Ruth Hamilton
The woman in Golden, British Columbia, who woke in 2021 to find a meteorite had landed on her pillow beside her head.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Canadian
- Field
- Narrow escape
Ruth Hamilton lives in the mountain town of Golden in British Columbia. Late on the night of 3 October 2021 she was asleep when she was woken by a loud bang and found her bedroom covered in pieces of plaster. A rock had come through the roof and ceiling and landed on her pillow, a few centimetres from where her head had been.
She called the emergency services. A police officer first wondered whether the rock had been thrown up by blasting at a nearby road project, but the construction company said there had been none that night. A worker there had seen a bright light in the sky and heard bangs. The stone was a meteorite.
The stone, about the size of a fist, weighed about 1.3 kilograms. Hamilton passed it to Peter Brown and his colleagues at Western University in Ontario for study. From reports and camera records of the fireball, they reconstructed its path, and found that it had travelled from the asteroid belt. The meteorite is an ordinary chondrite and was named Golden.
Hamilton was unhurt. Her story is one of very few recorded cases of a meteorite landing on or near a sleeping person, a reminder that while meteorite falls are common across the whole Earth, hitting anyone is extremely rare.
On the timeline
- 3 October 2021A meteorite lands on a pillow