10 Weird Meteorite Stories from Space

Añadido: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Hidden within the study of meteorites  there have been a number of strange, sometimes even bizarre stories of the  recovery and the composition of rocks falling from space. Already mysterious, these  fragments of planets and asteroids are sometimes accompanied by colorful and interesting  stories beyond their extraterrestrial origins, so here are ten weird meteorite  stories from the history of meteoritics.

[00:00:26]Number 10. Clarendon C, Texas. 2015 While this meteorite isn’t of  great interest scientifically, it’s a common chondrite that represents around  80 percent of all meteorites and we have, and more fall each year, it’s the strange  circumstances of how this meteorite was found that was interesting, because it  apparently was not found by a human.

[00:00:50]To explain a few things, the C in the name  indicates that it was the third meteorite, unrelated to the others, found in the  areas around Clarendon. This was a large, weathered meteorite that had broken into  fragments, but the largest was about 760 pounds. It was found by the owners of a dude  ranch, or rather, was found by their horse samson.

[00:01:12]What happened was they were taking some guests  horseback riding and decided to stop for water for the horses near a stream, and about ten feet  from the meteorite samson stopped in its tracks, snorted at it in an agitated way, and wouldn’t  get close to it. The owner saw that the huge rock that was scaring the horse was a rusty  looking stone, and the other fragments lying around it were significantly heavier than  normal rocks, and as a result suspected it was a meteorite. It was confirmed, and indeed,  this meteorite was discovered by a horse.

[00:01:45]What exactly the horse was picking up on  is anyone’s guess, because the meteorite had been sitting on earth exposed to rain and  weather for many years. But whatever it was, the horse knew something wasn’t right about that  rock. The huge mass is now in a university museum.

[00:02:03]Number 9. Chinguetti, Mauretania.  1916 The Missing Meteorite Enigma In 1916 a French Army captain named Gaston Ripert  overheard some camel herders in Mauretania talking about an enormous block of iron in the Sahara  desert dunes that they referred to as the iron of god. Ripert asked them if they would show  it to him, so they rode out into the desert, even to the extent that one interpretation is that  Ripert was blindfolded for the journey because he said he went out there blind, and about dawn  they arrived, and there was a truly enormous partly buried piece of what appeared to be iron,  and by enormous, the report is that it was 100 meters wide, so more of a hill than a rock, that  had polished to mirror shine by the blowing sand.

[00:02:53]He also noticed that the mass had what he  described as needles of iron that could not be broken off, which is interesting  because iron rich silicate meteorites might do that as they weather, and there was  no way Ripert knew that possibility because that type of weathering in this meteorite  class had not been discovered yet in 1916.

[00:03:12]So Ripert collected what he thought was  a detached piece of this iron mass from the top of it that he believed was part  of it, and after World War I had ended he had it analyzed and it was found to be a  scarce type of stony iron meteorite called a mesosiderite. Exactly the type of meteorite  that might form the needles he observed.

[00:03:32]This type of meteorite is from a zone inside of an  asteroid where an impact of a stone mass hits an iron mass heating everything up and the materials  mixed only to cool afterward. After that, a further impact knocked it off the asteroid to  eventually make its way to earth. If a meteorite like this falls on earth and is subject to long  periods of weathering, the silicates can weather out before the iron and form metal needle  structures. Because of the purported size, which would be far larger than any other known  meteorite, the huge mass out in the desert became the stuff of legends to meteorite hunters. Any  attempts for many years to find the iron main mass again were fruitless, and it was assumed that the  shifting sand had reburied the mass, compounded by the fact that Ripert only had a general idea,  more of a guess, of where it was because he was traveling blind. No one today living in the area  seems to have any knowledge of the original story of the camel herdsmen that blindfolded Ripert  to keep the iron of god’s location secret.

[00:04:33]The scientific problem here is that there  is an upper limit on how large a relatively small meteorite that fell to earth can  be, even in a glancing skip trajectory, and not explode into huge numbers of fragments  because of violent entry. The description of the iron block here far exceeds that size, but  also wasn’t large enough to overwhelm it like something like a dinosaur killer asteroid  can, and the meteorite material he brought back didn’t have any out of the ordinary  strength properties or anything like that.

[00:05:03]It’s still unknown what Ripert saw in the desert,  we only know that he brought back a real meteorite from the area that is of a scarce type, but modern  magnetometer surveys of the area simply do not show a giant mass of iron rich material present  anywhere out there. And the Chinguetti meteorite itself that he recovered, is determined to have  only been no larger than 31 inches originally before its atmospheric flight. Ripert was  schooled in natural sciences and geology and maintained that he knew what he saw, but whatever  that huge mass was, it was never found again.

[00:05:38]Number 8. Ann Hodges Survived  Being Hit By a Meteorite This case is one of the very rare cases where  someone was verifiably hit by a meteorite. The story is about Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges.  On November 30, 1954 she was napping on her couch in Sylacauga, Alabama when a meteorite fell  through her roof, through the ceiling, hit a radio and bounced off and then hit her on her thigh and  hand leaving bruises. Initially her and her mother who was also in the house at the time thought  the chimney had collapsed because the meteorite had filled the house with debris and dust and  left a large hole in the roof and ceiling.

[00:06:17]Her husband got home a few hours later from  work, to which she said there had been a little excitement. It did shake her though, and she  visited the hospital the next day. And here’s where this gets a bit silly. So the US Air Force  shows up and confiscates the meteorite, not at all sure how they had that legal authority or why  they were interested in a natural space rock, and confirmed that it was indeed a chondrite  meteorite and somehow the Mayor of the town got ahold of it and wanted to donate it a museum,  but Hodges countered that she had well enough evidence from the hole in her house, that it  was hers. She eventually got her meteorite back, only to get sued by her landlord who claimed  ownership, a settlement was agreed upon, and Hodges ultimately kept her meteorite.  The problem is that she got a lot of short term media attention over the incident,  and the fact that it happened at all, seemed to have affected her overall  health, which wasn’t great to begin with and ultimately she sold the meteorite  to the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

[00:07:22]Number 7. Space and Northern Sudan. 2008.

[00:07:27]This is a situation that will probably happen  again and with increasing frequency as all sky surveys come online to actively track near earth  objects with increasing precision. On October 8, 2008, the automated Catalina  sky survey spotted an asteroid, cataloged as 2008 TC3, that appeared to be  on a collision course with earth. It was, but posed no major threat, it was simply too  small. But what’s noteworthy is that it was first spotted in space and then was monitored  all the way down to the surface of the earth.

[00:08:02]One day later, it hit earth as a meteorite and  was predicted correctly to fall in an area of Northern Sudan. The entry was witnessed  by airline pilots as flashes in the sky, who had been warned of the imminent fall, and it  exploded 37 kilometers above the ground with a yield of as much as 2.1 kilotons of TNT. Much  of this meteorite vaporized in the atmosphere, but about 35 pounds of fresh meteorites were  ultimately found near an area called Almahata Sitta, arabic for station six, which is  a railroad stop on the line to Khartoum.

[00:08:38]The meteorite is generally, that gets  complicated, considered to be a rare type called a Ureilite based on the first sample  found and was found to contain amino acids, making it an important meteorite, that’s usually  something associated with a different type of meteorite and is associated with life, but  the story gets more convoluted. The origin of ureilites is undetermined, but it is believed  that they are from F type solar system asteroids.

[00:09:06]Then it got weirder. As the area of  the fall was searched more meteorites were found and they kept coming back as  different classifications of meteorite, sometimes radically. Indeed, there were  20 different types noted, some unique, that were all in a very small geographical  area. It seems unlikely that they aren’t related somehow. But it’s not impossible that  a bunch of different types of meteorites from different origins would fall about the same time  in the same area. It could happen, but not likely.

[00:09:38]But the types didn’t really match the dust  in the atmosphere after the fall and other indicators that maybe this is just an area  that just happened by chance to get hit by a bunch of different meteorites from  different origins. Nanodiamonds were actually found in some of the material  that would indicate that the material actually came from a moon or mars sized object  originally that was shattered into asteroids, or at least a Ceres sized object that  had interactions of water going on.

[00:10:05]Interestingly the object was also  captured by infrasound detector arrays in Kenya when it exploded and the  US caught it with its spy satellites, the images of which have never been released.  Ultimately though, asteroids of this size hit earth several times per year, and it fell over  a sparsely populated area and caused no damage.

[00:10:28]Number 6. The Malacca Incident. In the middle of the 17th century, or the 19th century, the history isn’t clear on  that, a Dutch ship called the Malacca was sailing near the island of Sumatra and the account is that  a meteorite struck the ship, devastating its deck, and killed two sailors instantly, and injured  many more. The accounts suggest that meteorite fragments actually penetrated the wood deck of  the vessel. The problem is that no one seems to have saved any of the fragments. Finding anything now is not likely, as the fragments would be under water in an  uncertain location because it happened in the open sea. The ship is long gone, the witnesses  long gone, and no meteorite associated with it exists. Still, the nature of the account  does seem to indicate that it was a meteorite that hit the Malacca one day long ago. Number 5. The Tutankhamun Meteorite Dagger The pharaoh Tutankhamun reigned about 1334  to 1325 BC and his tomb was found famously intact and unrobbed by Howard Carter. Many  famous artifacts were discovered including perhaps the most famous ancient artifact ever  found, the gold mask of Tutankhamun. But also in the grave goods of the tomb there was an iron  dagger. The composition of the iron here showed a high nickel content and the presence of cobalt  that indicated a composition consistent with an iron meteorite that had been worked into a knife. This was kingly indeed, because this was a period in time where iron smelting and iron working was  very rare in Egypt, and in fact, that early iron was considered more precious than gold. Iron  of unknown origin found somewhere in Egypt in a fully metallic form would certainly have gotten  attention and ended up in Tutankhamun’s burial goods. There have actually been instances of  metallic beads found in Egyptian tombs that appear to be meteoritic iron as well, but it’s not clear  if it’s from the same meteorite as the dagger.

[00:12:31]But analysis of some of the beads showed that the  Egyptians were working with meteorite iron before they were working with smelted iron. Oddly the  Egyptians appeared to link iron with the stars in their temple inventories. Regardless of the  reasons they did that, well, we link iron today, and nickel, with the explosions of giant stars. Number 4. The Iron Rain of Yunnan Province. About 1341 AD. This is a truly anomalous one, because it should be solved by now but isn’t. Historic  annals from China record that around 1341, a huge iron rain occurred that was so intense  that numerous people and animals were killed.

[00:13:12]If this actually happened, it would be among the  most deadly meteorite falls in recorded history.

[00:13:18]In medieval China, they had been smelting and  working iron for millenia, and knew what iron was, it was an every day material for them so they  would have recognized iron when they saw it.

[00:13:28]Moreover the account specifically describes a  massive explosion in the sky before the iron rain, and it can reasonably be said that the most  likely cause was an iron meteorite entering the atmosphere, detonating into numerous fragments,  and the fragments falling to earth. This still happens, it can happen tomorrow, and the account  seems to accurately describe that. But here is the oddity, for such a large event, the reality is  that iron will just sit in the ground and slowly rust, and there are meteorites far older than  1341 that survive, the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona is iron, and it fell 50,000 years  ago, forming an iron rain of its own fragments of which are numerous along with fully metallic  fragments still found today. Yet in this case, even in an area where metal detectors have been  in private hands for years, no one has ever found any specimens of an iron rich meteorite  fall in this area. The pieces should be there, but haven't turned up. Even if the fragments were  recovered and smelted, with that extensive of a fall, something would have been missed, and  there are other iron meteorite falls in China that in modern times were easily and rapidly  identified no matter how old the fall was.

[00:14:42]Number 3. Bondoc and Harvey Nininger This story is like something out of an Indiana Jones film. This meteorite is an intermediate  meteorite type, officially a mesosiderite, a mix of stone and iron in roughly equal  proportions and was found on the Bondoc Peninsula in the Philippines sometime in 1956. A  lot of people did not at the time believe this was a meteorite, it’s very strange compared to other  meteorites known, and still is, but it was one and was sold to Dr. Harvey H. Nininger in 1962.  Nininger was basically the father of the field of meteorite studies, and was keenly acquiring  any specimens he could from anywhere in the world for his studies. In this case, the Bondoc  meteorite was enormous, about 850 kilograms, but getting something like that from a remote  area in the Philippines back to his laboratory in the United States was not an easy task at all. Basically, Nininger sent a grad student from the University of Kansas to go get the meteorite, and  it took over three years in total. He had to walk nine hours to get to the meteorite with a team he  had along a crocodile and snake infested river, and once there had to load the meteorite on a sled  that was supposed to be drawn by three harnessed caribao, a water buffalo though some sources  say caribou, but they couldn’t budge it, so they brought in a bulldozer with great difficulty,  one wonders, if you intend to drag a sled, why not a team of four caribao? Well the accounts  do say there were crocodiles in the area, so maybe they originally did. Anyway, the  bulldozer dragged it to a river bank, they built a bamboo raft and loaded it onto it. And  then a typhoon struck, derailing the whole thing, and two motorboats had to be brought in to keep  the raft stable during the storm but one of the boats sank, nearly killing four people. Eventually, with even more difficulty, it was transported to Manila by truck, and  then loaded onto a ship and taken to the US, where there was much bureaucratic red tape to  import it, and finally it made it Nininger’s lab, and the bulk of this meteorite is now with  a specialized laboratory at the University of Arizona. Seems like a lot of trouble that  grad student John Lednicky went through, but it was worthwhile because Bondoc is a very unique  meteorite with unclear origins other than it is from the boundary layer of a destroyed asteroid  between its iron core and silicate surface.

[00:17:08]Number 2. The Hypatia Stone, Egypt. 1996. In 1996 a small claimed meteorite was found, some claimed it to be kimberlite debris,  but there are also still proponents of it being a meteorite of a very special origin, the  nucleus of a comet. This has never been settled, and this stone is still considered unclassified  and not listed in the official meteorite catalogs.

[00:17:31]The reason the finder picked it up was because  it appeared glassy, and in that area of Egypt a valuable type of impact glass is found known  as Libyan desert glass. But it wasn’t that.

[00:17:42]The problem is that this stone was tiny,  only 30 grams, and that had to be cut into pieces for analysis and only about four  grams really remain. Where it gets weird is the composition. This rock contains diamonds,  microscopic ones, which meteorites sometimes do, but earth geology is less likely, though  obviously diamonds are found on this planet.

[00:18:03]The samples showed anomalous isotope distributions  that looked extraterrestrial, but were called into question as contamination. One interesting  idea here is that it has been suggested that the stone actually is a fragment of whatever impacted  North Africa and created the Libyan desert glass, but this too is unresolved. Moreover, the weird  chemistry suggests in some ways that if it is a meteorite, it predates the solar system. By 2018, compounds were found that supported a very unusual, but extraterrestrial origin.  Whatever this rock is, it’s chemically weird and some samples of interstellar  dust grains actually overlap with it, meaning that it’s possible that this stone  is a relic, older than the solar system, of material created in a Type Ia supernova. But  ultimately just what this stone is, or even if it represents meteorite, and if not what created  its geology on Earth remain open questions.

[00:19:01]Number 1. The Fossil Meteorite Osterplana 065 This one is a genuine mystery, with a bizarre history. So meteorites unless something unusual  happens, just land on the earth’s surface and then start to weather away. Eventually, they’re  gone, incorporated in the soil, and chances are because micrometeoroids constantly rain upon the  surface of the earth, you almost certainly have interacted with degraded material from space  if you’ve ever gardened, or even washed your car. Or at least the atoms they were made from  before they dissipated from weathering and so on.

[00:19:36]But very rarely a meteorite can preserve for a  very long time under the right conditions and even effectively become a fossil. Cue in the Thorsberg  stone quarry in Sweden. This meteorite impacted earth in the Ordovician Period, about 470 million  years ago. It basically fell in water and embedded itself in sediment, and that preserved it. This is an unusual period, because other fossil meteorites of this period from the same  fossil beds have been found that seem to correlate with a specific break up of an asteroid that  yielded the very common L type of chondrite.

[00:20:10]L chondrites are considered very normal meteorites  for the solar system, and show nothing unusual, but one is very different. Cataloged as Osterplana  065, this meteorite may have been a fragment of the impactor that broke up the L chondrite parent  body based on cosmic ray exposure, but it’s not like any other meteorite ever seen because  the chromium to oxygen isotope ratios fall way outside of any other meteorite we’ve ever found. There have been papers published on this anomalous meteorite, one specifically that suggests that  whatever this meteorite is, the type no longer falls on earth for unknown reasons even though  the L chondrites still routinely do. This is unsatisfying, if you have one type still falling,  you should have both types still falling because to shatter an asteroid of the magnitude of the L  Chondrite parent body, you either need huge mass which leaves meteorites, or very high speed.  Or alternatively, you need a situation where the L chondrite parent body is still out there  somewhere, and took other hits and still produces ejected material, but the impactor is long gone  and does not. The ultimate conclusion at the time though was that the meteorites that fall on  earth today are not completely representative of what asteroids were in the asteroid belt during  the Ordovician period. That makes little sense.

[00:21:32]I offer another suggestion, that the meteorite  impactor may have been small, and moving at a high speed hyperbolic trajectory and its anomalous  isotopes may point to it being an interstellar meteorite that originated in another star system  entirely. If you have have things like 3i/ATLAS, Oumuamua and 2i Borisov in such numbers as to  suggest interstellar material passes through the solar system constantly and always has, then  it’s certainly possible that such a rock might hit a solar system object at a hyperbolic speed,  a characteristic that identifies interstellar objects, and leave a meteorite that gets deposited  on earth. I leave it up to the chemists to decide if my hypothesis is viable or not. Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael  Godier currently warning all of you in the audience that if you intend to recover a  multiple ton meteorite from a remote location, be sure you bring enough caribou if its in an  area where they live, and not water buffaloes if that isn’t appropriate. That whole affair got  infinitely more difficult than planned because they were a caribao short. But isn’t that how life  works, never enough hours in the day, and always a caribou short which is why it takes me forever to  get books out and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe  to my channels for regular, in depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects  of this amazing universe in which we live.