Saturday afternoon felt ordinary in Ponderosa Forest, a quiet suburb north of Houston. Then the sky cracked open.
Witnesses reported a green flash, black smoke, and a loud boom that rattled homes across the Houston area just before 5 p.m. NASA confirmed a meteor first appeared 49 miles above Stagecoach, northwest of Houston, moving southeast at 35,000 miles per hour before breaking apart 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station. The fragmentation sent fragments raining toward the suburbs below.
One of them found a roof.
What happened inside Sherrie James' home
Sherrie James was in her bathroom combing her hair when she heard a loud boom followed by a thud from her daughter's room. She walked in and saw a hole in the ceiling and a dent in the floor. Next to her daughter's bed sat a big, black rock that had no business being there.
"It came through the roof, hit the floor, bounced up, and landed right there between the TV and the bed," James said.
Ponderosa Fire Chief Fred Windisch confirmed to CBS News that the object - a little bigger than his hand - appears to be a meteorite. It tore through the roof and two floors of the home before landing in the kitchen area. Nobody was hurt. Her daughter was not in the room.
A NASA scientist noted the rock was likely still moving several hundred miles per hour when it hit - cutting straight through the structure. James says she now plans to sell it, and has already received multiple offers.
How rare is this - really?
This is where the story gets extraordinary.
Scientists estimate that a meteorite hits a house somewhere on Earth roughly once per year - but the odds of it being YOUR house are approximately 1 in 33 million over a 30-year period.
Only one person in recorded history has ever been directly struck by a meteorite - Ann Hodges of Alabama in 1954. A 9-pound rock crashed through her ceiling, bounced off a radio, and struck her in the thigh while she napped. She survived, but the media attention and a legal battle over ownership of the rock contributed to a breakdown that followed her for years.
To put the odds in perspective: your lifetime odds of dying from a local meteorite impact are 1 in 1,600,000 - which sounds terrifying until you realize you're more likely to be killed by a tornado, struck by lightning, or attacked by a shark. You are far more likely to win the Powerball jackpot than to be killed by space debris landing on you specifically.
The meteor was enormous - and it wasn't alone
NASA said the meteor weighed approximately one ton with a diameter of three feet. The fragmentation created a pressure wave responsible for the booms heard across the entire northern Houston metropolitan area.
The American Meteor Society received more than 140 reports from across south-central and southeastern Texas - from Houston to Katy, College Station, San Antonio, and Austin. NASA's Doppler weather radar indicated meteorite fragments may have landed across parts of Houston between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing. That means there could be more rocks out there - in yards, in fields, in driveways - that nobody has found yet.
Throughout Scripture, the heavens are described not as empty space but as a declaration - creation speaking in ways that remind humanity of its smallness and God's vastness. A three-foot rock traveling from the edge of our solar system at 35,000 miles per hour, breaking apart above a city of millions, and landing in one specific bedroom next to one sleeping child who happened to not be there - that's the kind of moment that makes even skeptics pause.
Sherrie James put it plainly: "No telling where this thing came from."
Sometimes the universe answers in ways nobody expected.
