posted 09-21-2020 10:21 AM               

Edward McCain of Benld, Illinois, drove a decade-old Pontiac coupe that he kept safely stored in his garage, which was a small wooden building with a tar paper roof. Well-worn ruts in the dirt floor marked the exact spot where he parked his car every day for years. Then, on September 29, 1938, by sheer cosmic chance, a speeding space rock tore through the roof of McCain's garage before burrowing itself into his Pontiac. The Benld meteorite indiscriminately nailed its target.

That same year, Ben Hur Wilson of the Joliet Astronomical Society poetically reported in Popular Astronomy that "a small stony-iron meteorite came crashing out of the battlements of heaven, aimed apparently with the precision of a crack artilleryman."

The cosmic cannonball not only tore through the roof, seat, and floor of McCain's car — which he was fortunately not in at the time — but also rebounded off the Pontiac's muffler before bouncing back up into the springs of the seat.

posted 09-21-2020 07:37 PM               

Ben Hur Wilson of the Joliet Astronomical Society poetically reported in Popular Astronomy that "a small stony-iron meteorite came crashing out of the battlements of heaven, aimed apparently with the precision of a crack artilleryman."