A Space Rock Crashed Through a Roof and Bruised a Resident
On this day · 30 November 1954
In 1954 a grapefruit-sized meteorite punched through an Alabama roof and slammed into a napping woman, the first such case on record.
On November 30, 1954, Ann Elizabeth Hodges was dozing on her living-room couch in Oak Grove, near Sylacauga, Alabama, when an 8.5-pound chunk of space rock tore through the ceiling. The fragment ricocheted off a wooden console radio and struck her in the hip and side, leaving a vivid dark bruise.
Hodges survived with no serious injury, becoming the first documented person confirmed to have been hit by a meteorite. The stone is part of the larger Sylacauga meteorite, an ordinary chondrite that briefly lit the daytime sky as a fireball before breaking apart over rural Talladega County.
A rock that had drifted through space for millions of years finished its journey on a quiet Alabama afternoon.
A tangled ownership fight followed: police, the U.S. Air Force, and the Smithsonian all handled the rock, while Hodges and her landlord battled in court before settling. Today the meteorite resides in the Alabama Museum of Natural History at the University of Alabama.
Sources & references
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