Two weeks ago, a woman lying in bed in her home near Vancouver heard a loud noise, felt pieces of her ceiling falling on her and then discovered a black fist-sized meteorite on the pillow a few inches from her head. Seems impossible, but a house in North America is struck every 1.3 years on average.
Over the years, about a dozen people have brought me strange rocks they’ve picked up near their home, thinking they’ve possibly found a meteorite.
So right off the bat let me say that a real one will almost always be black, heavy for its size and be able to pull on a magnet. A really good tell-tale sign is if the rock has gentle depressions that look the way soft clay might appear if you gently pushed your thumb into it.
Large museums usually have someone who can analyze the stone, and such experts often keep a cabinet where they store some of the “meteor wrongs” brought to them over the years. Authentic meteorites are fabulous for displaying in your living room. People love to hold an object that came from space, and virtually all are asteroids, or fragments of one. If you want one, check eBay and you’ll find they cost about $500 for a nice one-pound octahedron (nickel-iron) specimen. But prices vary: Those that came from the moon or Mars, or which have a famous history like the cantaloupe sized meteorite that clobbered a parked Chevy Malibu in Peekskill in 1992, fetch much more.
Sadly, that strangely heavy rock you found is almost certainly not a meteorite because they’re extremely rare. Only eleven have been discovered in New York State in our entire history.
Antarctica is currently the in-place to look for them, while riding a snowmobile. Typically, one that landed thousands of years ago gets buried under snow, compacted into the ice, and eventually shows up when that layer works its way to the surface as an isolated, eye-catching dark rock.
In a few places, a single large meteoroid broke apart high up and hundreds of pieces wound up in the same general area. A field 500 miles northwest of Buenos Aires is one such spot. EBay advertisers who want to sell you a “campo del Cielo” meteorite are offering exactly these specimens, which came to Earth between four and five thousand years ago and are indeed genuine.
If the rock you’ve found locally has deep holes, it’s not a meteorite, because meteorites don’t have holes in them. If the rock has many sharp edges, it’s not a meteorite.
Go ahead, buy one and display it, and see all the attention it gets. How many things in your home came from outer space?
Join the family! 
