Meteor: On November 30, 1954, just after noon, Ann Hodges dozed peacefully on the sofa in her home, near the city of Sylacauga, in the United States. It would have been a normal and unremarkable moment in Hodges’ life if she hadn’t been awakened for an extremely unusual reason: an object broke into her house at high speed, broke the roof, ricocheted off a large wooden radio set, and hit her in the hip.
Ann, at the time 34 years old, woke up feeling bewildered with a sharp pain in the left side of her body and with her house full of debris and smoke. Only after a few moments, she and her mother, who was also in the house at the time, noticed the black rock weighing about 4 kilos and the size of a pumpkin as the cause of such damage.
This is one of the rarest records of people being hit by a meteor fragment in history. Called the Sylacauga Meteorite or Hodges Meteorite, the piece that hit Ann was one of two found due to a meteor explosion that tore through the atmosphere earlier that day. Although the event could have been fatal for young Ann Hodges, it is believed that the reduction in the fragment’s speed as it collided with the roof and radio and the dampening of the thick blanket she was currently wearing saved her life, causing only a big bruise on your body.
