Mbale, Uganda (1992)
In 1992, another person survived a direct hit by a meteorite. The same year that Michelle Knapp’s car was struck (apparently 1992 was a big year for meteorites), a small chunk of space rock hit a young boy in Mbale, Uganda, in the head. Luckily, the piece was tiny (about 3 grams or 0.1 ounces) and first passed through banana leaves, which slowed it down enough to avoid injury. The boy was fine and got a fantastic story to tell for the rest of his life.
Lorton, Virginia (2010)
Imagine sitting at your desk in the middle of the work day, wishing desperately that you were anywhere else, and a rock from space crashes through the roof. That’s exactly what happened at Dr. Frank Ciampi’s office in Lorton, Virginia, on Jan. 18, 2010. A 300-gram (10.6-ounce) meteorite came flying through the ceiling of his medical practice and embedded itself in the floor beside his receptionist’s desk.
No one was hurt, but the meteorite shattered part of the building. Let’s just hope Dr. Ciampi let his receptionist go home early that day.
Chelyabinsk, Russia (2013)
Up until this point, all the eyewitness accounts of space rocks coming to Earth have been pretty lighthearted. Nobody has died, and damage has been pretty limited. But that all changed on Feb. 15, 2013, when an asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia.
This was not a tiny meteorite. This space rock was estimated to be 20 meters (65 feet) wide, and it packed a serious punch. The city of Chelyabinsk — and a huge area surrounding it — got extremely lucky that the asteroid exploded in the air, 30 kilometers (19 miles) above the ground. The blast itself was equivalent to 400–600 kilotons of TNT — more than 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If it had hit the ground intact, it would have been the most devastating disaster in recorded history.