This day in history: At around 8:30 pm on this day in 1888, a shower of meteorites fell "like rain" on a village in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq (then part of the Ottoman Empire). One man died and another was paralyzed. The man's death is considered the only credible case of death-by-meteorite.
"However, if ancient scholars can be trusted, humans haven’t always been so lucky. Researchers mining ancient texts in recent decades have discovered that historical records are surprisingly rich with accounts of apparent deaths due to falling space rocks. In most cases, there’s no physical evidence to confirm these stories. Yet their presence in official histories and similarities to modern accounts lead some scientists to believe at least some of the events must have really occurred.
Chinese histories in particular are rich with accounts from government scholars and astronomers that document times when “a star fell.” These records were kept consistently across many provinces and passed from dynasty to dynasty, chronicling significant events spanning thousands of years. If these documents accurately portray meteor fireballs, then somewhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of people have been killed by falling space rocks." Read more here.
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