A skydiver from Norway almost had an alien encounter of the worst kind when is lucky to be alive after what appears to be a meteoroid nearly hit him during a free fall, a newly-circulated video shows

In the summer of 2012, Anders Helstrup started a typical skydive above Oslo, equipped with a helmet-mounted video camera -- that ended up capturing what geologists and meteor experts believe is the first footage of a meteoroid falling through the sky after it's stopped burning, according to a story that originally ran on the NRK.no Norwegian news site.

Helstrup told NRK that soon after leaving his transport plane, he said he noticed something strange in the sky with him and later on, while watching his video of the jump, he assumed the object speeding past him was a rock he had somehow packed into his parachuting gear.

(In the YouTube clip below, the falling rock is first seen about 28 seconds into the video.)

"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, "Helstup said. He suspected the object came from much higher in the sky.

Indeed, when geologist Hans Amundsen saw the video, he agreed with Helstrup's backup explanation, the zipping past him on the video was a meteoroid.

According to Hubblesite.org, a site maintained by the Nation Aeronautics and Space Administration's Space Telescope Science Institute, a meteoroid "is a piece of interplanetary matter that is smaller than a kilometer and frequently only millimeters in size. Most meteoroids that enter the Earth's atmosphere are so small that they vaporize completely and never reach the planet's surface," but "if any part of a meteoroid survives the fall through the atmosphere and lands on Earth, it is called a meteorite."

Furthermore, explains the site, "A meteor is the flash of light that we see in the night sky when a small chunk of interplanetary debris burns up as it passes through our atmosphere." In other words, the term 'meteor' only refers "to the flash of light caused by the debris, not the debris itself."

Said Amundsen to NRK: "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 ... Nobody's seen footage like this before."

Amundsen suggested if Helstrup had jumped out of the plane even a fraction of a second later, he could have been struck by the space rock, which could have cut him in half.

"Imagine a 5 kilo [11 pound] rock hitting you in the chest at 300 kilometers [186 miles] per hour," Amundsen said. "That would have led to quite an accident investigation."