On November 30, 1954, a woman in Sylacauga, Alabama was hit by a meteorite.

Yes, this is for real. Ann Hodges was sleeping in her home when a meteorite — a 4-kilo fragment of a larger rock — punched through her roof, hit a radio, bounced off, and smacked into her side. It left a huge bruise.

I wrote about this on the 60^th anniversary of the event, back on The Old Blog™. I discussed the event, as well as Ms. Hodges’ personal life and how it was affected (not positively, and I don’t mean from the injury).

BANner Jody Boese reminded me of this recently when he sent me a link to a video of her when she was a guest on the popular TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret”, where celebrity panelists tried to guess the guest’s secret, usually something unusual or embarrassing about them. I think Hodges’ event counts.

Watch the video. It’s interesting for a lot of reasons:

I was amused at how the host had to apologize and give her the money (80 bucks!) because they hadn’t thought that she would be recognized, despite this being a nationally renowned event and the show aired less than a month after the incident.

Hodges got into a legal tussle with her landlord for ownership of the meteorite, and while she eventually won she never got much money for it (there’s a fascinating and detailed account of her story on the CBS 42 website). Oddly, a second chunk that fell on a farmer’s property not far from there wound up selling for a goodly amount of money, but it wasn’t subject to all the lawsuit hassles.

If this incident happened today, and were verified, that meteorite would fetch a substantial amount of money. A known fall (meaning a witnessed meteor producing the meteorite), plus it being a hammerstone — one that hit a structure — would make it valuable, but also the fact that it hit a person (that’s only been documented to have happened one time since) would ramp up the price easily to six figures. Maybe more.

Times have changed. Back then it was a curiosity; now it would set someone for life.

And the video itself… wow, does that drive home how times have changed. When was the last time you heard a woman introduced by her husband’s full name (“Mrs. Hewlett Hodges”; her husband was Eugene H. Hodges, and I assume the H was for Hewlett)? And then, at the end, along with the $80 the host gave her a carton of cigarettes as a prize. Holy smokes. I mean, well, you know what I mean.

Times really have changed. Not all for the better, obviously, but in some things? We’ve come a long way, baby.

I remember the day in 1980 when Mount St Helens in Washington state erupted. The news was spotty and we didn’t have the internet then so it took a while to get photos and the story of what happened: an earthquake, one of a series that had been going on for months as magma rose beneath the volcano, triggered a landslide. The relief of pressure this provided caused an immense explosion of steam and magma that took off the entire side of the mountain. The column of ash rose over 20 km high, and melting glaciers caused hot mud flows called lahars that further devastated the area. Even today, over four decades later, the volcano is considered a high threat.

From space that’s harder to see. From nearly 800 km above Earth’s surface, ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite took this astonishing image of the volcano in January 2025:

The caldera (the crater) is the roughly circular feature below center, covered in brilliant snow. Just above it is the heart-shaped Spirit Lake, which was heavily changed by the 1980 event. But what’s all that red around it?

That’s vegetation. No, it’s not Mars. But the colors you’re seeing here aren’t “real”. What’s shown in red here is actually infrared light, outside the range of wavelengths our eyes can see. Sentinel-2 is designed to look at vegetation and monitor changes due to things like agricultural use. So why is it red?

Vegetation is weird. It’s usually pretty dark, reflecting visible light poorly. Green is reflected a bit more than other colors, so it tends to look green to our eyes. But when you look just outside our eye’s visible range the reflectivity rockets up; it reflects infrared light very well indeed. Sentinel-2 is sensitive to infrared so the vegetation looks very bright, and is colored red in the image so we can see it.

I wrote about this many years ago after seeing a video taken in infrared; the plants all looked ghostly white. I deduced plants reflect IR well, and then poked around and found that was true:

The wavelength runs along the x-axis from blue on the left to near-infrared on the right (the human eye can see out to about 750 nanometers), and the amount of light reflected is the y-axis (so 0 = dark, 100 = perfectly reflective). The leaves of this particular plant, chionophila jamesii, are fairly typical in that they reflect a lot of IR light.

That’s why the volcano’s surroundings look so red, since IR is colored red in that image. Brown and black areas are likely denuded of plants or water (water absorbs instead of reflects IR light, which is in part why water vapor is a greenhouse gas; it traps heat like carbon dioxide does).

Images of the volcano and others like it from Sentinel-2 are important to understand how things change on the surface of our planet; we can watch land usage, water, plants, and more, seeing the impact of human activity and natural cycles. This is critical in planning for farmers, for example, and has many other uses.

Seeing cool and pretty pictures from space is nice, but remember that our Earth is changing, and these images are how we keep our eyes — our eyes in the sky — on it.

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