The enigmatic item will be examined to see whether it truly has
extraterrestrial origins.
On July 6, a woman in the French town of Alsace was struck by a little item
as she was speaking with a friend on her patio. The black-and-gray
concretion looked like a meteorite upon closer examination.
The Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace
published the news first. The item impacted the woman in the ribcage hard enough to damage her,
according to The Weather Channel.
If true, it would be one of the most unusual cases of a human being struck
by a meteorite—at the very least, one of the rare cases in which the victim
survived to prove it happened. The most well-known incident occurred in 1954
when a woman in Alabama was severely injured by a meteorite that entered her
house through the roof.
An overview of the terminology is as follows: Earth-bound meteorites are
shattered pieces of space rock and metal. Rock and metal fragments fall as
meteors. Large space rocks and metal objects called asteroids are frequently
the cause of meteor showers on Earth.
Such debris frequently falls from space. In fact, a group of scientists
predicted last year that the Earth receives more than 5,000 tons of asteroid
and comet dust each year. The fact that the material actually survives the
fall is something that is quite unusual; most bigger quantities disintegrate
when they heat up in the Earth's atmosphere.
A possible meteorite struck the roof of a New Jersey house earlier this
year. A unique meteorite from the year 2021 fell to Earth on a road in the
English Cotswolds. In addition, a meteorite that landed in the Russian city
of Chelyabinsk in 2013—ten years ago already!—broke windows and injured
hundreds of people, but no one was killed. The biggest meteorite to strike
Earth this century was the one from Chelyabinsk.
In addition to the intrinsic worth they have when they're periodically
auctioned off, fallen meteorites can be of scientific interest since they
can be billions of years old, i.e., they date to the birth of the solar
system.
The fact that a meteor impacts a human instead of any other place on Earth
is even more unusual. Researchers looking through Ottoman Kurdistan's
records in 2020 discovered evidence that a falling meteorite killed one
person and disabled another in 1888.
Those incidents "precede the famously massive Tunguska explosion of 1908,
which may have killed two people, and are more evidence-based than a 1677
Italian manuscript from Italy—which even
NASA cites—in which an Italian monk was killed by a stone "projected from the
clouds," according to Atlas Obscura at the time.
To be hit by a space rock, every circumstance needs to be disastrous.
However, in contrast, this Alsatian woman now has a boasting privilege that
no one else on Earth does (pending verification that the object is a
meteorite and not a commonplace object).
