Cars hit by meteorites? It has happened at least three times

Having your car hit by a meteorite sounds like a movie script, but it has happened — and, in more than a century of automobile history, three cases have already been properly documented. All in the United States or Canada.

The rarity has an explanation: according to NASA, the Earth is bombarded daily by more than 100 tons of dust and particles the size of grains of sand, which disintegrate in the atmosphere. The agency uses the car as a ruler for the next step: about once a year, an asteroid the size of a car enters the atmosphere, produces a flash and consumes itself before reaching the ground.

Illinois, 1938: The First Record

On the morning of September 29, 1938, in Benld, Illinois, a 1.8-kilogram rock pierced the roof of a wooden garage and hit Edward McCain’s 1928 Pontiac coupe. It went through the roof, the seat and the floor, bounced off the exhaust and relodged in the seat springs.

McCain was not in the car. When he found the hole in the upholstery hours later, he suspected rats — only then did he call his neighbor and find out what it was. A resident was about 15 meters from the impact, probably the person who came closest to being hit by a meteorite up to that point. Further analysis showed a fusion crust of only 1 millimeter, an indication that the rock entered the atmosphere at a low speed and therefore did not fall apart. The meteorite and car parts are in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

When the stone is worth more than the car

On October 9, 1992, a 12-kilogram rock went through the back of the 1980 Chevrolet Malibu of Michelle Knapp, then 18, in Peekskill, New York. She had bought her grandmother’s car for $400 a few weeks earlier. The meteorite pierced the trunk and opened a 15-centimeter crater in the ground under the vehicle.

The loss became a business. Knapp sold the Malibu, never repaired, for $10,000 — today it circulates as a museum piece. The rock went for $50,000.

The most recent case is from September 25, 2009, in Grimsby, in the Canadian province of Ontario. A 45-gram fragment hit the windshield of Yvonne Garchinski’s Nissan Pathfinder after crossing the sky at about 75,000 km/h. The rock is 4.6 billion years old, practically the age of the Solar System. Other pieces were found in the region, without causing damage.

The concentration of the three episodes in North America says less about the fate of the meteorites than about who records what falls. Impacts on cars in other parts of the world may simply never have made it into a scientific catalog.