Star on Alabama

The small town of Sylacauga, Ala., about 40 miles south of Birmingham, was enjoying its noontime peace under a blue sky. In the living room of her one-story frame house, Mrs. Ann Elizabeth Hodges, a pleasant, plump housewife of 32, was napping on a sofa. She was lying on her side, covered with two quilts, one hand resting on her hip. Her mother, Mrs. Ida Franklin, was sewing in the next room. Her husband, Hewlett, a telephone company tree surgeon, was away at work.

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.

Mrs. Hodges, napping soundly, missed the overhead fireworks, but she woke from her sleep with an impression that all was not well. "Mama came running in," she reported later, "and asked me if the house was falling down. I said I didn't know. I thought it was the chimney. I got up and started out of the house. Then my hip started hurting.''

Black Stone. The two women looked around the room. In one corner of the ceiling was a jagged hole, and on the floor lay a black, glb. stone. If it had just arrived from interplanetary space, Mrs. Hodges could claim to be the first fully authenticated case of a human injured by a meteorite.*She had no time for wild surmise. Neighbors came flooding into the house, followed by cops and more neighbors. A doctor rushed her to his office, X-rayed her space-inflicted injuries and found no broken bones. But she had bruises on her hip and hand.

The excitement grew and spread. In Phenix City (Alabama's "sin city" on the Georgia boundary), there was a rumor that the fireball was a flying saucer and that at least one invader from space had been seen bailing out of it. Most other observers thought it was a burning airplane. Acting on this theory, Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery sent 40 airplanes crisscrossing Alabama, looking for the wreckage. When Air Force authorities learned that the black stone had scored a hit on Mrs. Hodges, they sent a helicopter, which landed in the Sylacauga schoolyard.

Angular Rhombus. Government Geologist George W. Swindel, who happened to be making a water survey in the neighborhood, saw the helicopter and the excited crowds milling around. Steered to Mayor Howard's office, he examined the black stone and pronounced it "a smooth, angular rhombus* with some of its corners broken off." The material inside was iron grey. Scrapings tested with hydrochloric acid gave the rotten egg odor of hydrogen sulphide. Swindel consulted Kemp's Handbook of Rocks and cautiously decided that the stone fitted the description of meteorites "of the sulphide type." Then the helicopter crew took charge of the object and flew it off to Montgomery. It was gone when Hewlett Hodges came home from work.

Mrs. Hodges greeted her husband calmly. "We had a little excitement around here," she said. "A meteor fell through the roof." But her calm was soon shaken. Hewlett Hodges was furious. He had a bruised wife, a hole in his roof and he had not even seen the black stone that was causing all the fuss. He denounced the Air Force for carrying off his meteorite, whose potential value was brought to his attention by Lawyer Huel Love of Talladega. What with Hewlett's carryings-on and the crowds of people tramping in and out to look at her living-room ceiling. Mrs. Hodges eventually retired to the hospital with an attack of nerves. She was put to bed with sedatives, but could not sleep.

Wise Up. Next morning the crowds were still milling through the star-punctured house, and telegrams and phone calls were streaming into Sylacauga. Scientists begged the Hodges not to damage the meteorite. Lawyer Love, asking $5,000 for it, reported that agents of a Muncie, Ind. munitions manufacturer were flying to Sylacauga to outbid everyone else. The Smithsonian in Washington was interested too, but was not talking serious money. Mayor Howard declared that the meteorite would eventually come to rest in the State Museum of Natural History. Hewlett Hodges felt otherwise. "The mayor," he said, "had better wise up to things."

Late that night Hodges felt better. He learned that the meteorite was being studied at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio. A colonel at Wright-Patterson assured him by telephone that it would eventually be returned to the man whose wife it had nicked.

Asked how it felt to be the first person to be hit by a meteorite, Mrs. Hodges said: "I feel bruised."

*Meteor Expert Lincoln LaPaz of the University of New Mexico has figured out the chances of any human getting hit in 100 years are only three out of ten (TIME, Nov.12, 1951).

*A six-sided solid whose faces are parallelograms.

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