Skydiver Films Meteorite Speeding Past Him During Free Fall [VIDEO]

A skydiver is lucky to be alive after what appears to be a meteorite nearly struck him during free fall.

During the summer of 2012, Norewigan skydiver Anders Helstrup embarked on a typical skydive above Oslo, complete with helmet-mounted video cameras to record his jump. What he ended up with was footage that geologists and meteor experts purport is the first footage of a meteorite falling through the sky after it has gone into "dark flight" - the stage after the blazing trail of light emitting from it extinguishes, according to Norwegian news site NRK.no, which reported this story Thursday.

During the skydive, Helstrup said he noticed something strange, and later when he watched the video of the dive he saw a speeding object fly past him and first thought it was a rock that had somehow got packed into parachuting gear.

"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."

When geologist Hans Amundsen was shown the video, he corroborated Helstrup's other theory: that the flying stone was a meteorite.

"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," Amundsen told NRK.

"Nobody's seen footage like this before," he said.

Amundsen said that had Helstrup jumped out of the plane a fraction of a second later, he could have been struck by the speeding meteorite, which could have cut him in half.

"Imaging a 5 kilo rock hitting you in the chest at 300 kilometers per hour," Amundsen said.

"That would have led to quite an accident investigation."

Read more about the meteorite and Helstrup's remarkable video on NRK.no (in English).