On July 6, a woman in Alsace, France, was struck by a small object while chatting with a friend on her terrace. When examined in more detail, it was understood that the black-gray object was a meteor.
The object struck with such force that it left a bruise on the woman’s ribs. If confirmed, this will be one of the extremely rare instances of a meteor hitting a human. The most famous example was when a meteor hit a woman in Alabama in 1954, which fell from the roof of her home, leaving a large bruise on her body.
It is not uncommon for such objects to fall from space. What’s rare is that they hit a human. In fact, last year a group of researchers estimated that more than 5,000 tons of asteroid and comet dust fall to Earth each year. What’s relatively rare is that the material survived the fall; Most of the larger masses break down as they heat up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Earlier this year, a suspected meteorite hit the roof of a house in New Jersey. In 2021, a rare meteorite crashed into a driveway in the Cotswolds, England. And in 2013, a meteorite fell on the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, windows shattered and hundreds injured, but no one died. The Chelyabinsk meteorite was the largest meteorite to hit Earth this century.
Everything has to go perfectly wrong for a stone from outer space to hit you. But in return, this woman from Alsace now has a bragging right that no one else on Earth has…
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