Meteorite Crashes Through Ceiling and Lands on Woman’s Bed


Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by “an explosion.” She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock said 11:35 p.m.

At first, Ms. Hamilton thought that a tree had fallen on her house. But, no, all the trees were there. She called 911 and, while on the phone with an operator, noticed a large charcoal gray object between her two floral pillows.

“Oh, my gosh,” she recalled telling the operator, “there’s a rock in my bed.”

A meteorite, she later learned.

The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist had barely missed Ms. Hamilton’s head, leaving “drywall debris all over my face,” she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it captivated the internet and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.

“It just seems surreal,” Ms. Hamilton said in an interview on Wednesday. “Then I’ll go in and look in the room and, yep, there’s still a hole in my ceiling. Yep, that happened.”

Meteoroids hurl toward Earth every hour of every day. When they’re large enough, survive the trip through the Earth’s atmosphere and stick a landing, they become meteorites. People collect them. Others end up in museums. Some are sold on eBay. In February, Christie’s held a record-shattering auction of rare meteorites, raking in more than $4 million.

On the night the meteorite crashed Ms. Hamilton’s sleep in Golden, a town of 3,700 people about 440 miles east of Vancouver, other Canadians had heard two loud booms and seen a fireball streaking across the sky. Some caught the phenomenon on video, according to University of Calgary researchers.

Credit…Ruth Hamilton

After Ms. Hamilton called 911, an officer who went into her house suggested at first that the stray rock may have originated from a blast from roadwork at a nearby highway, she said. But the workers had not done any blasting that night.

Then the officer took another guess: “I think you have a meteorite in your bed.”

Ms. Hamilton did not sleep the rest of that night, she said, and sat in a chair, sipping tea as the meteorite sat on her bed. Ms. Hamilton told local news outlets that she kept the news to herself at first, but she later reported the episode to researchers at the University of Western Ontario, where Peter Brown, a professor there, confirmed the rock was a meteorite “from an asteroid.”

Ms. Hamilton also told her family and friends. “My granddaughters can say that their grandmother just almost got killed in her bed by a meteorite,” she said.

Meteorites have landed in people’s homes and yards before. In 1982, a six-pounder crashed into a house in Wethersfield, Conn., tore through its second- and first-floor ceilings, cannoned into the living room and ricocheted through a doorway and into the dining room, where it came to rest. In 2020, an Indonesian coffin maker was startled by a 4.4-pound meteorite that came through his roof.

The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a…



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