Science: Star on Alabama

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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.