Strange Transit Of The 1950s

Want a super-weird example of a Uranus Moon transit? On November 30, 1954, Aquarius Ann Hodges became the only known person to survive a direct meteor hit.

The Alabama housewife was was napping on her couch after lunch when the nine pounds (four kilograms) rock shot through the roof, bounced off her radio and whammed into her hip. It left a massive bruise but otherwise no physical injuries.

Breifly thinking it was “one of the neighbor’s kids,” Hodges stormed outside to confront them but instead found a bunch of shocked onlookers gawping at the hole in the roof left by what had evidently been a fireball so spectacular that it had been visible across three states and generated sonic booms. It was a fragment of what was about to be known as the Sylacauga meteorite, after the town it flew into.

Aries was rising, Mars and Pluto opposing and Jupiter was conjunct Uranus, in close orb of her natal Moon. It was fierce astrology and Uranus-Moon transits are known for surprises but still, a rock from outer space whacking into your hip while you’re napping? Wild.

Ann Hodges and the meteor – which was named after her – gained immediate fame but her landlady then tried to claim possession of it on the grounds that it was her house the space rock had hit. It became an unpleasant, ridiculously publicized dispute.

These days, of course, an Aquarius surviving a direct hit from a meteor while napping on the couch could spin the episode into a business. She would have scored a gigantic social media following and spun it into reality tv semi-stardom, sold off micro-fragments of the meteor, started a spurious religion or sought compensation from one government body or another.

But then? Sadly, Ann Hodges wound up hating the rock. The associated publicity and litigation took a toll yet she was unable to leverage her weird experience for financial gain the way others – who’d merely found fragments of the meteor did.

Interestingly, scientists estimated that the meteorite was from asteroid Toro, which was exactly opposite Hodges’ natal Mars in Scorpio. Her Mars was also exactly trine Uranus at Zero Pisces. And at the time the meteor fragment smashed through her ceiling, asteroid Toro was conjunct Hodges’ Venus and on the Midheaven.

Asteroids can be strange like that.