B.C. woman wakes up to find a meteorite under her pillow
Resident shaken after rock from space smashes through bedroom ceiling
Ruth Hamilton was sound asleep last week when she was awoken by her dog barking, the sound of a crash through her ceiling and the feeling of debris on her face, the resident of Golden, B.C., said Monday.
She said she jumped out of bed and turned on the light to figure out what had happened, and discovered a hole in her ceiling.
“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” she said of the Oct. 3 incident. “I wasn’t sure what to do so I called 911 and, when I was speaking with the operator, I flipped over my pillow and saw that a rock had slipped between two pillows.”
A police officer was sent to investigate, she said. Initially, the officer suspected it was debris from a construction site on a nearby highway.
“He called the (construction site) and they said they hadn’t done a blast but that they had seen an explosion in the sky and, right then and there, we realized it was a meteorite.”
They concluded it must have been a fragment from a meteor shower that took place earlier that night.
She said the officer soon left, but she couldn’t get back to sleep.
“I was in shock and I just sat here for a few hours shaking,” she said. “The odds of that happening are so small so I’m pretty grateful to be alive.”
Apart from being shaken up, Hamilton said she avoided any injuries, but plans to keep the rock.