described with chilling details An event occurred on August 22, 1888.
The documents, which were official reports aimed at Sultan Abdul Hamid II, report that a “bright light accompanied by smoke” was followed, for about ten minutes, of meteorites that fell “like the rain” on a village of Sulaymaniyah, a region that today is part of Iraq. The consequences were tragic: “A man died and another was seriously injured and was paralyzed.” The texts also mention extensive damage to crops.
No one knows where those rocks are. The documents mention that samples of the rocks were sent to the capital, but the researchers have not found them. Even so, it is the first report in the story, backed by three manuscripts, which states that the impact of a meteorite killed a man.
The incident has gone unnoticed by more than a century by the idiomatic barrier and the little interest in reviewing historical archives of this type, but seems authentic. “Because these documents come from official government sources, we have no suspicion about their truthfulness,” the study concludes.
Unlikely, but not impossible. Every day, about 44 tons of meteoritic material bombard the earthbut the vast majority disintegrates in the atmosphere. That a large enough fragment survives and, in addition, impacts a populated area and, to top it off, hit a person, it is statistically unlikely, but not impossible.
Even so, it is not the meteorites that should worry, but our own garbage. Every day three large pieces of space garbage, such as dead satellites or rocket stages re -entering in the atmosphere. The majority burns or falls into the ocean, but luck is not eternal. With the new megaconstellations, the resentments will multiply. “Sooner or later we will have bad luck and someone will be injured by the fall of space garbage,” warns the astrophysic Jonathan McDowell.
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