A skydiver from Norway was narrowly missed by a meteorite mid-air in summer 2012. Anders Helstrup, along with other members of the Oslo Parachute Club, jumped from a plane and while releasing his parachute for a slowed descent above Hedmark, he felt something that looked like a stone a few feet away from him.
"I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn't register what was happening," NRK quoted him as saying.
A video posted on YouTube shows how close the stone travelled. But Helstrup wanted hard evidence, so he and with his helpers had begun searching the forest area of one and a half square kilometers for any sign of the large meteorite.
He was skeptical of what actually passed by him. Helstrup showed the video to the Natural History Museum in Oslo in order to verify the footage by the geologists.
"When we stopped the film, we could clearly see something that looked like a stone. At first it crossed my mind that it had been packed into a parachute, but it's simply too big for that." said Helstrup.
Scientists were astonished to see the video and called it world's first occurrence.
The shape of the stone was certainly that of a meteorite and it was in a stage called "dark flight," when the light disappears and the meteorite no longer travels in a definite angle but travels straight down.
Helstrup's rock was free falling at 186 mph, concluded the geologists.
Catching such a meteorite on a video is "much less likely than winning the lottery three times in a row. It has never happened before that a meteorite has been filmed during dark flight; this is the first time in world history" said Hans Amundsen, a geologist.
Check out the video of the near miss meteorite here
(Edited by Vanilla Sharma)
