HIT BY A METEORITE?
A woman in Schirmeck, in Alsace, France, was having coffee with a friend on her terrace when she was hit by what is believed to be a meteorite, leaving her with bruises. “I heard a big ‘Poom’ coming from the roof next to us. In the second that followed, I felt a shock on the ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat!” she said. Having realised it was not an animal, she “thought it was a piece of cement, the one we apply to the ridge tiles. But it didn’t have the colour.” She consulted a roofer, who said that it was not cement, but looked like a meteorite. She then took it to geologist Thierry Rebmann who said that the rock appeared to be a mixture of iron and silicon, which made it likely to be a meteorite. It seems that the meteorite struck the unnamed woman’s roof and broke into fragments, one of which struck her.
Astronomers estimate the chances of being hit by a meteorite are more than a trillion to one. The earliest report of someone being struck by one is in a manuscript published at Tortona, Italy, in 1677, which claims that a Milanese friar was killed by a meteorite, although this is impossible to verify. The only other people knownfrom a grapefruit-sized one that crashed through her roof, bounced off a radio and struck her side in 1954, and a young Ugandan boy from Mbale who was hit by a small meteorite fragment in 1992. It weighed 3g (0.1oz) and had bounced off a tree before hitting him, so he was uninjured.
