A skydiver in Norway managed to capture an incredible first-world video of the moment an extinguished meteorite passed him as it hurtled towards the Earth, Grind TV reported.
After Anders Helstrup leapt from a plane over Hedmark, south east Norway, and deployed his parachute, he was able to cheat death just by a few feet when the space rock hurtled past him at 300mph, UK MailOnline reported.
"This is the first time in history that a meteorite has been filmed in the air after its light goes out," geologist Hans Amundsen told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, Norway's largest media organization also known as NRK.
"Dark flight," the portion of the meteorite that ceases to glow upon its descent, has been witnessed and recorded on video for the very first time, experts said.
Skydiving with other members of Oslo Parachute Club in the Rena area, Helstrup experienced an unusual sensation when he opened his parachute, according to Grind TV.
"I got the feeling that there was something, but it didn't register what was happening," he told NRK.
After making a safe landing, he checked out the recorded video taken from cameras attached to his helmet.
"When we stopped the film, we could clearly see something that looked like a stone," he said. "At first it crossed my mind that it had been packed into a parachute, but it's simply too big for that."
"Helstrup, who lives in Oslo, became preoccupied with the experience, taking time off work to search the countryside near Rena, the town he and his fellow skydivers had jumped over," UK MailOnline reported. "Eventually he contacted Oslo's Natural History Museum, where the film caused a sensation with experts who were convinced that the stone which plunged past him was a meteorite."
"The film caused a sensation in the meteorite community," Helstrup told NRK. "They seemed convinced that this was a meteorite, perhaps I was the one who was the most skeptical."
The meteorite came from an asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, began falling towards the gravity of the Sun, reached the speed of perhaps five times the velocity of a bullet, and got caught by Earth's gravity, Amundsen concluded in NRK's video report, Grind TV reported.
"If you'd jumped a fraction of a second later, you'd be dead," Amundsen told Helstrup in NRK's report. "It would have cut him in half. Imagine a 5-kilo [11-pound] rock hitting you in the chest at 300 kilometers [186 miles] per hour. That would have led to quite an accident investigation."
Although the incident happened in the summer of 2012, it wasn't made public until this Thursday.
Project Dark Flight, a venture on the meteorite, has been launched in order to get help in finding the valuable rock. The Dark Flight YouTube channel has posted several videos on the incident.
