How a Camera Fell from the Sky, Nearly Got Eaten by a Pig and Spawned an Internet Sensation

He’d guess the odds of a camera falling from a plane into his pig pen are about one in a million. The odds of him finding the camera are just as bad, if not worse. And the chance of that camera still working after crashing into the mud?

“It’s just something that could never happen,” he says.

But highly improbable isn’t the same as impossible. Last month, as he and his daughter Eva walked his property after a few days of rain, he a kicked hard plastic case. At first, he made for the trash can, but on closer inspection noticed an enclosed camera.

He dug through his kids’ electronics for the proper cord and plugged the GoPro device into a computer. To his surprise, it fired right up. He clicked the last video dated June 22nd, 2013.

The video opened to the inside of a plane cabin packed with skydivers. The camera breaks free when its owner jumps from the plane, tumbling as it falls above the green hills of Northern California.

As he watched, Cort saw signs of his own property outside Cloverdale: his vineyard, his house and then – rapidly filling the shot just before impact – the confines of his pig pen. The camera lands, lens facing the heavens. In moments, Munselle heard snorts. He watched one of his pigs amble over to the camera, sniff it, and begin chewing before the video cuts to black.

If the date was accurate, it would mean the camera had been withstanding the elements in his yard for the last eight months.

“You got to see this thing,” Cort told his wife, Mia, the moment she walked into the room.

Mia posted the video to her YouTube and Facebook accounts to share it with a friends and family. They all found it amazing, but it was a few days before Mia realized a considerably larger audience had taken after the video.

She had set up her account to forward YouTube comments as emails. One afternoon as she dropped the kids off at school, the phone started buzzing without pause, unable to process one message before the next notification pushed it aside.

Mia normally posted style videos connected to Studio 128, her hair salon in Geyserville, California. She earned a handful of comments on each video, but this was a whole other order of internet interest. Reddit had discovered the link to the video and the views had jumped into the millions in less than a day. (As of the beginning of this week, YouTubers had played the video 13,852,483 times.)

Mainstream media outlets followed the Internet gathering. Fox News and Good Morning America each featured the clip. CNN came out for a walk-and-talk interview with the family. So many calls started pouring into Mia’s hair salon that she gave up on her voice mail.

Cort loved watching the media distort some details on their family. He burst out laughing when Good Morning America described Mia as a “pig farmer from Cloverdale.”

“That was just about the funniest thing I could possibly imagine because she’s definitely not a farmer,” says Cort. The livestock, vineyard and vegetables are all his unquestioned hobby, dating back to his days in 4-H as a kid.

Cort says his four-year-old daughter, Ivy Jo, had a hard time grasping the sudden attention around the family, but Eva — who just celebrated her seventh birthday — managed to catch on.

Driving to school with a copy of the story on her family from the local paper, she pestered her father with questions on celebrities. Did they all live in big houses? How would a celebrity’s house compare in size to their house?

“And then I put it together,” he says. “She thinks she’s a full-on celebrity because she was in the local paper!”

In fairness to Eva Munselle, stranger things have happened.