Another meteorite hits house in Ohio

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A small meteorite was discovered Friday after hitting a house in Columbus, OH and setting it on fire -- and from the looks of it, the Gods in charge of hurling rocks at Earth are aiming for Ohio towns that begin with "C." The address was 76 N Oakley Ave. According to the owner, the house was for sale and was uninhabited since November of 2020.

Oddly, all but one of the reported meteorite strikes in Ohio over the centuries have occurred in towns beginning with the letter "C": Canton in 1807, Chatfield in 1971 and 1982, Cheviot and Columbus in 2021.

The Chatfield occurrences were of particular interest, improbably hitting houses only 1½ miles apart and separated in time by 11 years.

Professor Stefan Nicolescu, mineralogist at the School of Earth Sciences at OSU, said the last two rocks to hit the state were likely from the same event.

The Friday discovery came just 19 days after a meteorite landed on a house in Cheviot. It smashed through the Columbus house's roof, upper story and landed in the living room. The fire is believed to have started upstairs. It was a recent event, although no one knows exactly when it happened, so both may have fallen at the same time, Nicolescu said. Fires of this nature are not usual.

"The first impression is that you would think that the two are connected," he said. "The Columbus one was not an `observed fall,' so we really don't know exactly when it fell. We do know that it fell very recently, however." Prospective homebuyers had visited it as recently as Thursday.

He hasn't analyzed the Columbus object yet, and he said that he won't know for sure whether the two space rocks are connected to the same objects until he has a chance to look at it.

So is Ohio in the crosshairs of some sort of bizarre cosmic shooting gallery? Nicolescu says no.

"The Earth is hit by 15,000 tons of extraterrestrial material a year," he said, adding that since certain Ohio cities are densely populated, the likelihood of finding meteorites are quite good.

Cathryn J. Prince of Canton, who wrote about the 1807 Canton meteorite in her book, "A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science," said meteorites back then were truly terrifying to people of the time; rocks were not supposed to fall from the sky.

"In fact, many thought that they were some sort of weather phenomenon," she said.

The homeowner contacted Nicolescu, the mineralogy collections manager of the School of Earth Sciences at OSU, who also confirmed the identity of the Cheviot meteorite from last month.

Last month, a baseball-sized meteorite crashed into a Cheviot house damaging a roof and the attic. Area police reported that several residents reported hearing loud booms that night.

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