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In 2013 five friends set about sending their GoPro into space above the Grand Canyon. It took them months of planning, but in June that year the camera lifted off attached to a weather balloon.
Despite attaching a phone to the camera so they could track its location once it landed back on Earth, they didn’t hear from the phone and presumed it lost. In fact, it had landed 50 miles away from where they launched it and they were reunited with the footage the GoPro took two years later.
A woman on a hike came across the phone and took it into an AT&T store. They identified the sim card and a few weeks later the friends were able to present us with this. Skip to about 45 seconds if you don’t want to see the preparation.
The person who discovered the phone actually worked at AT&T, which was described as “a twist of ironic fate” by one of the friends who shared the story on reddit – because they had previously blamed AT&T for them not locating the camera.
The friends planned the launch in an area where, when the camera eventually tumbled back to Earth, it would receive a signal and thus alert them to its whereabouts using an app. But they claim the map they used wasn’t accurate so the phone never got a signal.
It’s a great twist to an already pretty great story that the person who eventually brought the camera back into their lives worked for AT&T.
