It sounds like it’s straight out of a movie: Ann Hodges’ story has to be seen to be believed.
On this day in 1954: Ann Hodges became the first and only person to be hit by a meteorite, and survive
On the afternoon of November 30, 1954, in Sylacauga, Alabama, Ann Hodges was resting on her living room couch when something otherworldly happened. At 2:46 p.m., a meteorite roughly the size of a grapefruit crashed through her home’s roof, ricocheted off a wooden radio, and struck her on the hip.
The impact left her with a large, dark bruise, but she survived. At first, Hodges and her mother, who was in another room, had no idea what had happened. They found the object—an 8.5-pound rock composed mainly of iron and nickel—but didn’t yet understand its origin.
It turned out that the rock was a piece of 1685 Toro, a mid-sized asteroid around the size of Manhattan, which has been classified by NASA as a “Near Earth Asteroid” because of its orbit’s proximity to Earth.
Outside, commotion quickly grew. Some locals who saw a bright streak in the sky thought a plane had crashed; others suspected it might be a piece of a spacecraft as 911 calls flooded the local station. The U.S. Air Force became involved, taking the rock for examination to confirm it was indeed a meteorite: material 4.5 billion-years-old that had traveled through space before its violent arrival into Hodges’s living room.
Once the scientific questions were answered, a different dispute arose: ownership. Because the meteorite had fallen into a house they were renting, Hodges and her husband found themselves in a legal battle with their landlord, who argued the rock belonged to her as the property owner (and, incredibly, wanted money to fix the roof!). Eventually, the landlord accepted a settlement of $500 to give up her claim.
In the end, she donated the meteorite to the Alabama Museum of Natural History, with the condition that the museum cover her legal expenses. The rock—now known as the Sylacauga Meteorite—is still on display there today.
The Sylacauga Meteorite is now considered highly valuable—worth more than a million dollars by some estimates.
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