Human casualties in impact events

Abstract

It is a widespread error to believe that people were never killed by meteorites. It was concluded that there were no human casualties due to meteorite falls because there were no reports about such incidents, but there are reports of these rare events. The statement of no one ever being killed by a meteorite may intend that the danger even of asteroid and comet impacts onto Earth is only fiction, but the danger is real. It is a low-probability-high- consequence event for large impactors (more than 1 km). Even from meteorites, however, people were reported struck to death. This article gives a survey over reports of human casualties from 616 A.D. well to our century.