‘Meteorite’ Misses Skydiver During Jump, Fireball In ‘Dark Flight’ Captured On Camera [VIDEO]
A Norwegian skydiver claims he has proof that he almost collided with a meteorite.
Video captured in 2012 of Anders Helstrup and several other members of Oslo Parachute Club was shared on YouTube on Thursday, showing what appears to be a near-collision between Helstrup and a rock. He was wearing a wing suit with two head-mounted cameras when he captured a rock whiz by him midair.
“I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn’t register what was happening,” Helstrup told NRK.no.
Helstrup enlisted his friends to look for the mysterious rock that nearly hit him on his dive, but they never found it. Helstrup was convinced the object was a meteorite and decided to study the footage to prove it.
“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,” he said.
Helstrup’s footage caught the attention of meteorite enthusiasts who have scoured the area looking for the alleged space rock. In the summer of 2012, Helstrup found a stone that showed potential.
“I found a stone which I thought was a meteorite and took it to the museum. They just fell about laughing,” he said about experts from the Natural History Museum in Oslo.
While Helstrup has his doubts about the mysterious object that nearly hit him on his dive, experts claim it must have come from space.
“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 said.
If the object is in fact a meteorite, it may have been captured for the first time during “dark flight” – a period when the meteorite stops traveling at an angle and falls straight down. According to the American Meteor Society, this could be anywhere between 200 to 400 miles per hour.
“It has never happened before that a meteorite has been filmed during dark flight; this is the first time in world history,” Amundsen said.
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