Paul Seaburn October 12, 2021

Most people go to bed expecting to find the same person/pet/pillow or empty space next to them that was there when they fell asleep – anything else would be cause for alarm. A woman in British Columbia awoke last week to find something it’s pretty safe to say no one on Earth has ever found in bed with them before … and lived to tell the media about it. Meet Ruth Hamilton – the woman who woke up next to a space rock.

“I was shaking and scared when it happened, I thought someone had jumped in or it was a gun or something. It’s almost a relief when we realized it could only have fallen out of the sky.”

A relief to find out the rock on your pillow where your head should have been was a meteor and not debris from a construction site? Yep, that’s what Ruth Hamilton of Golden, B.C. told the Castlegar News on October 4th after she first called the police to come look at the rock on her bed and the hole in her roof. (Photos here.) After the police assured her it was not from a burglar nor from road construction in the nearby Kicking Horse Canyon just east of Golden, Hamilton checked with her neighbors and some remembered seeing a meteor streak across the sky the night before.

When you least expect it …

“It appeared quite close, and it was to the northwest of me. It went very quickly.”

“(I) saw it right above Elephant mountain, which is about 1130 meters elevation. It disappeared behind the mountain around 10:30 pm.”

Witnesses in Calgary and Nelson, British Columbia, reported their sightings to The Daily Hive, while the International Meteor Organization’s website had nearly a dozen reports from the Alberta area.

“I’m just totally amazed over the fact that it is a star that came out of the sky, It’s maybe billions of years old. The only other thing I can think of saying is life is precious and it could be gone at any moment even when you think you are safe and secure in your bed. I hope I never ever take it for granted again.”

Hamilton plans to keep the space rock as a souvenir, at least until her insurance company figures out if the roof repairs due to meteor strike are covered. And she’s obviously grateful her name wasn’t added to the very short list of people who succumbed to “death by meteorite.” In 2020, historical documents were confirmed to show the only death by meteorite occurred in on August 22, 1888 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, when one man was killed and another paralyzed by a space rock. In 1954, Ann Hodges was asleep on her couch in Oak Grove, Alabama, when she was hit by a piece of the Sylacauga or Hodges meteorite that crashed through the roof and seriously injured her hip – it is now in the Alabama Museum of Natural History (the space rock, not her hip).

First and Only ‘Death By Meteorite’ Has Been Confirmed | Mysterious Univ…

It seems like it should happen more often, but the first death and only by meteorite in recorded history has jus…

Follow that rock!

Ruth Hamilton of Golden, BC, beat the death-by-meteorite odds — Tulane University environmental sciences professor Stephen A. Nelson calculated the odds of getting killed by a meteorite and determined them to be about 1 in 250,000.

She needs to buy a lottery ticket.

MU*