When we stargaze, we bask in photons that have traveled for many millennia before reaching our eyes. To us, the stars appear fixed on a so-called celestial sphere that encapsulates our entire earthly existence.
The truth, of course, is that no such sphere exists. Instead, stars and galaxies are scattered through the cosmos at distances so great they’re incomprehensible to us.
But not all celestial phenomena exist so far away. Every day, shooting stars fail to recognize a boundary between space and Earth, dropping rocks from above — and often with dramatic results.
Our planet is vast, so meteorites typically don’t concern us. But every once in a while, these objects actually strike humans and our property. Based purely on statistics, researchers estimate that a space rock should strike a human roughly once every nine years. And with those odds, you’d expect people to get killed by meteorites fairly often.
“I do strongly suspect that stats on ‘death by asteroid’ have been severely undercounted through human history,” NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson told
Astronomy via email. “It’s only been in the last half century or so that we’ve even realized that such a thing could happen.”
However, researchers still have not found a single confirmed case of death by space rock. But that’s not to say we haven’t come close. Modern history is full of near misses. On many occasions, space rocks have exploded over populated areas and sent thousands of meteorites raining down.
One of the most recent and well-known examples occurred in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, when a house-sized asteroid exploded over the city and injured some 1,200 people. Further back, on Jan. 30, 1868, a meteor exploded outside a town called Pultusk, near Warsaw, Poland, creating a literal meteor shower: More than 100,000 stones fell from the sky. The biggest recovered meteorite (a fragment of a space rock that makes it to the ground) weighed 20 pounds (9 kilograms). It’s the largest meteorite fall on record.
“The citizens of Warsaw gazed, petrified with fear, on the rapid approach of an immense ball of fire, which burst over their heads with a noise and shock such as never before had been seen or heard on the surface of the Earth,” mineral expert
Lewis Feuchtfanger reported at a scientific conference in 1868. If someone flew over a populated area, dropping hundreds of thousands of stones from the sky, you might expect at least one person to get hurt. Yet there are no reports of injuries from Poland on that day.
However, if ancient scholars can be trusted, humans haven’t always been so lucky. Researchers mining ancient texts in recent decades have discovered that historical records are surprisingly rich with accounts of apparent deaths due to falling space rocks. In most cases, there’s no physical evidence to confirm these stories. Yet their presence in official histories and similarities to modern accounts lead some scientists to believe at least some of the events must have really occurred.
Chinese histories in particular are rich with accounts from government scholars and astronomers that document times when “a star fell.” These records were kept consistently across many provinces and passed from dynasty to dynasty, chronicling significant events spanning thousands of years. If these documents accurately portray meteor fireballs, then somewhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of people have been killed by falling space rocks.
Here, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most compelling and captivating accounts.