It was a simple, sunny afternoon on Canada's Prince Edward Island as Joe Velaidum and his partner, Laura Kelly, set off to walk their dog. Noticing a stray leash lying in the yard, Velaidum briefly stopped to pick it up before setting off on a quick walk. Minutes later, a meteorite pummeled the walkway — exactly where Velaidum had been standing — and a Ring doorbell camera captured the entire incident on video. "I never stop on that spot — ever," Velaidum told CNN about the incident, which occurred in July 2024. "And looking back on it now, we noticed, because of the video, if I had stayed on that very spot for just two minutes longer, I absolutely would have been struck and probably killed by this meteor." Months later, after undergoing lab analysis that confirmed it was, in fact, a rock that had plummeted from space, the object has been officially cataloged in a database kept by the nonprofit Meteoritical Society. The specimen — named "Charlottetown" after the nearby city — stands out because of its accompanying video, which the University of Alberta released last week. While the doorbell footage showing its arrival is not the first caught on video, it's remarkable because the incident was captured at very close range and with recorded sound, according to Dr. Chris Herd, a professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada. "No other meteorite fall has been documented like this, complete with sound," he said. Even in Herd's line of work, incidents like the meteorite strike in Prince Edward Island — Canada's smallest province that lies just north of Nova Scotia — almost never come up. The University of Alberta's online meteorite reporting system receives about 10 submissions a week. But ".1% or less of inquiries that come in actually turn out to be meteorites," Herd said. Velaidum, a university professor himself, did not readily accept the possibility that the object that struck his front yard was extraterrestrial in origin. More likely, he guessed, it fell from an aircraft or off the roof. "The rational part of my brain just said, 'No, this has got to be something much more mundane than a meteorite, right?'" Velaidum said. Initially, he said, the couple began to sweep the detritus off the sidewalk. It was Kelly's father, who lives nearby, who prompted the couple to dredge up some samples for further inspection. Using a vacuum and magnet — which can attract the metals found in meteorites — they scraped together a 95-gram (3-ounce) sample. When a quick online search turned up the University of Alberta's meteorite collection, the couple reached out, sending along some photos. Herd said he knew instantly that they had a bona fide space rock. "I have the expertise that I've looked at hundreds, if not thousands of these types of photos," Herd said, noting that meteorites are coated with a black shell that forms when space rocks react with Earth's thick atmosphere while traveling more than 45,000 miles (72,420 kilometers) per hour. What makes the occurrence more special, Herd said, is the fact that a camera captured the moment of impact — a stunning observation not just because it confirms the meteorite's arrival, but also because the footage can benefit science. "We are working on analyzing the video to see if we can say more about the meteorite's fall — including speed," Herd said. "We might be able to analyze the sound, for example, to say something about the physical properties of the rock." Herd and Velaidum also pointed out a string of bizarre coincidences associated with the meteorite's arrival. First and perhaps most sobering, Velaidum would have been struck by the object if it had arrived just a few minutes earlier. It was the first confirmed meteorite strike in the history of the 2,200 square-mile (5,700 square-kilometer) Prince Edward Island. And Herd happened to have a family vacation planned on the island about 10 days after the incident, so he was able to retrieve the specimen in person. "It's crazy. This story is full of all kinds of things like that — serendipity," Herd said. Velaidum added that he teaches a religious studies course on "the meaning of life" at the University of Prince Edward Island, which includes a discussion of the vastness and power of the wider universe. "We have a section of the course that deals with the immensity of space and how insignificant our existence seems when considered against that backdrop," Velaidum said, "which is another strange coincidence ." The type of space rock that hit his property, however, is not all that rare. It's classified as an "ordinary chondrite" — dubbed "ordinary" because they are common as far as meteorites go. But its origin is no less fascinating: "We're quite certain in the scientific community that these types of meteorites come from broken pieces off of asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter," Herd said. "This one chunk that arrived to Earth last July 25 at 5:02 p.m. ... was probably in space for millions or tens of millions of years prior to that," he added. Today, the Charlottetown meteorite is part of the University of Alberta's Meteorite Collection, which houses more than 1,800 specimens — the largest of its kind in Canada. Herd, the curator of the collection, said members of the public who hope to submit a suspected meteorite for consideration should keep in mind that some earthly objects are often mistaken for space rocks. Slag, for example, is the rocky black substance that is discarded as a by-product from smelting or refining metal. But slag often has visible bubbles — and "bubbles are extremely rare in in meteorites." What's valuable and fascinating about sorting the "meteorwrongs," as the scientific community jokingly refers to them, from the meteorites is the information about our universe that these space rocks can offer. "Everything on the Earth is newer because of geology and active processes (on our home planet's surface)," Herd said. "There's no rocks of that age — 4 and a half billion years old — that are preserved on the Earth." — CNN
