A meteorite hit Ann Hodges while she was napping

Ann Elizabeth Hodges was asleep on the sofa of her rented house in Sylacauga, Alabama, on 30 November 1954. At a quarter to one in the afternoon, a 3.8-kilo chondrite —a lump of iron and silicates from the asteroid belt— came through the roof, bounced off the radio cabinet and struck her on the hip. Hodges was 34, and she walked away with a bruise the size of a dinner plate. She is still the only documented case of a human being hit by a meteorite, and in the catalogues the rock is listed as the Sylacauga meteorite, an ordinary H4 chondrite.

The lawsuit lasted longer than the fright. Her landlady, Birdie Guy, claimed the rock on the grounds that it had landed on her property; the Air Force took it away first to analyse it, and sightseers camped out in the garden. The Hodges ended up paying 500 dollars to keep their own meteorite, and by then the market had cooled: nobody was offering the figures people had whispered about in December. Ann donated it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History, where it can still be seen.

A neighbour did far better. Julius McKinney, a farmer, found a second fragment of the same fireball, weighing 1.7 kilos, on a dirt road, had to fight nobody for it and sold it without lawyers. With the money he bought a house and a second-hand car.