People Throughout History Who May Have Been Killed By Meteorites

Every day, an estimated 48 tons of meteoritic material falls onto Earth, although most of it burns up in the atmosphere, causing shooting stars. Space, it seems, is a surprisingly cluttered place. There are over 30,000 near-earth asteroids in the solar system, and Earth still bears the scars from several colossal asteroid impacts in the past. For smaller space rocks like meteoroids, there are certainly countless more out there. An average of 17 meteorites crash onto Earth's surface every day and, per Slate, the odds of being killed by one are about 1 in 700,000. Statistically, that makes death-by-meteorite more likely than winning the lottery.

To date, only one person has ever been officially killed by a meteorite, documented in historical records from 19th-century Iraq. However, history is full of unconfirmed reports of such incidents. While they may not always be considered credible, there's a good chance that falling chunks of space rock have been responsible for numerous deaths throughout history, and even in prehistory.

Fortunately, not all close encounters of the rocky kind are fatal. There are plenty of accounts of near misses too. In 1794, a meteor knocked the hat off an Italian child's head, leaving the child completely unharmed. More recently, in 2021, a Canadian woman was rudely awakened when a meteor smashed through her roof and landed on her pillow while she was sleeping! Many, however, have not been so fortunate, like when a meteor exploded over Russia in 2013, injuring over a thousand people.

Perhaps the oldest written accounts of death-by-meteorite can be found in the Hebrew Bible, which would later become the Christian Old Testament. The first was likely inspired by the ill-fated city of Ell el-Hammam, a Bronze Age city near the Dead Sea. According to a study in Scientific Reports, the airburst that destroyed it around 1650 B.C.E. was larger than the one which caused the famous Tunguska Event (more on that later). The researchers hypothesize that this was first remembered in oral histories, later becoming the story of the ill-fated city of Sodom. Genesis 19:24-25 reads, "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire [...] And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground."

Another account comes from the Book of Joshua, the 6th book in the Hebrew Bible and also part of the Old Testament. Joshua 10:11, describing the Battle of Gibeon, says "the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died." It pointedly says that more were killed by falling stones than by the battle itself. The story reportedly dates back to around 1420 B.C.E. and, while it's difficult to say if it's an account of a real event, it certainly sounds like a description of an airburst and falling meteorite debris. Similar deadly events have been recorded throughout history, and this isn't the only one to have reportedly struck a battlefield.

In 1490, Ming Dynasty history books recorded a catastrophic event in the city of Qingyang, in China's Gansu province. The so-called storm of stones saw rocks falling "like rain" from the sky, with sizes varying between a water chestnut and a goose egg. A paper in the journal Meteoritics suggests this bombardment may have been caused by an airburst as a large meteor crumbled while entering Earth's atmosphere, resulting in a shower of fragments pummelling anything below. No official death toll was ever recorded from this very literal meteor shower, but one source suggests there may have been tens of thousands of fatalities. If correct, this would make the Qingyang event the deadliest meteor impact ever recorded.

The same year, Chinese astronomers were the first to discover a comet in the sky, now believed to be responsible for the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. Its official name is C/1490 Y1. Earth's handful of annual meteor showers happen as our planet passes through trails of debris left in the wake of comets, as they cross Earth's orbit to swing by the Sun. The Quadrantid stream, though, seems to have been formed quite recently, and astronomers have also discovered an asteroid orbiting in its same path. This chunk of space rock may be a fragment of some violent event that caused the Quadrantid meteor shower. Though it's difficult to say whether this had anything to do with the stones which fell on Qingyang, it seems quite a coincidence.

During medieval times, monasteries were known for keeping extensive records, and there have been a couple of recorded incidents of Italian monks being struck down by falling space rocks. One such event happened in 1511 when a shower of falling stones was reported to have killed several birds, at least one sheep, and one member of the monastic order. The written account describes how "unheard-of thunders, mingled with awful lightnings, resounded through the heavens." The entire meteor shower reportedly lasted for around two hours as the landscape was peppered by stones the size of eggs falling from the sky.

Another incident, less dramatic but evidently no less deadly, happened around the middle of the 17th century when a Franciscan monk in Milan was struck on the leg by a meteorite. He reportedly died shortly afterward. The event was largely discounted until the 1980s when a pair of researchers found a written account by the doctor who treated the monk. From the written account, when the meteorite struck the unlucky man's leg, it severed his femoral artery causing him to quickly bleed to death.

[Featured image by Rama via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0 FR]

One of the most dramatic and terrifying meteorite deaths happened in rural France during the 18th century. In 1790, a large meteorite fell on the commune of Roquefort in Southern France, near the city of Toulouse. An old paper in the Philosophical Magazine explains that the falling meteor crushed an entire farmhouse, killing the farmer who lived there as well as several cattle. People arriving later discovered a crater 5 feet deep. Several other meteorites reportedly also crashed into France that evening but, mercifully, no other fatalities were reported.

Managing large tracts of land, farmers have witnessed many meteor falls, though it's likely plenty of them have gone unrecorded. Some aren't even noticed or recognized, like one instance of a meteorite that was used by a Spanish farmer to cure ham until he learned of its extraterrestrial origins. A few recent but less lethal incidents have also included a meteor that landed in an Indian rice field in 2019 and a Californian farmer who had a lucky escape in 2022. According to The Telegraph, his home was struck by an object described as a "flaming basketball." The farmer himself didn't actually see the object. He was at home at the time and didn't notice anything until he discovered his porch on fire. The resulting blaze destroyed a truck and a trailer, and killed a dog.

[Featured image by Reprodukcja własna via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

Perhaps the most famous cosmic impact in recent history was the Tunguska event. Most likely an airburst, this happened when an unknown object fell in 1908 over Siberia in Russia, exploding in the atmosphere with an estimated force of 15 megatons of TNT — a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. This devastated an area of around half a million acres of pine forest, leaving felled trees and charred wood in its wake. The Tunguska event is still quite mysterious, having left no crater and with only a few tiny fragments having been found of whatever caused it. Some speculate that it may have been a small comet rather than a meteor. There were plenty of eyewitnesses to the event, which was visible some 500 miles away from the impact site. A few reported seeing a fireball and feeling a hot blast of wind as an atmospheric shockwave knocked people off their feet.

According to a study in Icarus, at least 30 people were inside the blast area of the Tunguska event when the impact happened. Three were killed by it, although none were struck directly by falling material. Instead, they were most likely victims of the shockwave which followed the event. The same shockwave made many of the others lose consciousness. People outside the area reported that they'd felt the ground tremble, and the shockwave was even picked up by seismographs as far away as Western Europe.