A “Mythbusters” TV experiment went horribly wrong when a cast iron cannonball hit two California homes before landing inside a minivan.
Mythbusters hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage were reportedly attempting to calculate how fast a cannonball would travel when it misfired and shot hundreds of feet in the air.
“This cannonball was supposed to go through several barrels of water and through a cinder block, and then ultimately into the side of the hill,” J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, told CBS News and the SF Chronicle. ”Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy… You wouldn’t think it was possible.”
Instead, the cannonball flew over the foothills surrounding Camp Parks Military Firing Reservation before hitting the front door of a home, flying up to the second floor, blasting through a back bedroom wall and smashing through a second residence some 50 yards away.
“It was a very loud boom; [we] thought a tree fell, maybe a meteor,” said homeowner Ming Jiang. “It wasn’t clear that it was a cannonball landing on the roof.”
The wayward cannonball finally came to a halt inside Jasper Gill’s minivan.
“It hit the dash, through the passenger window,” said Gill who had exited the vehicle just 10 minutes before the ball struck. “I’m lucky [to be] alive… It’s shocking – anything could have happened.”
