Will My Life Insurance Cover Death By Meteor?

Good questions indeed. Norwegian sky diver Anders Helstrup is probably asking them right now (if he isn’t, I’m sure his wife is). Did you catch the video he recently posted on Youtube? It shows him sky diving, when – literally out of the blue – a meteor shoots past him. At least it looks a lot like a meteor.

He and his wife believe it was, and took their tape to a scientific lab for review. Can you imagine a rock from the asteroid belt between around Mars and Jupiter making its way into the earth’s atmosphere… and then shooting at fantastic speed within a few yards of you… while you are falling through the sky with nothing but a parachute between you and the crushing planet crust?

Well, it is the job of life insurance underwriters to think about this kind of stuff. Believe it or not, they could come up with a price to charge you for coverage. The policy could cover not only skydiving, but death by any cause – including attack by meteor.

And so you and your family could sleep at night knowing that not even heavenly forces could prevent your claim from being paid.

By the way: science writer Phil Plait did a very thorough job investigating this incident. He concludes it probably wasn’t a meteor.

What do you think it was?