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Meteorite Strikes Causing Injury Or Death

Dr. Moody Jacobs shows a giant bruise on the side and hip of his patient, Ann Hodges, after she was struck by a meteorite.
She is the only confirmed person in history to have been hit by a meteorite (1954).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)

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Tell me that she is looking down, rather than being asleep...
 
Dr. Moody Jacobs shows a giant bruise on the side and hip of his patient, Ann Hodges, after she was struck by a meteorite.
She is the only confirmed person in history to have been hit by a meteorite (1954).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)
I was cleaning a set of shelves once and dislodged an item on the top. I felt it moving past and in fact I felt I passing my hair and for those who know me that shows how close to hitting me it was. The item in question was a meteorite so technically I was nearly hit by a meteorite!
 
I was cleaning a set of shelves once and dislodged an item on the top. I felt it moving past and in fact I felt I passing my hair and for those who know me that shows how close to hitting me it was. The item in question was a meteorite so technically I was nearly hit by a meteorite!

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This newly published Smithsonian article provides a more detailed account of Ms. Hodges' famous meteorite injury and the incident's aftermath(s).
In 1954, an Extraterrestrial Bruiser Shocked This Alabama Woman

Ann Hodges remains the only human known to have been injured by direct impact of a meteorite

On November 30, 1954, Ann Hodges experienced a rude awakening. As the 34-year-old lay napping cozily under quilts on the sofa in her Alabama home, she awoke with a jolt as she became the only human being known to have suffered an injury after being struck by a meteorite.

The approximately 8.5-pound, 4.5-billion-year-old interplanetary traveler shot like a bullet through her Sylacauga house’s roof at 2:46 p.m. It banged into her large radio console and bounced onto her body, causing a large bruise on her left side.

Experts estimate the odds of being hit by a meteorite are 1 in 1.6 million. "You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time," Michael Reynolds, a Florida State College astronomer told the National Geographic. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smit...e-nature+(Science+&+Nature+|+Smithsonian.com)
 
The Smithsonian article cited above mentions some other incidents involving injurious or fatal meteorite effects ...

While Hodges is the only human known to have been injured by a meteorite impact, a cow in Venezuela died after being pummeled by an unearthly rock in 1972. Another meteorite in February 2013 created a sonic boom that broke windows and scattered debris, causing injuries to more than 1,000 people in Chelyabinsk, Russia. There also was an unconfirmed report in 2016 that a bus driver in Natrampalli, India, suffered fatal injuries after being hit by detritus ejected when a meteorite hit the ground. And despite multiple social media claims of being struck by a meteorite in the 21st century, none has been confirmed. ...
 
l have a dim memory of reading about a meteorite impact in Egypt that killed a dog.

[Googling...]

Alexandria, 28.6.1911:

“The fearful column which appeared in the sky at Denshal was substantial. The terrific noise it emitted was an explosion which made it erupt several fragments of volcanic materials. These curious fragments, falling to earth, buried themselves into the sand to the depth of about one metre. One of them fell on a dog. . .leaving it like ashes in a moment.”

maximus otter
 
The earliest documented case.

Although tales of people being killed by meteorite impacts date back to biblical times.

But few deaths, if any, have been documented. Now, Turkish researchers have uncovered the earliest evidence that a meteorite killed one man and paralyzed another when it slammed into a hilltop in what is now Iraq in August 1888.

Documents chronicling the event were found in Turkish state archives, the team reports online today in Meteoritics & Planetary Science. According to one of three letters written by local authorities in the region shortly after the event, the killer meteorite was one of several that fell during a 10-minute interval. Reports of a fireball seen in a city nearby suggest the object approached the area from the southeast before it blew up high in the atmosphere (artist’s representation of a meteorite strike pictured above).

In addition to the human casualties, some crops and fields were significantly damaged, the letters report. One of the letters was also supposedly accompanied by a sample of the meteorite, but the researchers have yet to find that object in Turkish archives or museums, they note.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/archivists-uncover-earliest-evidence-person-being-killed-meteorite
 

This more extensive article at the Discover magazine site:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/th...-man-in-iraq-in-1888-historic-records-suggest

... provides more details on the 1888 incident and the prospects for locating the actual site of of the impact / blast effects. Here is the article's assessment of the 1888 incident's significance:

The accounts of the 1888 event are compelling because they were written by local high-ranking officials, including the regional governor, and forwarded to the sultan. Furthermore, they suggest that stony fragments were recovered from the impact site and mailed in to the central government. Unsalan and his team have looked for the would-be meteorites in area museums and archives, but have so far come up empty-handed. Those potential space rocks could be lost in a museum collection now.

The authors say this is the oldest known meteorite death in recorded history because no other purported incident can claim to have both a trustworthy historical record and a sample fragment from the site. However, it’s important to reiterate that the researchers have not been able to recover or confirm that the stony fragments supposedly collected after the 1888 event were, in fact, of extraterrestrial origin.

This article also provides the following review of other historical events alleged to involve death by meteorite:

...[H]istory is surprisingly rich with accounts of people killed by meteorites. For decades, researchers have searched for and debated historical claims of people and animals that might have died in impacts.

For example, on Sept. 14, 1511, a monk and several animals were said to have been killed in Lombardy, Italy, after more than 100 pounds of space rocks fell. And Chinese records say that 10 people were killed by a large shooting star that fell on a rebel camp on Jan. 14, 616.

Back then, people didn’t really know what meteorites were. But by the early 1800s, the scientific community generally agreed that meteorites fell from space. And there have been many accounts since then — often potentially dubious in nature — of people being killed by space rocks.

In 2016, a bus driver who was walking near a college in India was killed and three others were hurt when a supposed space rock smashed down and exploded. The Indian government and even some researchers backed the claim, and global mainstream news outlets carried the story. But those claims died down after a story in The New York Times said NASA disputed that the explosion was a meteorite. However, NASA never actually analyzed the event, and it’s not clear that any scientific investigation was ever published.
 
This more recent Discover magazine webpage lists 7 possible incidents that may have represented death(s) caused by meteorites, including the 1888 Iraq incident discussed above.
Death From Above: Seven Unlucky Tales of People Killed by Meteorites

Researchers mining ancient texts in recent decades have discovered that historical records are surprisingly rich with accounts of apparent deaths due to falling space rocks. In most cases, there’s no physical evidence to confirm these stories. Yet their presence in official histories and similarities to modern accounts lead some scientists to believe at least some of the events must have really occurred.

Chinese histories in particular are rich with accounts from government scholars and astronomers that document times when “a star fell.” These records were kept consistently across many provinces and passed from dynasty to dynasty, chronicling significant events spanning thousands of years. If these documents accurately portray meteor fireballs, then somewhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of people have been killed by falling space rocks.

Here, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most compelling and captivating accounts. ...

Around 1700 B.C.: Meteor Explosion May Have Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah ...

Jan. 14, A.D. 616: 10 Rebels Killed in Wall Collapse ...

Around 1341: ‘Iron Rain’ Over Yunnan Province Kills People and Animals ...

April 4, 1490: 10,000 People Killed in Chinese City of Ch’ing-yang ...

1648: Two Sailors Killed on the Dutch Ship Malacca ...

Aug. 10, 1888: Ottoman Empire Records Suggest Meteorite Death ...

FULL STORY: https://www.discovermagazine.com/th...-unlucky-tales-of-people-killed-by-meteorites
 
The 'Sodom and Gomorrah' story in that article is a web of unsupported facts. Only the archaeologists from the 'unaccredited' university of Trinity Southwest think that the Tall el-Hammam site has anything to do with Sodom, and they have tacked on a meteorite strike onto the story to explain the Biblical fable.
 
The 'Sodom and Gomorrah' story in that article is a web of unsupported facts. Only the archaeologists from the 'unaccredited' university of Trinity Southwest think that the Tall el-Hammam site has anything to do with Sodom, and they have tacked on a meteorite strike onto the story to explain the Biblical fable.
They're baaa-aaack ... and this time they've published a much more extensive report on the results of their 15 years of excavations at the Tall el-Hammam site. It seems they've added a new angle to the story - the Tunguska-scale airburst that destroyed this city is also the force that blew down the walls of Jericho.
A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom

As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).

Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.

Some seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.

About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground. ...

Getting answers required nearly 15 years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people. It also involved detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in 10 states in the U.S., as well as Canada and the Czech Republic. When our group finally published the evidence recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts and medical doctors.

Here’s how we built up this picture of devastation in the past. ...
FULL STORY: https://theconversation.com/a-giant...-inspiring-the-biblical-story-of-sodom-167678
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report in Nature's online open access Scientific Reports. The full report can be accessed at the link below.

Bunch, T.E., LeCompte, M.A., Adedeji, A.V. et al.
A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea.
Sci Rep 11, 18632 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3

Abstract
We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa); melted pottery and mudbricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3
 
Why would you need a natural explanation for an act of God? Surely "It was God's will" covers everything?
 
Looked great until -
"The project is under the aegis of the School of Archaeology, Veritas International University, Santa Ana, CA, and the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University, Albuquerque, NM"
Both are biblical-fundamentalist institutions which are devoted to proving that the Bible is literally true (I could say a certain amount about the ethical stance of charging students to learn things that are definitely not literally true, but I won't). "VIU proudly holds to a high view of Scripture, with each course offering rooted and grounded in the Bible."
"The mission of Trinity Southwest University is to provide quality higher education for adult learners, teaching them, through a variety of biblically-based academic disciplines, to uphold the divine authority of the Bible as God’s only inspired representation of reality to humankind" - from their own websites.
It is a disgrace that Nature has published this, as it simply cannot have been peer-reviewed.
 
Scientific Reports journal appears to go for quantity rather than quality since they are the "world's largest journal" by number of articles (unclear about the math, there). This is not their first controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports#Controversies

There is a lot to unpack in this article. It deserves a fair and thorough review by archeologists and geologists with expertise in this stuff. Some sources for the research also seem obscure. It's another lesson that science doesn't happen via one publication. It takes a long time and a community effort to sort through the evidence, evaluation, and conclusions.
 
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