The site in Elmore County, roughly 20 miles north of Montgomery, is the only confirmed impact crater in the state.
But to witness the event that blew the 4.7-mile hole in the Earth, you'd have to travel back more than 84 million years to a time when much of Alabama was covered with water.
Or you could ask the man who proved the site was an impact crater, Auburn University Impact Geology Professor David King Jr.
"The Wetumpka asteroid went all the way through the atmosphere, it went all the way through to the bottom of the ocean and into the Earth's crust, the better part of a mile before it blew up," he said. "So it was a much more energetic event."
King and colleagues discovered geological evidence in 1998 that proved the crater, first identified in 1970, was the result of a meteor impact.
According to his estimates, the meteor that caused the crater was about 1,200 feet in diameter, dwarfing the 49-foot meteor that shattered over Chelyabinsk, Russia and the 160-foot asteroid that passed near Earth this afternoon.
"We plugged some of the energy numbers into a formula developed to understand the effect of nuclear weapons on the battlefield, and we calculated a kill radius that went all the way south of Montgomery," he said. "There were about 400,000 people living in that footprint."
While today's unexpected explosion over Russia is raising questions about humanity's ability to detect such objects before they impact the Earth, Kings says its not particularly surprising we missed it given the object's small size.
Nor is it impossible, he said, that the timing of the Russian impact and the near-Earth asteroid that passed just 16 hours later were mere coincidence. Scientists across the globe have said the two events are not related based on the objects' differing trajectories.
"These are rare events to begin with, so it's even rarer that they would occur together like that, but it happens," he said. "If we went around long enough, just about anything could happen. If we could live for 5 billion, we'd all win the Vegas lottery."
According to King, the Russian meteor was probably not detected in advance due to its relatively small size.
"There are probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of objects out there that are really small that we don't know about," he said. "It's the the one you didn't know about that's going to get you. We don't have effective detection techniques for these little ones."
Scientists will be looking closely in the coming days, King said, at how this afternoon's close encounter affected the larger asteroid's trajectory and whether the course change will make it a threat the next time it passes close to the Earth in about 33 years.