A skydiver barely missed being hit by a meteorite as it whizzed past him during a jump.
Anders Helstrup made the near-leap of death in 2012, but never noticed how close he came to being hit by the rock from space. The skydiver did sense something odd during the jump, which felt to him like an unusual rustling in the air. At first, he was unable to explain what happened.
Watching the film of the jump after the event, Helstrup saw the rock speed past him, at almost 200 miles per hour, on its journey to the ground.
"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," Helstrup told Norwegian television station NRK. That station is the largest media outlet in Norway.
Helstrup and others spent the summer searching for the remains of the meteorite around Hedmark, Norway, where the jump took place.
"I got my girlfriend, family and friends to join the project. We searched the forest and kept looking," the skydiver told the station. They were unable to recover any specimen that matched the description of the rock from space.
In addition to his parachute, the skydiver also wore a wing suit during the jump. The leap took place alongside other members of the Oslo Parachute Club.
At the time it missed Helstrup, the meteorite was in "dark flight," the last moments before impact, when the meteor is no longer illuminated by air friction. The video from the jump was sent to the Natural History Museum in Oslo.
"It can't be anything else. The shape is typical of meteorites - a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded," geologist Hans Amundsen told the press.
Helstrup was wearing a pair of cameras on his suit when he made the skydive. The rock chunk whizzed by, just missing the man, right after he released his parachute.
Analysis by Amundsen confirmed the object Helstrup recorded on video was, in fact, a meteorite falling to Earth from outer space. By using data collected from the film, the area where the object may have fallen has now been narrowed down to a square measuring 330 feet on each side.
This is the first time in history a meteor fall has been recorded on film at this distance. It also marks the first time such an object has been recorded during dark flight.
