How a Strange Car Accident Turned Out A-OK

Cars are expensive and, for many of us, vital to our everyday lives. When our cars get damaged — even when no one gets hurt — the result is, at best, an inconvenience which is often expensive. It need not involve another driver, either; having your car smashed by another customer’s errant shopping cart as you grocery shop can ruin your day.

And your car can get damaged almost anywhere, even at your own home — if the situation is right. Just ask Michelle Knapp. And she also learned that ultimately, that may not be such a bad thing.

On the evening of October 9, 1992, Knapp, then 18-years-old, was a resident of Peekskill, New York — the town made famous-ish by the television show The Facts of Life (which purports to take place there). More importantly, she was the owner of a 1980 red Chevy Malibu which she had picked up, used, for $400. Knapp either didn’t have a garage or lived with her parents and had to park on the driveway. While that left the Malibu vulnerable to the elements, that shouldn’t have been a big deal. Typically that means rain, snow, sleet, hail, and the like, which aren’t going to cause much wear and tear on a car. But on that October day, the Malibu met a new, stronger foe: a meteorite.

The Peekskill Meteorite, as it quickly became known, soared through the skies of the northeastern United States — it broke up in the atmosphere near Kentucky, and could be visible in Pittsburgh (about 400 miles west from Peekskill), Washington D.C. (more than 250 miles south-southwest), appearing as a greenish fireball in the eyes of many. In today’s world, with smartphone cameras everywhere, you’d expect to get a lot of video footage of the event; that’s basically what happened in 2013 when a meteor exploded over Russia. But that shouldn’t have been the case in 1992 — back then, if you wanted to shoot video extemporaneously, you needed a camcorder, like this. They were too cumbersome to carry around, though.

But we have videos of the Peekskill Meteorite — about sixteen of them, in fact. (Here’s one clip.) That’s because the meteorite had impeccable timing. October 9th of that year happened to be an autumn Friday, which meant that throughout the country — including the northeast — high school kids were playing in their weekly football games. Coaches, proud parents, and other spectators often came to the games hoping to capture a key play on tape. When a UFO appeared overhead, many of those cameras turned skyward. The brilliance of the event, captured on film, made the meteorite one of the more famous celestial events of the decade.

For Ms. Knapp, the events took a more personal tone. The meteorite flew over the United States, landing in Peekskill and, specifically, at her house. It smashed through her car, ripping up her trunk and pulverizing her rear-right taillight (as seen above) — certainly causing more damage than the $400 the car was worth just a bit earlier. That’s bad, and for sure, Ms. Knapp wasn’t very happy about losing her wheels.

But the buzz around the event more than made up for it. But the fame from the event ensured otherwise. Since then, the car became a historical curiosity, “touring [museums in] the United States, Germany, France, Switzerland and Japan,” per Wired. (While the meteorite itself was rather valuable — it’s not every day that the science community gets ahold of a sizeable piece of 4.4 billion-year-old space rock — it wasn’t obvious clear that a totaled 1980 Chevy Malibu would fare so well. )

It wasn’t Knapp who arranged those trips — she had already used the car’s newfound fame to turn her bad luck around. Shortly after the Malibu met its end as a viable means of locomotion, a collector of meteorites and meteorite-related memorabilia bought the car off Knapp for the astronomical (sorry!) price of $10,000 — 25 times what she originally paid for it.

Bonus fact: Meteorites strike Earth quite often, likely averaging around once per day. But those pieces are often quite small and don’t get much notice. And they typically don’t cause a lot of damage — especially not to human life. According to the American Museum of Natural History (which has a piece of the Peekskill Meteorite on display), “there are no known cases of a person being struck and killed by a meteorite.”

From the Archives: Not So Fast: The story of one of the first-ever car accidents.