Meteorite crashes into house and lands in sleeping woman’s bed

A woman in British Columbia had a cosmically rude awakening earlier this month when a meteorite crashed through her ceiling and landed in her bed.

Ruth Hamilton, 66, told the New York Times that around 11:35 p.m. on October 3, she woke up to her dog barking, then heard what she described as “an explosion.” Turning on the light, she saw a hole in its ceiling and thought that a falling tree must have hit the house. It wasn’t until she called 911 and spoke to an operator that she spotted a 2.8-pound meteorite between her pillows.

“I didn’t feel it,” Hamilton, who lives in the city of Golden, told CTV Vancouver. “It never touched me. I had debris on my face from the drywall, but not a single scratch. “

When Hamilton first saw the space rock, however, she didn’t know what it was. Police who responded to the scene first consulted with a nearby construction crew, believing it could be debris from some kind of explosion.

Workers said they did not explode, but saw a “shiny ball in the sky,” police told CTV – suggesting the stone in Hamilton’s bed may have fallen from the space. Researchers at the University of Western Ontario later confirmed that the projectile was indeed a meteorite.

“I was shaking and scared when it happened I thought someone jumped or it was a gun or something,” Hamilton told the Pipestone Flyer. “It’s almost a relief when we realized he could only fall from the sky.”

Western scientists are asking residents of Golden and surrounding areas to keep an eye out for rocks that could be other meteorites and send any pictures they have of the passing fireball.

In the meantime, researchers are still studying the meteorite that landed in Hamilton’s bed, but she is ultimately considering keeping it.

“My granddaughters can tell their grandmother was almost killed in her bed by a meteorite,” she told The Times.