Authorities believe this Renault Clio Campus was struck by a meteorite
The incident happened in Strasbourg, France
Imagine calling your car's insurance company to declare potential meteorite damage. It's unlikely to happen, but that's exactly the phone call that the owner of a Renault Clio Campus in Strasbourg, France, had to make after finding a giant hole in the little hatchback's roof panel.
The incident took place on November 20, 2023, according to French newspaper Le Figaro, and the impact left a roughly 20-inch hole in the Clio's roof. What happened wasn't initially clear: Firefighters were dispatched to the scene to investigate "a smoking car." They quickly ruled out a fire and vandalism and after a great deal of head scratching decided the hole was probably caused by an "astronomical body."
It's not just the roof panel that was damaged. Whatever caused the hole was traveling fast enough to also go through the hatchback's floor and fuel tank. Radioactivity tests came back negative, luckily, but part of what's stumping investigators is that the object wasn't in the car.
"Either it's so small that we can't find it, or the impact was so strong that the object disintegrated and turned to dust," Matthieu Colobert, the captain of the firefighting team dispatched to the scene, told Le Figaro. There may be one promising lead: A representative for the local police department told the publication that his team found a "chestnut-sized rock that's light and that looks like burnt wood" near the car.
The rock was sent to a lab in Paris, where researchers will try to determine whether it punctured the Clio and, crucially, whether it came from space. While this might initially sound far-fetched, the officer pointed out that "even a marble traveling very quickly can cause damage."
As you'd expect, the news spurred a diverse selection of reactions on various social media platforms. Some users claim to have seen or heard the object traveling through the sky, while one guessed that someone accidentally dropped a Nokia 3310 from a nearby balcony.
Meteorite strikes thankfully aren't common but they're not unheard of. One of the most famous incidents happened in 1992, when a 27-pound, football-shaped rock hit a 1980 Chevrolet Malibu at about 164 mph in New York. The owner bought the car for $400 and sold it for $25,000 shortly after the impact, and she later sold the meteorite for $50,000. The sedan has been displayed in several museums since.
There's no word yet on whether the Clio Campus (a model lurking at the bottom of its depreciation curve) will skyrocket in value as well.
JONATHON RAMSEY
Nov 16th 2023
Life is imitating art in increasingly nutty ways. If, in a movie, we'd seen this same crash between a car and a bus that happened in Long Beach, California, we'd have thought, "No way. What are the chances?" A Dodge Charger driver showed us the chances are never zero.
The driver, speeding south on South Street toward California Avenue at around 3 o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, ignored a stop sign at the intersection. Southern California builds a lot of its main roads with surprisingly high crowns and low gutters on either side. The Charger was going fast enough that as it dipped through the California Avenue gutter and hit the crown, all four tires left the road — as in, a proper "Bullitt" jump without the need for San Francisco ramps or Hollywood tricks. Then, as the sedan was midair, it got hit by a Long Beach public transit bus heading east on California, the collision sending both into The Boujie Crab restaurant on the southeast corner of the intersection.
Flying car + moving bus + crab shack = a bad day for everybody.
The seafood spot was closed, thankfully. The impact injured at least 14 people, 10 of them taken to local hospitals, six in serious condition. The bus driver was one of those injured, but no one died. The Charger ended up wedged between the bus and the structure, emergency crews needing to pull the driver and passenger out. The car caught fire as it was loaded onto a flatbed trailer more than six hours later. Residents living in the apartments above the restaurant were forced to evacuate; it's not clear for how long.
In the video above, KTLA 5 identifies a woman named Erica Hunt as the restaurant owner. We're not sure where that identification came from; Nickey McKnight opened The Boujie Crab in 2020. McKnight told ABC 7 she wasn't sure she'd reopen The Boujie Crab in the same location. "I have mixed feelings about this street, although I do want to stay in Long Beach," she said. Problem is, "Some of my customers would say this [street] is like a race track because they go so fast. ... Literally, you can hear the speed from inside the restaurant." A local resident told the Long Beach Press-Telegram the same thing about speeding on South Street, "It happens all the time — people do donuts, go 60 to 70 miles per hour down the street."
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