“Unprecedented Home Security Footage Captures Meteorite Crash in Canada!”

A resident on Prince Edward Island in Canada experienced an extraordinarily peculiar near-death incident: A meteorite fell precisely where he’d been standing just minutes earlier. Furthermore, his home surveillance camera recorded the impact—capturing an exceptional clip that may represent the first known documentation of both the visual and auditory aspects of a meteorite striking Earth.

The astonishing incident occurred in July 2024 and was reported in a release from the University of Alberta on Monday.

“It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang,” the resident, Joe Velaidum, tells the Canadian Press’ Lyndsay Armstrong.

However, Velaidum was not at home to witness the noise firsthand. The previous summer, he and his partner Laura Kelly spotted peculiar, star-shaped, gray debris in front of their house after returning from a stroll with their dogs. They reviewed their security footage, and that’s when they saw and heard it: a small rock diving through the sky and crashing into their walkway. It descended so swiftly that the space rock itself is only discernible in two of the video’s frames.

“The surprising thing for me is that I was standing right there a few minutes just before this impact,” Velaidum remarks to CBC News’ Stephen Brun. “If I’d seen it, I probably would’ve been right there, so it likely would’ve torn me apart.”

Meteorite impact captured on P.E.I. home surveillance camera

The couple initially gathered 0.25 ounces of fragments from the grass around the impact zone, and later returned with a vacuum and magnet to recover additional pieces. Suspecting something (literally) celestial, they reported the occurrence using the University of Alberta’s Meteorite Reporting System.

By coincidence, Chris Herd, curator of the university’s meteorite collection, had already scheduled a vacation to Prince Edward Island just ten days later. Consequently, he made a detour to investigate the report.

“My wife and I visited; we actually brought our son and his girlfriend to assist. We used a kitchen scale (to weigh the sample) and documented everything… the entire experience was incredibly exciting,” Herd informs the Canadian Press. At Velaidum and Kelly’s residence in Marshfield, they collected further samples and measured the small, 0.79-by-0.79-inch crater the meteorite impact created in the walkway.

In total, the homeowners, Herd, and his family retrieved around 3.35 ounces of meteorite fragments, according to CBC News. Further evaluations confirmed the newly designated “Charlottetown Meteorite” to be an ordinary chondrite, which is the most prevalent type of meteorite.

“As the first and only meteorite from the province of PEI, the Charlottetown Meteorite certainly made its entry in a remarkable manner. No other meteorite fall has been documented in such a way, complete with sound,” Herd states in the announcement. “It adds an entirely new dimension to the natural history of the island.”

He mentions to CBC News that the meteorite originated from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it would have been hurtling along at a minimum of 125 miles per hour just before impact.

Interestingly, no individuals reported witnessing a fireball in that region around the time of the impact. According to the Weather Network’s Scott Sutherland, this could be due to the meteorite landing hours before sundown, making it challenging to spot a bright streak in the daylight sky, in addition to the fact that it was a cloudy day. This renders the recording of the event even more extraordinary.

“To witness a meteorite from hundreds of millions of miles away that enters our atmosphere and strikes our tiny little province, and an even tinier community within that province, and then my doorstep. It’s simply unbelievable,” Velaidum conveys to the Canadian Press. “I’ve been reflecting on it a lot because, you know, when one has a near-death experience, it tends to be quite shocking.”