On the afternoon of August 14, 1992 in the town of Mbale, in Eastern Uganda an enormous
fireball was observed by many in the region falling.
The result was a meteorite entry that showered the town with fresh meteorite fragments, which
were very rapidly recognized and collected by both scientists and non-scientists.
There was some local grinding up of this meteor into powder and sampling it to see if it was
an effective medicine.
But scientists on the scene were able to rapidly sample and analyze this meteorite and it remains
one of the most fresh meteorites ever studied in depth without decay or exposure to water.
And it was a rather large fall, with at least 147 kilograms of material recovered, much
of which was in the form of relatively small fragments.
I often get comments that any video title or headline that ends in a question mark is
automatically answered as no, the so-called Betteridge’s law.
The answer to this one is yes, you can get hit by a meteorite and here is a story of
a young Ugandan teenager that happened to be passing under a banana tree during this
meteorite event only to be hit in the head with a small 3 gram specimen of this meteorite.
Luckily he was uninjured because the banana tree’s leaves broke the fall but it is conceivable
that had it not it might have had a worst possible outcome, but remember a falling meteorite
is subject to slowing and atmospheric friction.
But a much larger example could have been fatal.
Perhaps the most famous example of death by meteorite were the dinosaurs.
The vast majority of species of life on earth that were subject to the end cretaceous extinction
event died off because of the massive environmental effects it unleashed.
But given that the impacting asteroid hit the area of what’s now the Yucatan, an enormous
amount of sea life would have been instantly vaporized by the impact as it blasted complete
through the ocean and into the bedrock below creating an enormous crater of which vestiges
can still be detected.
This would have been death by meteorite very directly for anything in the local area of
hundreds of miles around, but the tsunamis that resulted without have been secondarily
just as deadly, with at least some evidence at a sight of an inland sea in the paleontological
record of one of those tsunamis killing an enormous amount of local life which subsequently
fossilized.
There’s even a turtle fossil, where it was impaled on a stick by the tsunami.
There’s still debate in the paleontological community as to whether this site is being
interpreted correctly, but it may represent a snapshot of that horrible day on earth 66
million years ago.
There are also a number of cases of people almost getting hit by meteorites.
Hidden deeply within the annals of meteoritics is an incident in St. Louis Missouri.
On December 11 of 1950 a large bolide fireball was seen over the city, sparking fears of
an a-bomb blast actually, of which reports flooded into the local authorities.
And here is where accounts of something get muddy.
A gentleman driving in St. Louis at the time had two pieces of the meteorite bust through
the roof of his car while he was driving.
He pulled over not knowing what exactly was going on and found the two fragments, apparently
in the back seat.
They were reported to the media to be red hot fragments of metal with a black skin and
a silver interior.
They were not, we still have the fragments and they are of a very normal common stone
meteorite known as an H chondrite.
Meteorites of this size do not actually arrive on the ground hot.
They are subject to heat and melting as they enter, but their interiors are still very
cold, that of deep space and after the period where they flare and burn they fall through
the densest parts of the atmosphere which are cold.
As a result meteorites tend not to arrive hot, unless big enough to explode, and rather
have been reported in fresh falls to be cold to the touch, and sometimes covered in frost.
But the articles of the time from the St. Louis meteorite are factually incorrect on
a number of counts, referring to meteoriticists that study meteorites as meteorologists, which
study weather.
Such are world of mouth accounts and how stories can shift.
But the point is a 28 year old St. Louis man driving in the city at night in 1950 very
closely was almost hit by meteorite fragments.
Another case of a meteorite severely damaging a car happened in Peekskill, New York.
On October 9, 1992 thousands of people ranging from Kentucky to New York saw a meteorite
entering and breaking up overhead.
At about 7:50 eastern time, a fragment of this meteorite slammed into a 1980 red Chevy
Malibu parked in front of its owner’s house.
There were 16 recordings of this fall made by means and in spots, as 1992 video cameras
were starting to become common and fans at a football game had their camcorders out taping
the game and caught it.
This allowed scientists to calculate that the object had been traveling through space
at a whopping 14 kilometers per second, or 31,600 miles per hour before hitting earth’s
atmosphere; by the time it hit the car it was going about 164 miles per hour.
This basically created a very damaged Chevy Malibu, just collapsed the trunk, but also
one of the most valuable Chevy Malibu’s ever having been hit by a meteorite.
The owner paid $300 US dollars for the car, and after the hit sold it for 25 thousand,
above and beyond the $50,000 realized by the meteorite itself.
The car is now in a museum along with the meteorite.
The meteorite is a common type of chondrite but shows really extensive shock in the geology,
meaning its parent asteroid had seen at least one large collision with another body.
Again this meteorite was described as warm to the touch, and smelling of sulfur by the
owner of the car.
And it gets weirder, outside of the human target aspect of meteorites.
Anything can get hit on the surface of the earth in principle.
And, yes, the Planet Mars once may have reportedly killed a dog.
The story begins about 1.3 billion years ago at one of Mars’ then active volcanoes, though
it’s unclear which, due to the planet being really active in those days forming lava fields.
In one of these fields, a later asteroid impact occurred blowing the volcanic rock off the
surface of Mars.
One of these rocks wandered the solar system for an indefinite amount of time before falling
on June 28, 1911 in the Egyptian town of Nakla, with many witnesses.
These were also very quickly collected by the locals and came into the possession of
the Egyptian government, which gifted a number of them to museums worldwide.
But one in particular was interesting in that there is an account from a local farmer, a
Mr. Hakim, of having seen a dog get vaporized after the fragments hit it.
I have heard a number of variations of this story, including that the dog was merely killed,
but there isn’t a body, just a varying account.
Vaporization by Mars however is unlikely, these were large falling rocks not full on
dinosaur era marine life vaporizing asteroids.
But it isn’t impossible that there is some kernel of truth to the story, a dog can get
hit by a meteorite about as easily as a human or a Chevy Malibu.
The meteorite itself is amongst the most scientifically interesting meteorites we have.
It’s actually the first Martian meteorite to show evidence of past water on Mars, due
to the presence of water related carbonates and other minerals that need water to form.
There’s also evidence that it was exposed to water in several different ways while it
was on Mars.
But there’s something even strange about this meteorite.
A very famous case of a potential detection of life on Mars that I’ve covered on this
channel before is the Allan Hills 84001 Martian meteorite recovered in Antarctica.
This was an infamous detection of what might have been microfossils in the makeup of the
meteorite that could indicate past life on Mars, but was quickly called into question
by other researchers that came up with more prosaic explanations and the whole is not
settled to this day.
But Allan Hills isn’t the only weird one.
Something similar happened with Nakhla.
In 1998 the British Museum provided a fragment of Nakhla to Johnson Space Center, whether
it was examined with optical microscopes and Scanning Electron Microscope technology that
showed somewhat anomalous structures for a martian rock, at least so far as we know,
but ones that are not anomalous per se to some earth rocks.
Just strange structures that looked biology related.
A few years later another fragment was broken open to reveal a fresh surface for NASA researchers
in 2006.
They found some very strange stuff, complex carbonaceous material that was basically stuffed
inside channels and pores in the meteorite that look effectively like the same thing
found in some geology on earth, which is known to be caused by the effects of bacteria on
rock.
In short, Nakhla’s crevices and cracks look to be full of the remains of dead bacteria.
In a nutshell, the findings are insufficient to say that bacteria once existed on Mars
and maybe there could be ways one of the most abundant elements in the universe, Carbon,
could end up in the cracks of volcanic rocks even though that doesn’t seem to happen
in this matter on earth without the presence of bacteria.
This is just a hint of what's to come with sample return missions from Mars.
They’re likely to find the same things that are found in the Martian meteorites, debate
about it, and only when the evidence becomes irrefutable, if it can be shown so, will anything
with Mars ever be hints.
Maybe bolstering it for Nakhla however, are the presence of amino acids, but that’s
quite a bit harder because you don’t need biology for those, they are found in meteorites,
and it’s very difficult to know what’s contamination there and what it isn’t, especially
if the same those were found in happens to be the one from the dog incident, which is
unknown.
But back to humans and meteorites.
We go through life knowing that there are hazards.
One might misstep at a crosswalk and meet a bad end, or get attacked in just the worst
possible way by an angry pelican, or happen to be around on that unlucky day when an asteroid
hits.
So the answer to this title, clickbait as some will claim it is, continues to be yes.
You can be hit by a meteorite and here’s another case, this one with an injury.
On November 30, 1954 just after mid day Ann Hodges of Alabama was taking a nap on her
couch when a meteorite came through the roof of her house, bounced off a radio and hit
her on the and and hip, ultimately causing a large bruise.
Hodges and her mother were in the house at the time, and said it sounded like the chimney
had collapsed and the house was filled with dust and debris.
As with accounts, there is a discrepancy here, the meteorite is known to have fallen at 12:46
PM, but the reports from the house say 2 PM, but I think we can forgive Mrs. Hodges here
who was at least half asleep on the couch when it happened.
Not the greatest thing to be woken up by, the universe throwing a sizable rock at you,
and it’s said that the incident happened at all was more distressing and stressful
to her than the actual bruise.
This grapefruit sized meteorite which is officially known as Sylacauga, but is often known as
the Hodges meteorite.
It was actually followed by something strange.
The air force confiscated the meteorite.
Personnel from Maxwell Air Force Base actually showed up to examine and take the meteorite,
which they did.
The Air Force concluded it was just a meteorite, but the Mayor of the town tried to assume
control and donate it to a museum of natural history in Alabama.
Now folks, as I’m sure you can tell from this accent, I am a US citizen and the laws
here don’t just allow the government to come in and take a meteorite that falls in
your house.
It’s yours.
And Ann’s husband Eugene knew it, making the case that he had ample evidence that the
thing fell in their house, see the large hole in the ceiling.
They did gain custody of the meteorite back, but it didn’t stop there, they were renters
so the landlord claimed ownership.
This led to a legal battle, and a $500 settlement, and Mrs. Hodges got to keep the meteorite
that hit her.
This at a time when meteorites were not worth all that much and there were few interested
scientists willing to pay anything for one.
In this case there were offers, but how do you sell something that the air force is holding?
Then, interest evaporated once it was in her possession, and she sold it to a museum for
$25.
Unfortunately the whole event adversely affected her in the end.
She was flooded with unwelcome reporters, and as a very shy person to begin with descended
into social anxiety and her health failed, dying in 1972 from Kidney Failure, apparently
suffering PTSD from the entire incident.
The fragment that hit Mrs. Hodges is still in the Alabama Museum of Natural History,
other fragments found in nearby areas are elsewhere, one of which was sold to the Smithsonian
for the price of a house and a house for the finder.
Mr. Hodges loaned the destroyed radio to the American Museum of Natural History, and the
event today has mostly been forgotten.
There are other more anecdotal accounts of people having been hit by a meteorite.
In 1677 a Franciscan Friar in Italy is reported to have been killed by a meteorite, the infamous
Tunguska event in Russia in 1908 is reported to have had 3 fatalities, and more recent
in British Columbia in 2021 a woman was sleeping and apparently a meteorite came through the
roof and landed on the pillow next to her, but she was unharmed.
But the reality is that we’ve all been hit by meteorites.
Micrometeoroids fall from the sky constantly, the earth collects many tons per year of this
material.
We see them as meteors, and chances are at some time in your life when a visitor from
space may have landed gently on you without you even knowing.
So the answer to the title of the video, can you get hit by a meteorite, is yes, you very
likely have.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently eyeing the skies
suspiciously.
The earth actually gains on the upper end 100,000 metric tons of meteoritic material
each year.
This planet is growing, albeit by not much in the grand scheme of things.
It used to gain much more earlier in its history, but it’s interesting to think that the planet
is still accreting material and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.