In a wildly inexplicable video, a sniper's tracer bullet seems to bounce off of his intended target's face, while not inflicting any life-threatening damage.

The exact context of this video isn't known, but likely takes place in Syria. The footage format has a Salafist jihadist propaganda feel, reinforced by the use of a tracer round to increase the video's production value. Two men, likely Syrian soldiers or pro Assad militiamen, are walking the perimeter of a base when they are targeted.

The tracer appears to make a direct impact with the man's face and then deflects upward and away from them. Bullets tend to do unpredictable things once they hit their target, so nothing seems off yet, and the viewer expects the struck man to drop at any second, dead.

However, that is not the case. The wounded man bends over in pain, but is not mortally hit. A second sniper round rips just over him, and he realized he must get to cover before his luck runs out. It's hard to explain what happened here. From the arc, or lack there of, of the bullet's trajectory, it doesn't appear that the shot was taken from all that far away, so the projectile should have had plenty of penetrating and killing power left when it reached him.

It's possible that the construction of the tracer bullet significantly reduced the kinetic energy of the projectile or changed the way it behaved upon impact. Yet, we have seen dozens of these types of sniper operation videos where the tracers have no problems zipping through soldiers and even hardened steel fuel tanks.