Has anyone ever been hit by a meteorite?
Yes, but only a handful of well-documented cases exist. The best known is Ann Hodges, who was bruised by a meteorite while resting on her sofa in Alabama in 1954.
Being struck by a meteorite is one of the rarest accidents there is, but it has happened. The most famous case took place on 30 November 1954 in Sylacauga, Alabama, in the United States. A stone of about 4 kg crashed through the roof of a house, bounced off a large radio and hit Ann Hodges on the hip as she dozed on the sofa. She was left with a dramatic bruise, and she remains the first person whose injury from a meteorite is medically and scientifically well documented.
Other close calls are easier to find. In August 1992 a shower of stones fell on the town of Mbale in Uganda, and a boy was reportedly struck by a tiny fragment of only a few grams that had already been slowed by the leaves of a banana tree; he was unhurt. In October 2021 a woman in Golden, British Columbia, woke to find a fist-sized meteorite on her pillow, inches from her head. Cars and houses have been hit more often, simply because they cover so much more ground than people do.
Older reports are harder to judge. Historians have found an Ottoman government record of a man said to have been killed by a falling meteorite near Sulaymaniyah, in what is now Iraq, in 1888, and chronicles from China and elsewhere describe deaths from falling stones. These accounts are intriguing, but no meteorite survives to confirm them, so scientists treat them with caution.
The reason injuries are so rare is that most of Earth is ocean, farmland, desert or forest, and people occupy only a minute fraction of its surface. Most incoming meteoroids also break up and slow down high in the atmosphere, so the pieces that reach the ground are usually small and falling only at the speed of a dropped stone.