A Woman is Hit by a Meteor

On This Day in History: November 30, 1954

Ouch, quit it. Imagine this. It’s 1954. You’re a thirty-four-year-old woman living on a farm in Alabama, which . . . probably wasn’t super exciting. Anyway, you’re taking a nap. And then a fucking meteorite the size of a goddamn cantaloupe crashes through the roof and smacks into you.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: November 30, 1954--

Considering how small the populations of prehistory were, and how big the planet is, it’s not that likely some troglodyte was sleeping off a mammoth feast and got bonked by a space rock at any time before we started writing such shit down. And so, it is quite probable that the events of November 30, 1954, represent the first time a hominid took a meteorite to the face . . . Oh, wait. It hit her on her side . . . and she lived to tell the tale. There is a 1677 Italian manuscript that tells an unverified story of a monk who was killed by a meteorite, describing his death as “equally terrible and unexpected.” And there are unconfirmed reports that in 1490 in China “stones fell like rain” and killed over 10,000 people, but many experts question if they came from space. There were rumors of people getting hurt in the shockwave from the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908 as well. But the woman in Alabama was the first verifiable recorded instance of a known person surviving being hit by a space rock.

Her name was Ann Hodges, and some named it the Hodges meteorite, whereas others call it the Sylacauga meteorite, after the name of the nearest city to where Hodges lived. I prefer the former, because she’s the unfortunate woman who got hit, and I can’t pronounce the other one. Ann lived because it wasn’t a direct hit, but a ricochet. She was snoozing on the couch and, after traveling through the roof, the meteorite hit the large console radio next to her, then caromed into her lower left side. She was badly bruised but could walk.

Michael Reynolds, an astronomer and meteorite expert at Florida State, said of the odds of a person being struck by a meteorite: “You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time.”

The rocky fireball was visible in three states as it streaked across the sky. If it hadn’t been slowed down by both the roof and the radio, it would have ghosted Ann’s ass. With Cold War paranoia running hot, the police chief confiscated the meteorite and gave it to the air force. Ann’s landlord said it hit my property, so it’s my rock. Ann eventually got it back, then donated it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History in 1956. Ann’s husband said the stress of the international attention of the story put his wife in an early grave. She died aged fifty-two from kidney failure.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. The holidays are coming and they make great gifts.