Cameras Launched Into Space Reveal Footage, 2 Years Later

Incredible GoPro footage from a camera that fell from the sky two years ago was finally discovered in the desert and recently made its way to the people who recorded it, Fox News reports. The strange story comes out of Tuba City, Arizona, where a group of friends rigged a GoPro camera, a camcorder, and a Samsung Galaxy Note II phone to a weather balloon to record shots of the Grand Canyon in 2013. All was well until they tried to use the Note's GPS to retrieve their carefully made package after it returned to solid ground. "The problem was that the coverage map we were relying on (looking at you, AT&T) was not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it," one of the friends explains on Reddit.

Two years later, an AT&T employee happened upon the bundle during a hike, about 50 miles from where the friends launched it, and took it to a retail store. AT&T was able to identify the Note's owner using the phone's SIM card. "We got the footage and data a few weeks later!" the Reddit user exclaims. The footage has since been named "Grand Canyon from the Stratosphere! A Space Balloon Story," and features incredible images of the Grand Canyon from ground level to 18 miles above the Earth. The total flight time was just over 90 minutes, according to Fox News. The YouTube video has received nearly 2.3 million views so far. (More Grand Canyon stories.)