A woman almost got killed by a meteorite that smashed through her roof and landed on her pillow. Ruth Hamilton, a resident of Golden, British Columbia in Canada, was sleeping in her home on October 3 when the incident occurred at midnight. The bang jolted her from sleep, and she experienced a shower of debris that followed the crash-in through the roof.
She heard her dog barking and then found a sizeable rock nestled between her pillows. She had been lying in that exact spot a moment earlier and couldn’t make sense of the stone. Out of fright, she dialed 911 and a police officer soon arrived at her house. He checked the rock and found it weighed about 2.8 pounds (1.3 kg).
There is a construction company in the nearby Kicking Horse Canyon close to Hamilton’s house. The police officer contacted them to determine if they blasted any rocks that night. The company said they did not blast any rocks that night, but reported seeing “a bright light in the sky that exploded and caused some booms.”
The officer then knew he must be holding a space rock that fell from the sky. Hamilton sent the sample to the Western University in London, Ontario, and experts at the Physics and Astronomy department confirmed that it was indeed a meteorite. The scientists said they still want to analyze the sample – but Hamilton said she would want to keep it as a memento once they are through with their research.
Authorities said this is not the first time a meteorite would crash into people’s homes. In 2020, a space rock crashed through the roof of a local villager in Indonesia, but no one was hurt. On November 30, 1954, Ann Hodges had a meteorite come calling at her Sylacauga, Alabama, home while she slept in her bed.
The object hit a radio console and bounced to hit Hodges as she slept, giving her painful bruises. The meteorite weighed 8.5 pounds (3.8 kg). Scientists said hundreds of meteorites fall to Earth every year, but most of them go unnoticed and undiscovered because they fall in forests or far away from people.
Hamilton said it is just unfortunate that someone can sleep peacefully in their house and get taken out overnight by a meteorite.