it happened on the 30th November 1954,
62 years ago yesterday on a clear afternoon in Sylacauga,
Alabama in 1954, Ann Hodges was napping on her couch, covered by quilts, when a
softball-size hunk of black rock broke through the ceiling, bounced off a
radio, and hit her in the thigh, leaving a pineapple-shaped bruise, she had
made history, she is the only confirmed person in history to have been hit by a meteorite,
Ann wanted to sell
the rock, but there was a hitch, Ann and Eugene were renters, and their
landlady, a recently widowed woman named Birdie Guy, wanted the meteorite for
herself, Guy obtained a lawyer and sued, claiming the rock was hers since it
had fallen on her property, the law was actually on her side, but public
opinion wasn't, Guy settled out of court, giving up her claim to the meteorite
in exchange for $500, Eugene was convinced the couple could make big money off
the rock and turned down a modest offer from the Smithsonian, but no one wanted
to buy the rock, and so the Hodges donated the meteorite to the natural history
museum in 1956, where it's still on display, as an aside if you want to look at space rocks here are a few on display, Meteorites: Best Places to See Them Up Close, Ann later suffered a nervous breakdown,
and in 1964 she and Eugene separated, She died in 1972 at 52 of kidney failure
at a Sylacaugan nursing home, so what are the chances of being hit by a meteorite? As
Hodges’s unique case demonstrates, the odds are on our side when it comes to
meteor strikes, one scientist found the lifetime odds of dying from a meteor
strike near you to be 1:1,600,000—to put that in perspective, your odds of
being struck by lightning are 1:135,000, the odds of dying as the result of a
meteor strike anywhere in the world—like the kind of rare but catastrophic
geologic event that shapes an eon—are 1:75,000, the odds of winning the PowerBall
lottery? 1:195,249,054, so stop buying lotto tickets and watch out for
meteorites, nowadays they can be worth a lot of money!
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