- Fortunately, most meteorites don’t hit people — except for two unlucky Turks.
On average, 17 meteors hit Earth with every passing day. Fortunately, most of them stay as meteors and burn harmlessly away in the atmosphere.
Occasionally, the stones do get through and reach the planet’s surface. That’s when they become meteorites — now you know the difference.
There are plenty of strange stories about unusual meteorites and what people have done with the ones they found. Here are seven examples of them.
1. God’s Good Omen (Wrapped in Chains)
In 1492, King Maximilian was about to go fight some rebels in Flanders, when a large fireball crashed into a field outside the town of Ensisheim in modern France. The king and his highest-ranking priests decided that stone must’ve been a good omen from God himself.
So, they recovered the stone and chained it up in a church so it couldn’t return to the heavens. Because a bit of chain would surely stop Lord Almighty from getting his rock back if he wanted it.
But hey, Maximilian squarely beat the rebels so perhaps the meteorite was a sign of divine favor. We’re just saying, he seemed to think the Lord must be pretty fickle.
2. The Prettiest Meteorite
Most meteorites arrive on Earth as pieces of scorched, cracked stone and metal. Others, however, are absolutely gorgeous — like the Esquel meteorite.
The Esquel meteorite consists of silicates and meteoric iron, but within that shell are embedded countless olivine crystals, or peridots. Essentially, the Esquel is full of gemstones.
It’s unknown when the thing landed, but it was discovered in 1951 in Argentina. Today, pieces of the original 1,500-pound meteorite are on display in various museums around the world.
3. Tracked from Space to Earth
The meteorite called Almahata Sitta is fairly dull — it’s a black chunk of rock that fell to northern Sudan in 2008. But what’s significant about it is that Almahata Sitta is the only meteorite astronomers have been able to track from space to Earth.
Catalina Sky Survey spotted the meteorite on a collision course with Earth and followed it over the next 24 hours. As it hit Earth’s atmosphere, the meteorite exploded.
However, the researchers had had enough time to calculate the meteorite’s fragments should fall into the Nubian desert. And sure enough, when they went to look, they found 35 pounds of meteorite fragments to study.
4. Alien Materials
Although they come from space, most meteorites consist of minerals, metals, and other materials we can find right here on terra firma. But not all of them.
Take, for example, the El Ali meteorite discovered in Somalia in 2020. It contained not just one but two minerals that had never been seen on Earth before.
Well, technically they had — researchers had synthesized both materials already in the 1980s. However, neither of them exists on Earth naturally.
5. Right in the Chevy
In 1992, 18-year-old Michelle Knapp from Peekskill, New York, had a stroke of rotten luck. A meteorite plummeted through the atmosphere and punched right through the trunk of her red Chevrolet Malibu.
Oh, we’re sorry — we meant to say she had amazing luck. Sure, her car got demolished, but the bizarre incident made it a valuable collectible.
Within a week, Knapp sold the car for $10,000. That’s a nice bit of profit, considering she bought it from her grandmother for $400.
6. The Cow-Killer
Knapps profited from a meteorite hit, but one Venezuelan cow wasn’t so lucky in 1972. On October 15, farmhands in the town of Trujillo heard a massive, unexplainable bang.
When they investigated the next morning, they discovered a large rock in a field that hadn’t been there before. Right by the stone was a dead cow whose neck and collarbones had been smashed in.
We’re not sure what the farmers did with the unfortunate cow. But we do know what happened to the meteorite — they took it to a farm and made a doorstop out of it.
7. The Sulaymaniyah Incident
There is only one verifiable case where human beings have died directly from a meteorite impact. It may have happened more often — but this is the only one that’s been written down.
The incident happened in Sulaymaniyah, Turkey, on August 22, 1888. Locals saw a huge fireball in the sky, after which shards of stone began raining down on the village.
During the 10-minute bombardment, one man died and another was paralyzed after being hit by the stones. The meteorite was reported in identical detail in three separate government documents — so there’s little doubt that it actually happened.