Who was Ann Hodges?
Ann Hodges was an Alabama woman who, on 30 November 1954, was hit on the hip by a meteorite of about 4 kg that crashed through her roof; she is the first person known for certain to have been injured by a meteorite.
Ann Elizabeth Hodges lived with her husband in a rented house near the town of Sylacauga, in Alabama, in the United States. On the afternoon of 30 November 1954, she was napping on her sofa under a quilt when a black stone about the size of a grapefruit crashed through the ceiling, bounced off a large wooden radio and struck her on the hip. It left a huge, painful bruise, but she was otherwise unharmed.
Many people in the area had seen a bright fireball and heard explosions, and some at first thought a plane had crashed or that it might be a Soviet attack, this being the early Cold War. Police and an air force officer came to take the stone away for examination, and it was soon confirmed as a meteorite. It weighed about 3.9 kg. A photograph of Ann's bruise appeared in newspapers and magazines, and she briefly became a national celebrity.
Then came an argument over ownership. The Hodges family wanted to keep the stone, but their landlady claimed it, arguing that it had fallen on her property. The dispute attracted wide attention before it was settled out of court, with the Hodges family keeping the meteorite. In 1956 Ann donated it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History at the University of Alabama, where it is still displayed. A second fragment was found nearby by a local farmer.
The Sylacauga meteorite is an H4 ordinary chondrite. Ann Hodges is remembered because she remains the best-documented case of a person being hit by a meteorite. Her story also shows that questions about who owns a meteorite can be surprisingly complicated, and that the answer depends on local law.