Smithsonian Magazine reports: A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had a very unusual 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 shocking event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alberta on Monday.
“It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang,” the homeowner, Joe Velaidum, tells the Canadian Press‘ Lyndsay Armstrong. Velaidum wasn’t home to hear the sound in person, however. Last summer, he and his partner Laura Kelly noticed strange, star-shaped, grey debris in front of their house after returning from a walk with their dogs. They checked their security camera footage, and that’s when they saw and heard it: a small rock plummeting through the sky and smashing into their walkway. It landed so quickly that the space rock itself is only visible in two of the video’s frames.