On July 6, in the town of Alsace, France, this woman was engaged in a friendly conversation with a pal on her terrace when she was unexpectedly hit by a small object. Curiosity piqued, she decided to examine the black-and-gray rock-like thing that had struck her. Lo and behold, it seemed to be a meteorite! The impact was strong enough to leave a bruise on her ribs.
Tests are still underway to confirm whether the object is indeed a meteorite, but if it turns out to be one, it would be an incredibly rare case of a person being struck by a meteorite.
From Gizmodo:
It’s not rare that such material falls from space. In fact, last year a team of researchers estimated that over 5,000 tons of asteroid and comet dust falls to Earth every year. What’s relatively uncommon is that the material actually survives the fall; most larger masses disintegrate as they heat up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Earlier this year, a suspected meteorite crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home. In 2021, a rare meteorite landed on a driveway in the Cotswolds, in England. And in 2013—ten years ago already!—a meteorite fell in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, shattering windows and injuring hundreds, though no one was killed. The Chelyabinsk meteorite was the largest to fall to Earth this century.
Fallen meteorites can be billions of years old—i.e., they date to the formation of the solar system—and as such can be of scientific value, besides the extrinsic value they have when they’re occasionally auctioned.
What’s even rarer is that of all the places on Earth a meteor can land, it strikes a person. In 2020, researchers poring over archives of Ottoman Kurdistan found documentation suggesting a falling meteorite paralyzed one person and killed another in 1888.
As reported by Atlas Obscura at the time, those events “precede the famously massive Tunguska explosion of 1908, which may have killed two people, and are more evidence-based than a 1677 manuscript from Italy—which even NASA cites—in which an Italian monk was killed by a stone ‘projected from the clouds.’”
It's quite astonishing to realize the sheer number of meteorites that come hurtling towards Earth! Considering the vast expanse of our planet, it's truly remarkable that one would actually strike a person.
But hey, if you're fortunate enough to survive such an encounter, it definitely makes for an incredibly cool story to share around the dinner table, doesn't it?
