It's probably the world's first such event caught on video, just missing the homeowner.
A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had an extraordinarily rare near-death experience: A meteorite landed exactly where he’d been standing roughly two minutes earlier.
What’s more, his home security camera caught the impact on video - capturing a rare clip that might be the first known recording of both the visual and audio of a meteorite striking the planet.
The remarkable event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alberta last week.
Suspecting something (literally) astronomical, the owner of the property - Joe Velaidum - reported the event through the University of Alberta’s Meteorite Reporting System. In a further twist of fate, Chris Herd, curator of the university’s meteorite collection, had already planned a vacation to Prince Edward Island just ten days later. So, he made a detour to check out the report.
Sure enough, says Smithsonian Magazine, analysis confirmed the newly named “Charlottetown Meteorite” to be an ordinary chondrite, which is the most common type of meteorite that came from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it would have been traveling at least 125 miles per hour at impact - leaving a one inch divot in the walkway's hard surface.
“To see a meteorite from hundreds of millions of miles away that enters our atmosphere and hits our tiny little province, and a tinier little community within that province, and then my doorstep. It’s just unbelievable,” Velaidum told the Canadian Press. “I have been thinking about it a lot because, you know, when you have a near-death experience it kind of shocks you.”
Here's the video...