“She’s the only one who’s ever been hit by a meteorite and lived to tell about it. Because of that, the meteorite has been appraised at over a million dollars,” Prondzinski said.
In an interview with National Geographic, Florida State College astronomer Michael Reynolds said, “You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time.”
There have been some near misses in the years since Hodges was hit.
Most recently, on June 26, people in Southern states reported seeing a fireball fly across the sky, and pieces of a meteorite hit a house in McDonough, Georgia, with some piercing its roof, denting its flooring, and missing a resident inside. He likely heard what sounded like a gunshot.
“I suspect that he heard three simultaneous things,” said Scott Harris, a researcher at the University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ department of geology, the university reported. “One was the collision with his roof, one was a tiny cone of a sonic boom and a third was it impacting the floor all in the same moment.
“There was enough energy when it hit the floor that it pulverized part of the material down to literal dust fragments.”
Harris studied the rocks and concluded the meteorite could have formed 4.56 billion years ago, making it older than the Earth. It is still being studied at the university.
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