Woman rocked awake by meteorite chunk crashing into her bedroom
CBC
Ruth Hamilton had been asleep for hours in her Golden, B.C., home when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, giving her a moment's notice before a rock from outer space hurtled into her bedroom.
"The next thing was just a huge explosion and debris all over my face," Hamilton recalled in an interview Tuesday.
"I jumped out of bed and turned on the lights. I didn't know what else to do, so I called 911," she said.
"Talking to the operator, she was asking me all kinds of questions, and at that point, I rolled back one of the two pillows I'd been sleeping on and in between them was the meteorite."
A charcoal-grey chunk of rock roughly the size of a melon had plummeted from space, tearing through Hamilton's roof before coming to rest on her floral pillowcase, inches from where her head had been moments earlier.
"I was shaking like a leaf," said Hamilton. "You're sound asleep, safe, you think, in your bed, and you can get taken out by a meteorite, apparently."
Initially, Hamilton didn't know it was a meteorite. She and an RCMP officer dispatched to investigate suspected it was debris from a construction site on nearby Highway 1, which runs through the town, nestled in the Canadian Rockies.
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