Did people long ago see meteorites fall?
Yes. People have watched meteorites fall for thousands of years, and some old meteorites were kept in churches and temples as special objects.
People have been watching the sky for as long as there have been people, so of course they saw fireballs and falling stones.
Some of the oldest written records come from China, where astronomers kept careful notes of things they saw in the sky for over two thousand years, including meteor showers and falling stones. Ancient Greek and Roman writers also described stones falling from the sky.
In some places, fallen meteorites were treated as sacred or special. A stone that fell in Ensisheim, in what is now France, in 1492 was hung in the town's church, and the largest remaining piece is still kept in Ensisheim today. Native peoples in North America treasured certain iron meteorites, and the Willamette meteorite remains important to the Clackamas people of Oregon. Some ancient Egyptians made beads from meteorite iron more than 5,000 years ago, and a dagger found in Tutankhamun's tomb has a blade made from meteorite iron.
In the 1700s, many scientists did not believe stones could fall from the sky. It was only around 1803, after a shower of thousands of stones fell at L'Aigle in France, that scientists finally agreed. So people saw them for thousands of years, but it took a long time to understand them.