Ann Hodges wasn’t doing anything heroic when she made history. She was asleep on her couch in Sylacauga, Alabama, in 1954, when an 8.5-pound rock from space tore through her roof, ricocheted off her radio, and slammed into her hip.
That was the moment she became the first documented human to be hit by a meteorite—and possibly the most reluctant celebrity of the atomic age.
Locals thought it was a plane crash. Some swore it was a bomb. The Air Force swooped in to make sure it wasn’t part of a UFO. It wasn’t. It was a 4.5-billion-year-old chunk of chondrite, probably from the asteroid 1685 Toro, which is roughly the size of Manhattan and has been circling us like a mildly menacing ex ever since.
First Human to Be Hit by a Meteorite Still Has the Wildest Space Story on Record
Hodges got off easy, physically speaking. A grapefruit-sized bruise bloomed on her hip. But her quiet, simple life exploded. Neighbors swarmed her house. Reporters showed up. She got fan mail from schoolkids and church ladies. She was dragged onto I’ve Got a Secret and posed for photo shoots she hated.
“She was a very private person,” Mary Beth Prondzinski of the Alabama Museum of Natural History told Business Insider. “She didn’t like all the notoriety.”
Her husband, Eugene, tried to cash in but couldn’t find a buyer. The landlord claimed the rock belonged to her, since it hit her roof. After a year of legal fighting, the landlord settled for $500. By then, Hodges was sick of all of it. She handed the meteorite over to the museum and asked only to be reimbursed for her lawyer.
They divorced ten years later.
According to National Geographic, astronomer Michael Reynolds once said, “You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time.” Which makes what happened to Ann Hodges even crazier.
In 2023, a man in Georgia nearly joined her exclusive club when meteorite fragments ripped through his roof and blasted a hole in his floor. He was 14 feet away. Researchers say those fragments are also billions of years old.
Ann Hodges didn’t want the spotlight. She just wanted to nap. Instead, she got a permanent bruise, a short-lived media tour, and a weird claim to fame no one has topped since.
Earth is hit by space rocks every day. Most go unnoticed, but Ann’s certainly didn’t. Seventy years later, we’re still talking about it.
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