By the time it was returned, the meteorite was old news and Hodges could not find a buyer.
The woman was Ann Hodges, who was hit on the hip by a grapefruit-sized fragment of the Sylacauga meteorite in 1954.
In a way, a meteorite is like a photograph of a time long before there was any life on Earth.
Oak Grove, Alabama was her starting point, but she also travelled to Kanwarpura village in India, where a 6.8kg meteorite fell close to Rajasthan atomic plant in 2006, and across her native Germany to Ramsdorf, where local children unearthed a meteorite then broke it into small pieces for each of them to have as a keepsake.
"I had to know how the meteorite changed her life," says Petersen, "and what became of her".
The meteorite was seized by the US Air Force despite a legal challenge mounted by her husband and a counter-challenge by her landlord, who planned to sell it to the highest bidder to pay for the damage to his property.
lands his plane and finds bits of meteorite in a place empty of people and powerfully illustrates how we are adrift on this planet in space, that we are all in it together.
Hodges, who died in 1972, was the first officially recorded person to be hit by a meteorite in modern times.
But the abruptness of both extinctions indicates that the coup de grâce was administered by something else, and in the case of the Permian some fragments of meteorite of the correct age, found in rock in Antarctica, suggest that, as with the Cretaceous, that something was an asteroid or a comet.
He is waiting for someone, he says.The police officer's colossal partner, whose sense of humour is as robust as his shoulders, prays aloud: "Oh Lord, I pray that a meteorite hits this [drug bazaar]." (He adds a P.S. to the effect that God should be careful not to hurt anyone).The temporal authorities in Baltimore take a more pragmatic approach to fighting crime.
(Mr Almond, the exhibition notes reveal, was "surprised by the profound effect that a visit to Auschwitz had on him").But the Chapman brothers pass the test, as does Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture of John Paul II struck down by a meteorite.
