Hot Air Balloon Ride Turns Disastrous as Guy Films Crash Landing

A hot air balloon ride turned into an utter nightmare and damn near a fatal experience for a group of folks who went down from the sky ... and held on for dear life.

Check out this insane video of a young man, Nicholas McCall, is up in a balloon with others out in Perris, CA, where everything seems to be swell from within their basket. He pans around and you can see they're above some a residential area with fields/open land nearby.

Sadly, things take a turn for the worse. His caption reads, "My hot air balloon experience was going great until the winds picked up." The clip then cuts to a freaky scene.

It shows the basket hurtling down toward the ground at a high rate of speed, at which point it makes contact and starts to be dragged across the earth -- with what sounds to be the guide screaming at everyone to hang on and to remain inside at all costs.

You can hear some whimpers from the other passengers, and amazingly ... this dude was able to continue recording, even capturing some different angles of the crash.