A Meteorite Crashed Through a Houston Home This Spring

Meteorite falls are rare enough on their own — meteorite falls that actually hit an occupied home are rarer still. On Saturday, March 21, 2026, around 4:30 p.m. Central Time, a fist-sized space rock crashed through the roof of a house in northwest Houston, Texas, following a roughly southwest-to-northeast trajectory.

The rock punched through the roof, passed through the attic, tore a hole in an upstairs bedroom ceiling, struck the floor hard enough to leave a dent, bounced off the opposite ceiling creating a second hole, and finally came to rest on a bed. Remarkably, no one was injured. In the aftermath, researchers from the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) worked with scientists and community members to recover fragments — about a dozen pieces were eventually found.

Events like this are a genuinely useful reminder of scale: meteorites fall to Earth constantly, but the vast majority land in oceans, deserts, or uninhabited land and are never found. A meteorite actually striking a home, in a way that's witnessed, documented, and scientifically confirmed within hours, is a rare enough event that it draws researchers from across the country — and gives collectors and scientists alike a fresh, well-documented specimen to study.

Source: Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI/USRA), April 2026.