...[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.