In 1910 Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet. Newspapers warned of poison gas, hucksters sold comet pills — and nothing happened, because a comet's tail is almost nothing at all.
In 1859 the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record lit up auroras near the equator and made telegraph lines spark — a warning about how a solar storm would hit today's grid.
In 1908 a space rock exploded in the air over Siberia and flattened 2,000 square kilometres of forest — the largest impact event in recorded history, and it left no crater.
About 66 million years ago a city-sized asteroid hit the Yucatán, triggering the impact winter that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and three-quarters of life on Earth.