Sound and video of meteorite crashing to Earth captured on video in P.E.I.

CHARLOTTETOWN — About two minutes after a P.E.I. man left his home to go for a walk with his wife and their dogs, a space rock hurtling toward Earth crashed onto the path where he had been standing.

The meteorite that hit Joe Velaidum’s walkway was captured on a home security camera, and it’s believed to be the first footage and sound of a meteorite landing on Earth — and the first reported and confirmed space rock to fall in the Maritimes.

That’s according to Chris Herd, the University of Alberta’s meteorite collection curator, who confirmed the object that hit the walkway with a loud bang and left a pile of dusty debris in July 2024 was a meteorite.

“It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang,” Velaidum said of the meteorite strike in an interview Tuesday.

Velaidum and his partner Laura Kelly noticed the strange-looking debris when they returned to their Marshfield, P.E.I., home after a short walk with their dogs, and checked the security camera to find the source. The couple was shocked at what they saw, and Kelly submitted the footage to Herd through the University of Alberta’s meteorite reporting system.

“I opened the video and realized, ‘Wow. This is pretty significant,’” Herd said in an interview Tuesday.

The professor in the university’s department of Earth and atmospheric sciences requested additional photos and asked the couple to collect the grey dust and rock particles. Herd just happened to be heading to P.E.I. on a family vacation 10 days later, so he was able to collect samples of the debris and confirm that what had landed was indeed a meteorite.

“My wife and I went over, we actually took our son and his girlfriend to help, we used a kitchen scale (to measure the sample) and documented everything … the whole thing was really cool,” Herd said.

Velaidum said they never imagined the front door security camera they use to monitor deliveries would capture something like a meteorite strike. “To see a meteorite from hundreds of millions of miles away that enters our atmosphere and hits our tiny little province, and a tinier little community within that province, and then my doorstep. It’s just unbelievable,” he said.

What stood out to him when watching the video, was that the meteorite hit precisely where he had been standing to pick up a dog leash from the yard.

“I was standing literally over the exact spot where the meteorite hit just a couple minutes later,” Velaidum said. “I have been thinking about it a lot because, you know, when you have a near-death experience it kind of shocks you.”

Herd said it’s fair to assume the meteorite would have been travelling somewhere around 200 kilometres an hour when it pummeled into Velaidum’s walkway. “I’m not sure he would have survived” had the meteorite struck Velaidum, Herd said.

“It isn’t strange enough that this meteor almost killed me, but the meteor expert had a family trip scheduled to Prince Edward Island in two weeks after we contacted him. What are the chances?” Velaidum said.

Herd said scientists are able to learn from the recording and fragments of the space rock, which has been named the Charlottetown Meteorite.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 14, 2025.

— By Lyndsay Armstrong in Halifax

The Canadian Press