

Is the Video of the Meteorite and the Skydiver Legit? - rpm4321
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/05/close_call_video_of_a_skydiver_almost_hit_by_meteoroid.html

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devindotcom
Any competent VFX artist could add something like this to the video, right?
This has been the case so many times, and people will go to such lengths for
attention, and the odds of this actually happening are so infinitesimal that
it seems far more likely to me that it was faked.

There's no real evidence either way yet. Honestly even if they find the rock
and it is meteoric, it still seems more likely to me that the whole thing was
invented, than that a meteor passed within a few feet of a skydiver. I can't
say for sure one way or the other, of course. I'm not even sure what would
convince me, considering how small the chance is of this happening and the
motive, opportunity, and techniques to fake it are easily identified.

~~~
stcredzero
Can you in fact concretely quantify the odds of a real event?

~~~
bertil
I'm not sure if your question is rhetorical (‘please, do it’) or not (‘is is
possible?’) but, yes, it should be possible to find lower bounds of such
events, by multiplying:

\- estimates of meteroid paths (per year); tenths of thousands;

\- estimates of people sky-diving (per year); 3 millions; Source:
[http://www.statisticbrain.com/skydiving-
statistics/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/skydiving-statistics/)

\- time of one jump; minutes, say two;

\- time of one meteroid drop; minutes, say two;

\- length in meters of a typical jump; 3,000;

\- length in meters of a drop; 20,000;

\- and the square of an estimate of visibility boxes — say meters across —;
1000 m^3;

divided by:

\- a year; 525,948 minutes;

\- Earth’s jumpable atmosphere (that's the whole thing) _squared_ : 3×10^24
m^3 (Wolfram Alpha).

My take is that the over-all volume of atmosphere and that meteroids can drop
at anytime makes it extremely unlikely: an order of 10^-35 with my very rough
estimates. 10^30 years of jumping would not make it likely. Even by estimating
millions of asteroids shattering in millions of pieces, that even should be
rarissime even considering the length of human species’ history.

More parameters, such as the fact that people tend to jump when there is
daylight or pay attention to the landscape, certainly counts.

If you compare to how many cameras are in the ground, we should have seen a
meteoroid last meters much sooner. So, if statistical disappointing skepticism
is to be considered, what makes all those camera unlikely candidate appears
that they are too stable and generally face other cameras and the ground were
the stone might be recovered. It doesn’t make that video fake; it’s just that,
using a Bayesian framework, it comes off as _incredibly unlikely_ not to have
been done using editing.

It makes it all the more spectacular if it were. I’m guessing the camera
makers can easily tell that from the recording on the device.

Please — correct my math, reasoning or any assumption: I certainly got most of
it wrong.

~~~
marshray
Perhaps a simpler path is in the relationship of the number of people who have
been verifiably struck by meteorites (e.g.,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Hodges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Hodges)
), the proportion of people on the ground to those skydiving with helmetcams
at any given time, and the relative cross-sectional target area of a person
compared to the visibility frustrum of a helmetcam.

~~~
bertil
Indeed.

Most jumpers now have several cameras so you can assume the proportion of
skydivers is enough. It‘s still less than ten millions minutes overall, while
billions of humans live half a million minutes each year. Now considering
three recorded events (listed in your source) over the course of five
centuries… This still means it would take billions of years of jumping to
reasonably come across such an event. That calculations makes it far more
likely that the previous one I made, most likely because I highly
underestimated the number of meteoroids.

The weakness of that method is that you are limiting the visibility of humans
on the ground to being struck, although one can argue that the buy in Uganda
was a case of it coming close enough to notice.

~~~
marshray
Unless there's something special about low altitude, why wouldn't we expect a
terrestrial camera with a view of the sky to have a reasonable chance of
capturing dark flight?

I know skydivers do a lot of filming, but seems more likely that the first
dark flight would be caught by tourists on a sunny day or something.

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chillax
Just wanted to add that the video was featured in Schrødingers cat, a popular
science program broadcasted on the largest TV channel in Norway (NRK). That
does not of course make it real, but I highly doubt they would've aired it if
they didn't think it was the real deal.

According to this norwegian article from the Norwegian Meteorite Network
they've already been searching for 100s of hours since 2012:

[http://norskmeteornettverk.no/wordpress/?p=1329](http://norskmeteornettverk.no/wordpress/?p=1329)

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Schwolop
The article states that it's not "technically" a meteorite until it _hits_ the
earth. So what would it be called had the skydiver managed to catch it?

~~~
stcredzero
_The article states that it 's not "technically" a meteorite until it hits the
earth._

This shows how our environment has biased our science and thinking. An object
hitting a planet's atmosphere should be thought of as having hit that planet.
Otherwise, it becomes indeterminate to say when a meteor hits a gas giant
planet, if at all. By the time atoms of the meteor get to where the gas giant
planet's material can be described as solid, the meteor is no longer
recognizably a meteor.

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mrb
The photo collage shows that the distance travelled by the rock between each
frame is approximately 2-3 m (assuming the rock size estimation of 8-20 cm is
correct) . If the GoPro recorded at 60 fps, it means the rock's speed was
120-180 m/s, which is very plausible!

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kabouseng
So the article doesn't really say much. Just more conjecture.

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Theodores
I am not saying this is a fake, however, sometimes looking at the tape is not
enough.

Means, motive and opportunity:

We should be looking into how the story came to light and whether those behind
the story had anything to gain from the story. 15 minutes of fame is enough,
however, did any news outlet pay for the story? We don't know who else was on
the plane and whether they packed a few rocks.

Anatomy of a hoax:

Every hoax has to convince one person known as an expert (TM). Once you have
an expert convinced then there is no need to convince anyone in the media,
they will report what the story is and assume it is true because the expert
says it is true. This story has an expert, he may want to believe the story is
true and see what he wants to see.

~~~
nickonline
The thing is it's gotten more attention from people suspecting it's a fake
than the actual event taking place.

I first saw the video last week and my thoughts were "Wow, that's freaky. I
doubt that happens often" and didn't think of it again, until everyone started
saying the video was fake, now it has started to take off.

A hoax or not I'm not sure why it's being given any more thought by anyone
other than "Huh, that's neat".

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ohwp
The only think that bothered me in this story was how quickly they determined
the size.

When I watched the video I thought about the size of maybe 5cm.

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damian2000
It sounds like it may be a viral advertisement for GoPro in the vein of this
one?

[http://petapixel.com/2014/02/12/real-fake-gopro-survives-
fal...](http://petapixel.com/2014/02/12/real-fake-gopro-survives-fall-
airplane-land-pigpen/)

TBH not sure if a GoPro was even used in this meteorite one, but it has taken
off in the media in a similar way.

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stcredzero
In the photo collage in the article, why is the path of the meteoroid curved?
Why is the path much more curved at the top than bottom? Also, I'm not sure
this path is consistent with an object at terminal velocity being filmed by a
parachutist at terminal velocity. The 2nd derivatives of both motions should
be constant, or change very slowly. I would not expect the path to curve so
much. Could this be a pendulum motion of the parachutist?

~~~
lucisferre
So I wasn't paying a lot of attention, but I believe when that was caught he
had just deployed his chute, so might he be decelerating rapidly at that
point?

~~~
stcredzero
Also, why am I being downvoted for asking intelligent questions?

