Inside Smith Hall on campus at the UofA is the Alabama Museum of Natural History, and it is *gorgeous*:
Columns like this just ask for husband-leaning:
There were a ton of fossils and other artifacts, but one of the better-known items on display here is the Hodges meteorite, the only meteorite ever known to actually hit a person. It crashed through Ann Hodges’ roof…
…bounced off her radio…
…and then struck her on her hip, which left, as you can imagine, a bruise. She deserved to have it named after her, right?
From Time Magazine:
Suddenly, across the noonday sky from west to east, swept a brilliant fireball. It left a long trail of white (some observers said black) smoke, and it flew so high that it was seen almost simultaneously in Greenville, Miss., Montgomery, Ala. and Atlanta. Over Sylacauga it exploded with a boom like thunder (some said a series of booms). A schoolboy in Montgomery, 50 miles away, insisted that the blast almost knocked him off his bicycle.
People thought the smoke might have come from an airplane crash, and Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery sent out 40 planes to look for wreckage (Mrs. Hodges’ home was in Oak Grove, in Talladega County). When the Air Force found out that what fell from the sky was at Ann Hodges’ home, they sent a helicopter to pick it up, and left with it — all before Mr. Hodges came home from work that day.
Now, in honor of the event, sculptor Don Lawler installed a piece he called ‘Falling Star‘ in front of the Sylacauga City Hall.
