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The History Channel Original Podcast.
History This Week.
November 30th, 1954.
I'm Sally Helm.
What I am about to tell you.
I want you to keep in mind that the chances of it happening are so low that I don't even know how you would calculate them.
At about 1245 in the afternoon, a space rock comes plummeting through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama.
It bounces off a standup radio, ricochets around the living room and then strikes a woman who was, up until a moment ago, napping on the couch.
Ann Hodges is declared the only known person to ever have been hit by a meteorite.
It's happened to a few other people since then, and there may have been others before, too.
But in 1954 newspapers are saying Experts agree unanimously that Mrs Hodges was the first person known to have been struck by a meteorite.
The only recorded person ever to be so lucky or so unlucky.
We're going to tell you today about her life, what happened to it after her cosmic encounter.
But first, let's spend just a moment on the life of the meteorite.
Let me put my meteorite hat on.
Here to give voice to our meteorite is Dr Julia Cartwright, a geologist and planetary scientist and a meteor expert.
Let us live in this meteor's mind for a moment.
It doesn't have a mind, I know, but let's live in its world.
Because it truly was born at some point in time that we were not present for.
So what, I mean, tell me, like, if you're this meteorite, how does your life begin?
Like, where are you born?
So...
I guess my life begins with heat.
The solar system itself is just beginning.
It's all heat and dust, and some of the swirling particles start to condense.
Sort of the way a dust bunny comes together in the corner of your house.
This is happening 4.568 billion years ago, so very long time ago.
So I'm very old.
Yeah, you're very old.
Very, very old. cosmic dust bunny gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
You kind of get runaway growth.
And I can't really say how big I was.
It's not something I remember.
And then, at a certain point, a crash of some kind, probably.
Maybe an asteroid.
It hits this bigger space rock, and our meteoroid is knocked loose to float around on its own.
And then... as this space rock might describe it.
I was on a trajectory around the solar system.
I probably was out there for a few million years floating around doing things, minding my own business.
And then in 1954, as our calendars go, I was on a collision course with the Earth.
Earth's atmosphere is much denser than the vacuum of space.
When the meteoroid hits, there's an uproar.
High speed.
Fire melting molten rock.
I would say that that might be like a teenage phase, because so much stuff happens in a very short period of time.
But really, I'm a very, very old thing at this point.
This ancient space rock breaks through our atmosphere and finds itself on a flight path over Earth.
It passes oceans, continents, a mountain range or two.
It's falling quickly, getting closer and closer to land.
It starts to see forests, then individual trees.
And then finally, it crashes through a roof in Sylacauga Alabama, and hits a sleeping Mrs Ann Hodges.
And then there was all sorts of a fuss after that.
This is making me feel that it's an odd life to be a meteorite, because you don't really have any say over where you go.
It sounds like.
You're just getting pulled around.
Yeah, i think that's also quite.
That has a really interesting segue as well, because mrs hodges did not choose to be impacted by a meteorite at all, any more than the meteorite chose to be there.
No, i don't exactly.
This had a massive effect on her life and she had no choice in this matter.
It happened to her and it is unique and i just i don't know like what is?
What is the effect?
What does happen to you when you are subject to something totally beyond your control?
Today, Anne Hodges meets a meteorite.
What happened to this space rock after it plummeted to Earth and found itself thrust into very human affairs?
And what happened to the human beings whose lives were upended by this rarest of rare events?
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What's up, it's Draymond Green.
I'm back for my 14th NBA season, and my podcast, The Draymond Green Show, is back too.
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Sylacauga Alabama, is a small town about an hour's drive from Birmingham, surrounded by pine trees which get turned into newsprint at a nearby plant.
There's also a textile mill, mostly makes denim.
And living in a little one-story wooden house just outside Sylacauga proper are Ann and Eugene Hodges.
Right across the street is a movie theater.
You can't make this part up.
There was a drive-in movie theater and it had a marquee next to it and it said Comet Drive-In Movie Theater.
Billy Field grew up in Sylacauga.
He's now a professor at the University of Alabama and a Hollywood writer.
He's written a screenplay about this story.
And it had a red comet that shot toward the sky.
That was like the logo of the movie theater?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it lit up at night.
You're right.
If you put it in a novel or something, people would say, that's too on the nose.
You can't have the meteor going over the comet drive-in.
You can think of Billy Field as the director of our story.
He reminded me a few times while we were talking, that the South is a storytelling world culture which, i gotta say, that's hard to forget.
When you're talking to billy field, you want to hear a story?
Well, let me tell you a story.
There's a good story about that.
I want to tell you one other story i want to tell you a story about.
He's another whole story uh, believe me, another whole story.
While field was writing his screenplay about the hodges, he tracked down many of the people involved and interviewed them or their living relatives.
Ann hodges had already died by the time he started looking into it, but her husband eugene, was still around.
What was it like to meet him?
What's his energy like?
Eugene was a tall guy, about six foot four.
He was a tree trimmer for the telephone company.
He kept the limbs off the telephone lines, and he was the boss of the room.
He had a temper.
According to Eugene, in those days if a woman worked outside the home it meant the husband didn't make enough money and he didn't want that.
Most times she'd take care of the bills.
That's Eugene talking to the Alabama Museum of Natural History in 2004 about the way he and Ann handled the bills.
I said, I'll make sure money is in the bank to cover them.
You make sure they get there.
Ann Elizabeth Hodges is a Southern girl through and through.
Born and raised in Alabama on a farm, living in Florida.
When she met Eugene, married him in Mississippi.
People described her to Billy as shy, maybe a little melancholy.
I'm certainly not a doctor, but I think she was probably a little depressed.
And I don't know this, but I like to say that she...
Laid down on the couch one day and prayed that God would send her something that would make her life more exciting.
The 1950 census had Anne working as a counter girl in a drugstore.
But at least on this particular Tuesday, November 30th 1954, she's at home in the afternoon lying on her couch napping.
She's sick with a cold, buried under two heavy quilts.
Her mother had moved in with the couple, and she's home too. sewing in the adjoining room.
And at a quarter to one, a meteoroid that has been knocking around space for billions of years crashes through the roof of this one-story house in Sylacauga, Alabama.
It first ricocheted off of her stand-up radio.
That's Dr. Julia Cartwright again.
The radio itself has got a really lovely dent in the top of it, which is really impressive.
And then it ricocheted off of the radio and it made its way across the room to Mrs Hodges as she was lying down having a nap on the sofa.
And it hit her?
Yeah, in the abdomen or thigh-ish area.
And the bruising is, wow, it's really quite substantial.
It looks like the same sort of injury you might see if you're in a car accident.
It's a really severe, clearly a lot of internal bleeding going on there.
Dr Cartwright has actually examined the rock itself in her work as a geologist at the University of Alabama.
She told me it weighs almost nine pounds, about as much as a gallon of milk.
And it has fallen from space.
By the time it reaches the Hodges' home, it's traveling at hundreds of miles per hour.
It's a beast of a rock.
I've got it here.
I can get out.
Can you?
Yes, it might take a little while.
It's a fairly nice, big, secure suitcase.
She had brought the actual meteorite with her.
I could see her on the screen pulling out this beige suitcase.
So there's my gloves going on, because you don't want to put like your finger, grease and stuff as well.
OK, here it is.
Wow.
OK.
Oh, my gosh.
So it's about the size of, I'd say, a very large grapefruit.
I cannot believe how cool it is to see this.
Yeah.
So here we go.
It's kind of like gray.
This more darker surface that you can see is the result of it having come through the atmosphere.
And then it basically kind of melts the very outside surface of the rock.
So we end up with this beautiful sheen.
It looks like nail varnish.
It looks like someone has gone and painted on your rock.
It's quite shimmery.
I'm going to put this down just for a sec.
It's a bit heavy.
It's heavy.
Yes, it is heavy.
Gosh, this must have really hurt.
It did.
Anne Hodges jumps up from the couch and she later writes it was then that I felt the pain flaming up through my left hand and alongside my hip.
As Forrest Gump would say, right on the buttock.
Anne is still in a kind of half sleep.
It all feels a little like a dream.
She'd been awakened by this sound like a bomb going off.
She still doesn't know what hit her.
Her mother walked into the room and said, what happened?
What was that?
What was that?
And Anne said, I think the chimney is falling down.
The two of them look around the room, maybe scanning for chimney pieces.
That's when they notice the eight and a half pound black rock.
And they looked up and saw this hole through the roof.
And then they both moved to the center of the room and hugged each other, embraced each other like, oh my golly, what is going on?
Ann's mom runs to the phone and calls up the fire department.
Something came through the roof and hit my daughter.
And the fireman said, well, maybe this is the thing everybody's calling me about.
People all over Alabama have seen this thing in the sky, including a five-year-old Billy Field.
Actually, I remember it quite well.
I was in the backyard hanging up clothes with my mama.
And in Alabama, in fall, you can get really blue skies, very deep blue skies.
And we were hanging up clothes in the backyard and a giant rocket of smoke shot across the sky.
And then, about halfway down, it exploded and blew up into what I remember is two rockets, two rockets of smoke that came down toward town.
People in Sylacauga look up to see these black plumes of smoke.
From further away, the smoke looks white.
Little Billy Field thinks maybe it was a plane crash.
Maxwell Air Force Base isn't far away.
Other people think that, too.
In fact, dozens of planes set off across three states to go out and search for survivors.
Everyone is trying to figure this out.
Nobody knew what had happened.
People were, you know, you could hear screen doors slamming and people saying, what was that?
What was that?
Some of them call the fire department, including, of course, Ann Hodges' mother.
Pretty soon, fire trucks are swarming around the Hodges' house.
And the fireman comes in and the mayor comes in and, you know, all the police.
The mayor comes?
Oh, the mayor comes, yeah.
This is like, this is a big deal.
I mean, everybody in town, everybody for miles around saw this.
There happens to be a geologist in town working on a new dam.
The mayor calls him up and he takes a look at the rock.
He smiled and said, it's a meteorite.
She was hit by a meteorite.
And the town goes wild.
Before you know it, everyone has heard the story.
The traffic is just like a homecoming football game.
The traffic is go all the way down the street.
People are parking their cars and Ann was in her bed. laying down, resting.
The people are coming through.
It's like at a funeral home or something.
When you're viewing they're coming through the front door.
They pause at her bedroom, look in there she's laying there in bed and then they walk on and out the back door.
I mean, nobody even gave them permission.
They just started doing it.
She's sitting there with her mother holding her hand and she's laying in the bed.
People just pause, look at her, and move home.
In the meantime, the Air Force has picked this up on their radar.
And they're like, what's this?
What's this?
You know, the Air Force wants to get involved.
And they fly to Sylacauga in a helicopter.
They land on the football field of Comer High School.
And the police take the meteorite to the Air Force.
So we've got Ann Hodges lying in her bed as all of Sylacauga parades past to peer in at her and up at the hole in her roof.
The rock that made that hole is gone, whisked away by the Air Force to be studied.
Cut to Eugene. in his car, driving home from his tree-trimming job south of Sylacauga.
He's coming down Broadway and he turns to head out to his house and somebody on the corner yells out hey Hodges, something come through your roof and hit your wife.
And he said, what, what?
And the guy ran off.
So Eugene, you know, he puts the pedal to the metal and goes roaring through town not very far, I mean a mile.
And he tops the hill and looks down, and there's traffic just backed up, at least for a mile.
He's like, what happened?
I got to get home.
So he gets on the shoulder of the road and drives down through there, pulls up his front yard.
People are filing through the house.
And Eugene big guy gets out of his car and goes up and breaks in line and starts to go through the house.
And some guy says, hey, buddy, go to the back of the line and wait your turn like everybody else.
Eugene told Billy Field that story.
Eugene said that I picked up that guy under his arms and I throwed him off that porch and I went in my house.
He told the Alabama Museum of Natural History, too.
You'd tell by my side I wasn't a little fella, and I pushed my way in.
I pushed some of them out of the way, but I got in.
And he said I walked in there and there was Ann in the bed and I sat down next to her and she said well honey, looks like we've had a lot of excitement around here today.
She tells him it was a meteorite from space.
So after the conversation a little bit, Eugene says, well, where's the meteorite?
He said, it hit that radio that it hit me and it rolled out on the floor.
He said, the policeman picked it up and left with it.
Now the plot thickens because Eugene is not happy.
This is their meteorite.
It came to them.
What's the Air Force doing taking it away?
Later, looking up at the gaping hole in his ceiling.
He tells a newspaper reporter.
I think I could get enough evidence that the thing fell in my house.
But...
It actually fell somewhere else, too.
If you remember, I said when the explosion happened.
There were two rockets of smoke that arched toward town right.
Yeah, yeah, right when you saw it.
Okay, so Mr. J.K.
McKinney is a woodcutter.
He cuts firewood for people.
That's how he makes a living.
Julius McKinney is a Black man living in Sylacauga.
He's driving home from a job.
And there are a couple of slightly different versions of the timing of what he did next.
But here is the basic story.
He's got a wagon. and two mules named Penny and Pearl.
And he's out on a dirt road somewhere heading home.
And they go around a little bend in the road and then they stop, just dead still.
And he whips them again.
Come on, let's go, let's go.
And their ears go back, which means they're scared.
He can't get them to move.
And he looks up ahead and he sees something black in the middle of the road.
He thinks, maybe it's a snake.
So he picks up a stick, moves towards it cautiously, and pushes it off the side of the road.
And it doesn't move like a snake.
It seems to be just a rock.
A black rock.
He gets back on the wagon and Penny and Pearl go home.
That was the thing they were scared of.
The next day, Mr. McKinney is reading the paper.
And a story catches his eye.
It says... It was a meteorite.
The explosion over Sylacauga was a meteorite.
It came down and it hit Mrs. Ann Elizabeth Hodges, crashed through a roof and hit her.
Mr. McKinney is thinking, huh.
So that's what that smoke in the sky was all about.
He keeps on reading, and the paper describes the meteorite, a black rock.
Mr. McKinney wonders, and he doesn't just stay there wondering.
Instead, he goes back to that dirt road.
And he finds it and he puts it in the back of the wagon and he brings it home and he sneaks it in the house and he puts it under the bed.
Doesn't tell anybody.
Doesn't even tell his wife.
Because how had he gone in the next day with it and said look, ladies and gentlemen, look what I found.
It's 1954.
Jim Crow South.
That African-American man didn't have any rights.
They would have said, well, you found it in the road.
You know, it doesn't belong to you.
Let's leave Mr. McKinney there for now with a mysterious black rock stashed under his bed.
Meanwhile, over at the Hodges, it's been chaos.
Reporters everywhere.
Ann later said...
It was too much for me.
All the people, the noise, the excitement and the pain.
My hand and hip were worse now.
So they took me to the hospital in a state of shock.
They took her to the hospital and Life magazine sends a photographer and the photographer says hey doc, where did it hit her?
And without asking her permission or anything, he just pulls back the blankets and there's this giant bruise.
Oh, and she's looking up like shocked, like, what?
And he takes the picture, and that becomes the Life magazine the next week.
Wow, that's such a good encapsulation of what's going on for her that people are just looking at her and she doesn't even want that.
Yeah, and she's shocked, like, you can see it.
The photograph shows places that people wouldn't want.
When a reporter asks Anne how she feels about being the first person to be hit by a meteorite, she responds matter-of-factly I feel bruised.
Eugene doesn't mind all the attention because people are starting to say this meteorite could be worth something.
Any meteorite has value, but this one, this historic one, it could really make them some money.
And so Eugene has a goal in mind.
Get that meteorite back.
To help him out, he calls up a local lawyer.
He will love it. who is a major character in the story.
Hewell Love is well-known in Sylacauga.
Field said he was once in a kind of 24-hour diner in town and he overheard some guys in a booth saying that if you get into some trouble but you're innocent, book this one lawyer in town, not Hewell.
But now if you've done it, you needed to get Hewell Love.
Well, I knew Hewell.
He was smart, conniving.
He was going to win for his client no matter what.
He was young then and incredibly handsome in trouble.
People would have said he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio.
That's Hewell Love's daughter, Julie, who is herself an attorney.
My mother would say if you can't afford to hire Hewell to defend you in a case, that you better pray to Jesus, because he's your last resort.
People used to actually come out during lunch and sit and watch him try cases, because he was just very dynamic.
I mean, like an old Southern preacher, which...
You know, good trial lawyers and good preachers, they walk hand in hand.
They're storytellers.
And there was one occasion that a jury actually shouted amen from the jury box.
So I wasn't surprised that they contacted him immediately when their meteorite got taken from them.
By the very next day after the meteorite hits, Eugene Hodges has booked Huel Love.
And Love starts working his magic.
He gets in touch with people he knows in D.C.
And within a few days, the Air Force has said, fine, come and get it.
From the time I was a child, we always knew that Daddy went to Washington to get the rock back and that you know.
There are all these pictures where my sister Patty, was playing with it.
Huell knew the value of publicity.
And so there's a picture, some big magazine, of Huell getting off the airplane with the meteorite.
Like he'd gone to Washington.
He'd overcome the big powers of big government and he got their meteorite back because it belonged to them.
At least that's what they say. and they want to cash in by selling this meteorite.
Soon enough, someone reaches out to buy it.
The Smithsonian Institution, big prestigious museum in D.C.
One of their curators writes to Ann Hodges, the U.S.
National Museum has the largest collection of meteorites in this country.
Thus, we hope to see this specimen and have the opportunity to make an offer of purchase.
Great news for Eugene.
Here's the big money he's been hoping for.
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By mid-December 1954, the Hodges seem set.
Anne's out of the hospital, cleared with x-rays that say she's just badly bruised.
Eugene's got the meteorite back.
And their lawyer, Huel Love, is corresponding with the Smithsonian about a purchase.
Now they have their meteorite.
They're all excited about it.
They're ready to sell it to the Smithsonian.
But who lives across the cow pasture?
Mrs. Bertie Guy.
Mrs. Bertie Guy is the Hodges' landlady.
They don't own the little house across the street from the Comet drive-in.
They're renters in the house.
So Bertie Guy comes along with her attorney.
They file suit saying the meteorite doesn't belong to you.
It belongs to the owner of the house.
Bertie Guy's lawyer finds some case in Oregon where the court ruled that a meteorite belonged to the company that owned the land where it was found, not to the person who found it.
What the court ruled was that anything that falls from the heavens belongs to the owner of the property where that thing comes to rest.
Wow, it's amazing that there's a precedent about that.
That's perfect for a birdie guy.
Yeah, it is, isn't it?
In all fairness, people like to make a birdie as a bad guy, but she just wanted her roof fixed, you know.
She just wanted, she wasn't trying to take advantage of them.
She believed, well...
The law is, it belongs to the owner of the property where it comes to rest, and it came to rest on my property.
But Ann Hodges says it came to rest on my body.
One newspaper wrote, Mrs Hodges had no precedent to cite, except maybe the custom that gives a baseball to the fan who catches it or gets hit by it.
I do have a letter from the Smithsonian and a reply that my dad had sent them that said unfortunately, at the moment it's tied up in litigation.
We're not expecting it to free up until... the first part of next year.
The Smithsonian isn't the only one.
According to Hewell Love, the Hodges are getting offers of up to $20,000.
Ms.
Hodges got letters from people that were not only giving her advice, but just like fan mail, like someone would reach out to you today on Facebook.
Like one lady said, Dear Mrs. Hodges, I sincerely hope your bruise is well.
May I say that you have pretty features and beautiful hands.
Because there's a picture of her in Time magazine.
I mean, she got poems.
One church asked her to donate the meteorite so they could use it for sermons.
One fellow wanted to make a replica of it to make a ring for his wife.
Field says Ann Hodges really can't stay out of the limelight, even if she wants to.
There's a famous song called Stars Fell on Alabama.
And stars fell.
People started singing Stars Fell on Silicog.
It was her 15 minutes of fame.
She even gets an offer to appear on the national game show, I've Got a Secret.
And I'm sure Anne didn't want to because she's shy.
But I'm sure that Eugene probably said, well, this will be good for us.
So Anne flies out to New York, walks on stage, and whispers her secret to the host.
I was hit by a meteorite.
The celebrities would get to ask questions and have to guess who you were.
Mrs. Hodges, was it a happy event for you?
I would say it was one of mixed blessings.
Not too happy at the time, but it turned out not to be too unfortunate later.
Was there an object involved?
No.
Eventually... You're not the lady that the meteor fell on, are you?
And on national television, the Hodges get some good PR for their case.
I understand there's also litigation involved.
Who claims they now own the meteorite?
Well, the landlady says it's hers.
Because it came through her roof?
Yeah.
It landed on your hip, didn't it?
That's right.
Well, I tell you what, I probably shouldn't take any sides in this.
I ain't no lawyer, but I claim if you're lying in bed and a meteorite comes along and hits you but if it happened to me I'd say it was my meteorite.
It seems like this TV audience, at least, is on their side.
But Birdie Guy... isn't letting up.
And neither are the tourists pouring in to stare at the Hodges' house and at Anne herself.
They couldn't get people to stop lining up like they were going to Mecca to come through and see where it happened.
By June, seven months after this vanishingly rare cosmic visitation, Anne Hodges is telling reporters I wish it had never happened.
But she is not in control here.
And the story just keeps unfolding.
And kind of a weird little, I guess you'd say a twist.
While these white folks are fighting over who owns this thing, Mr McKinney has the other piece under his bed.
The audience has to understand that in 1954, an African-American man, he wouldn't have had a chance if he'd come out and said well, I've got the other piece.
But Field says McKinney has a friend, a white man, who he thinks he can trust.
He tells the man about his encounter with the meteorite and that... He had the other piece of it.
We know from records at the Smithsonian Institution that Mr McKinney sells his space rock to a man named Stuart Perry.
Perry is a newspaper publisher by day who has a passion for collecting meteorites and donating them for research.
And that is how Mr. McKinney's rock ends up at the museum in May of 1955.
So how much money do Mr and Mrs McKinney earn from their private sale of the rock found in the road?
Field says he doesn't know the exact amount, but it was... Enough to buy a new house and a car.
A few months later, Huell Love settles the Hodges case out of court.
The Hodges agree to pay Bertie Guy $500 of whatever they make off the sale of the meteorite.
They're expecting the bulk of a big payout to go to them.
But by this point... Here comes a little yellow telegram from the Smithsonian saying...
We're no longer interested in buying your meteorite.
They were like, we just need one.
We're out of the market.
As time went on, people lost interest in it.
Not just the Smithsonian.
Also those other fans who had sent Anne letters and poems, who had lined up to see the Hodges' home like it was some kind of sacred spot.
I have a telegram from one fellow who had made an offer and sent a telegram to my dad that said he's withdrawing the offer.
There's just too much publicity.
So... the Hodges wound up for a period of time using it as a doorstop.
A doorstop.
This heat-scarred rock, which started forming alongside the solar system itself and traveled around the universe for billions of years.
It became a doorstop in a little house in Sylacauga, Alabama.
The kind of thing people would walk past every day and barely even see.
Eventually, Anna Hodges donates the rock to the Alabama Museum of Natural History.
In exchange they get just enough money to repay their debts 500 for Bertie Guy and another 250 for Huel Love to reimburse his airfare from that meteorite recon trip to DC.
And this whole meteorite media firestorm takes a toll on the Hodges.
She was depressed and Anne had a lot of anxiety and the doctors put her on pills which ended up screwing up a lot of people's lives in those days.
And then later on she was divorced from Eugene And Eugene said it had something to do with the meteorite.
She never did completely recover.
Eugene again, talking to the Alabama Museum of Natural History.
You know, she had that nervous breakdown and all of that.
And she never was the same person after that.
She just went all to pieces.
Billy Fields says.
Just like with so many parts of Ann Hodge's story, the rumor about her breakdown went around Sylacauga.
He remembers hearing when he was a teenager that she lived in an apartment above a local drugstore.
So we'd pass that at high school, driving around at night.
We'd pass that.
I'd look up there and think, yeah, she's up there.
What is she like?
What's she thinking?
How did that meteorite make her crazy?
Ann Hodges would die a few years later of kidney failure at age 52.
And we don't know what she was thinking in the years after her brush with the Cosmos.
Whether she blamed all her troubles on the meteorite, or came to love her new doorstop, or what.
But undoubtedly, she had had a dramatic encounter with one of the fundamental facts of life.
That you just can't control what it brings you.
You never know what might come crashing through the roof.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching.
Check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today.
If you want to get in touch, please shoot us an email at our email address, historythisweek at history.com, or you can leave us a voicemail, 212-351-0410.
Thanks to our guests Dr Julia Cartwright, planetary scientist at the University of Alabama.
Billy Field, professor at the University of Alabama and screenwriter.
And Julie Love Templeton, attorney in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Dr Cartwright is involved in a number of art-science collaborations to engage and educate the public about meteorites and planetary science.
You can find out more on her website.
Keep an eye out for Billy Field's latest project, TheStoryAcorn.com, which launches in January 2023.
The website will feature history from the civil rights movement told by those who lived it.
The website teaches students to gather stories from their own communities and share them with the world.
Thanks also to Mary Beth Pronzinski and to the Alabama Museum of Natural History, whose interview with Eugene Hodges you heard throughout the episode.
If you're passing through Tuscaloosa, drop in to see the Hodges meteorite for yourself.
I can attest, it is pretty mind-blowing.
I knew that this might happen, but I'm surprised by how amazing it is to see it.
It really, really is amazing.
This episode was produced by Julia Press.
It was story edited by Jim O'Grady and sound designed by Dan Rosato.
History This Week is also produced by Morgan Givens, Corinne Wallace, and me, Sally Helm.
Our associate producer is Emma Fredericks.
Our senior producer is Ben Dickstein.
Our supervising producer is McKamey Lin, and our executive producer is Jesse Katz.
Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review History This Week, wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.
