Historic Falls

Hraschina, Croatia, *1751

Meteorites are some of the most entrancing, rare, and fascinating objects on the planet. If you hold an meteorite, you will never have touched anything more ancient. It is older than the ground you stand on. Some meteorites contain material older even than the sun and the solar system.

It’s possible to stand in the dark and look at the moon, with a piece of moonstone in your hand. Or Mars, with a fragment of the red planet in your other.

In the history of mankind, something like 30,000 tonnes of gold have been mined. Perhaps 1,000 tonnes of diamond have been extracted. But the total weight of all the recovered meteorites on the planet is only about 700 tonnes – and 60 tonnes of that is still sitting where it landed, in Hoba, Namibia.

Almost all we know about meteorites has been discovered in the last 200 years. This site is about the men and women who witnessed them, their testimonies, and the stories of these remarkable rocks themselves.