Lottie Williams, beating the odds

Yesterday, NPR reported that one of NASA's satellites will be falling back to earth sometime soon, and the biggest piece of it will likely be around 300 pounds.

So what are your chances of being hit by that, or one of the two dozen other pieces? NASA calculates that the chance of someone, somewhere on Earth, being hit by a piece of the satellite are one in 3,200. Heck, a lot of things are more unlikely than that! But wait. Those are the odds for someone, somewhere. What are the odds of any particular single person getting hit? You, or me? Then, NASA says, they're one in trillions.

But Lottie Williams beat those odds, back in 1997. She spoke to NPR about it, said she saw something that looked like a shooting star, one night:

"It was just a big ball of fire, shooting across the sky at just a fast speed," she recalls. A little while later, Williams felt a tap on her shoulder. When she turned around, there was no one there — but something fell to the ground.

It was a small piece of burned mesh. An analysis later showed that it's most likely part of a returning Delta II rocket — the fireball she saw in the sky.

photo by Brandi Stafford, for the Tulsa World

NPR story here