VIDEO: Large meteorite caught on dash cameras in Russia
![still-youtube-potapow-614[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/still-youtube-potapow-6141.jpg?quality=83)
Image from RT video, see below.
People are a little jumpy with news of the close flyby of the asteroid 2012 DA14 tomorrow. This meteor actually hit and destroyed a building. make you wonder is this wasn’t a piece of 2012DA14 that was a fragment that got ejected from the main asteroid by some other deep space collision but was in a similar trajectory out ahead. If so, there may be more incidents like this. It may also be simply coincidence. [UPDATE: NASA has issue a statement on this, see below]
Story from the YouTube description, video follows.
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A series of explosions in the skies of Russia’s Urals region, reportedly caused by a meteor shower, has sparked panic in three major cities. Witnesses said that houses shuddered, windows were blown out and cellphones stopped working.
A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan.
Lifenews tabloid reported that at least one piece of the fallen object caused damage on the ground in Chelyabinsk. According to preliminary reports, it crashed into a wall near a zinc factory, disrupting the fiber-optic connections of internet providers and mobile operators.
Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it resembled an earthquake and thunder at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.
Photo from Twitter.com user @TimurKhorev
Police in the Chelyabinsk region are reportedly on high alert, and have enacted the ‘Fortress’ plan in order to protect vital infrastructure.
Office buildings in downtown Chelyabinsk are being evacuated. Injuries were reported at one of the city’s secondary schools, supposedly from smashed windows. No other injuries have been reported so far.
An emergency message published on the website of the Chelyabinsk regional authority urged residents to pick up their children from school and remain at home if possible.
The video suggests it was shot down by the Air Force, that’s now proven false. Word has it that there was an air burst at about 10,000 feet.
Here is another video showing the trail plume, you can hear the sonic boom, car alarms go off, and windows blown out. It is quite something:
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UPDATE: (via NASA’s spaceweather.com)
It is natural to wonder if this event has any connection to today’s record-setting flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14. NASA has issued the following statement:
“The trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object. Information is still being collected about the Russian meteorite and analysis is preliminary at this point. In videos of the meteor, it is seen to pass from left to right in front of the rising sun, which means it was traveling from north to south. Asteroid DA14’s trajectory is in the opposite direction, from south to north.”
UnfrozenCavemanMD says:
February 15, 2013 at 3:27 am
I do not think it is a coincidence.
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The odds of it being a coincidence are astronomically small. All NASA and anyone else TRUTHFULLY can say is that they APPEAR unrelated, based on very limited information.
No one can say with certainty that the objects are unrelated unless they know the trajectory of the Russian object BEFORE it reached earth. Maybe it did a slingshot around the moon on its way to Russia, which made it appear to be coming from a different direction.
Two identical people enter a room through different doors. Are they twins or doppelgängers? You can’t know if they are related simply based upon the door they entered through. You need to know their history before entering the room.
This statement from NASA is typical of the problem that has taken hold of science. Scientists promoting their beliefs as facts; unwilling or unable to admit they “don’t know”. History shows that just about everything science tells us is true today will be shown in the future to be incorrect.
Bill Parsons says: February 14, 2013 at 11:39 pm.
Particularly amazing to me is that at least three Russian drivers caught this on a video device while they are driving. Is every driver in the Urals listening to rock-and-roll music and talking on a video-equipped cell phone as they drive?
_______________________________
Dash cams are essential in Russia, to protect against:
a. Drunks claiming you deliberately rammed them.
b. Insurance frauds where people deliberately run in front of you.
c. Police frauds where they say you did something you did not do.
Regards the ‘explosion’, the dumb BBC keep mentioning this. However, this was merely a sonic boom, and yes, they can be quite violent if you go fast enough and low enough.
.
A.D. Everard February 15, 2013 at 12:35 pm
Have I missed something? The only birds dropping out of the sky that I know of have been those flying too close to those bird-chopping wind farms.
There have been cases of birds dropping dead because of heat. People, too. Australia 1896, for instance. I don’t know of anything like that happening recently.
Yes, you’ve missed something. It is common for birds to drop dead and fall out of the sky because of the heat. It happened this past summer in El Centro, CA, and it has probably happened dozens of times there during the past 50 years.
Pedric says:
February 15, 2013 at 9:16 pm
There’s no worthy historical evidence for Muhammad, either, by the way. Or Moses. Or Abraham. Or Solomon.
Or Pedric.
Jennifer says: February 15, 2013 at 9:40 am
Course I believe in God, but His word does mention inccodents like this, near the and of time.
___________________________
Jennifer, like most theists, you are misinterpreting your texts.
The NT does not say ‘End of Time’ it actually says ‘End of an Aeon’ (the end of an age). So what ‘age’ was ending in the early 1st century?
Actually, this era marked the end of a precessional astrological age. If you study astronomy, you will know that the Earth precesses on its axis, once every 26,500 years or so, and this causes the constellation at the Vernal Equinox to change every 2,200 years or so. Each of these ‘ages’ is known as a Great Month – and this is a real astronomical event.
However the beginning of the 1st century marked the ‘End of an Age’ – the end of one of these Great Months. In the early 1st century, the constellation of Aries turned into Pisces; and we know that early ‘Christianity’ was following these astronomical-astrological events because the NT clearly says so.
How so? Because it says that Jesus was born as a Lamb of God (Aries), but became a Fisher of Men (Pisces). This is a clear allusion – to those with ‘ears to hear’ as the NT says – that these Nazarene ‘Christians’ were marking the change in Great Month from Aries to Pisces. There are many other allusions to this, that proves this claim.
This era was the End of an Age (the end of times) that the NT was discussing, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the world coming to an end. Early Judaism and Nazarene ‘Christianity’ was primarily a Sabaean cult (astronomer-priests).
Mazel tov (meaning ‘good constellation’).
.
ferd berple quotes Pedric: February 16, 2013 at 6:37 am
“…Pedric says: February 15, 2013 at 9:16 pm
There’s no worthy historical evidence for Muhammad, either, by the way. Or Moses. Or Abraham. Or Solomon……”
and ferd berple says
“….Or Pedric….”
Ahhhh, Ferd, but I BELIEVE in Pedric!!
And that’s good enough for me.
Silver Ralph says: February 16, 2013 at 6:55 am
“……..a real astronomical event.
However the beginning of the 1st century marked the ‘End of an Age’ – the end of one of these Great Months. In the early 1st century, the constellation of Aries turned into Pisces; and we know that early ‘Christianity’ was following these astronomical-astrological events because the NT clearly says so.
How so? Because it says that Jesus was born as a Lamb of God (Aries), but became a Fisher of Men (Pisces). This is a clear allusion – to those with ‘ears to hear’ as the NT says – that these Nazarene ‘Christians’ were marking the change in Great Month from Aries to Pisces. There are many other allusions to this, that proves this claim….”
I have developed a theory that if you only have one single text to study, it tends to get a little over-interpreted.
I just watched an exclusive video footage here which has not been published anywhere else! This was unbelievable. I thought I will never see such mysterious thing in my life, ever. Thank you god.
http://www.russianmeteorexplosion.blogspot.com
steveta_uk says:
February 16, 2013 at 3:42 am
Steve Oregon (February 15, 2013 at 9:12 am)
“This is very worrying. I have been unable to find any government figures on which areas of the UK are most likely to be hit by meteorites, so clearly they are covering up the information…….”
That is most troubling indeed.
Just imagine if much of the global warming funding was diverted to Meteor research, monitoring, mapping of likely meteor strike zones, meteor preparedness and everything else the busy little bureaucrats can dream up.
The net public benefit would be similar to all of the AGW “investments”.
***
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 15, 2013 at 6:06 am
So one of our favorite visiting “death by slightly elevated global warmth” prophets (posts here as “Phil.” aka “Phil-dot”
****
Well that’s interesting. So Phil-dot is actually the warmist Phil Plait? Ironic that one who rightly advocates skepticism in astronomy throws it away for Globull warming. I wonder if he’ll have the courage to post here again seeing that he’s now exposed…
Lars P. says:
February 16, 2013 at 4:56 am
the more I look at the videos, the more I think it was a grazing shoot
I agree, crater is far too small; probably only a small fragment.
Atmosphere enhances force of an air blast; at the optimal altitude (proportional to the magnitude of the explosion) impact pressure could be more than double.
Apparently sonic boom was heard 2 min after the visual observation. Ignoring the atmospheric density gradient, the altitude would be 2 x 60sec x 340m/sec = 40800m = 41 km, but with density gradient taken into the account, altitude would be greater.
Tunguska probably was near the optimal altitude.
Idle mind speculations.
Michael, post your references here. The mods have allowed our posts, so I expect they’ll be consistent and allow your proof texts. Prediction: not one of them will be contemporaneous.
ferd, the fact that I’m posting here is proof enough that there’s someone behind the words.
Lillie Reyes says:
February 16, 2013 at 7:57 am
I just watched an exclusive video footage here which has not been published anywhere else! This was unbelievable. I thought I will never see such mysterious thing in my life, ever. Thank you god.
Lillie “somebody” asks me to buy before I even see the merchandise:
Your link says: “Please share unlock this page.” what I will not do, I hate this kind of trick.
From Pedric on February 16, 2013 at 10:50 am:
I have dreamt many times of reading things and having discussions that had no existence in waking reality. My mind is creative enough to make up such brand new, to “write scripts for” and “do improv in” my dreams.
So something in my dreams is not proof of its existence in reality.
I also have met several people in my life whose actions are rather predictable, they might as well be scripted or programmed.
I’ve been told there are several billion people on this planet. But I don’t see them, I have no proof of their existence. By mere statistics, there should be a whole lot more exceptional people, more outliers. By the population increases, we should have at least 20 to 50 Einsteins, Edisons, Teslas, out there revolutionizing all of the sciences. What we have a large mass of plodders making drudging progress, who sometimes “discover” a glaringly obvious logic flaw (plot hole).
Perhaps I have physically met or been around a few tens of thousands of people during my life. But I’d be hard pressed to name a hundred of them without prompting. Everyone else, they’re like the same pool of extras being reused for background during the shooting of a long-running TV series. You might have seen the same person 500 times playing 500 different people, but they never made enough of an impression to remember them so you don’t notice the recycling.
I have very few senses that tell me very little of the real world around me. I don’t “see” electric or magnetic fields, only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. What I can sense, I also imagine sensing in dreams. I could be fooled into believing something non-real is real somewhat easily. Heck, these days, as I am led to believe, my senses of taste and smell can be deceived with chemicals. Photos and videos and sounds can be faked, ever more quickly and undetectably.
And now they’re researching giving someone the “feel” of a material on a smartphone screen. I’ve been naturally mistaken about the feel of something before, but soon I might not be able to trust that sense either.
I have enough trouble these days accepting my perception of “reality” as real. There are unexplained events, quirks, logic flaws that I notice but the “other people” don’t. Many instances where I’ve suggested something I thought was simple and the other person said “Huh, why didn’t I think of that?” I don’t believe in “The Matrix”, but… I know I am real because I experience myself, “I think I am, therefore I exist.” However, everything else feels like a simulation. And one that just keeps running, doesn’t crash, with the noticed flaws to be explained away by the “actors” as due to my faulty memory, mis-perceptions, etc.
You, Pedric, are words on a computer screen. By the reality I’m supposed to accept as real, a computer could have written those words. We have never met. You have as much reality to me as a person whose unknown name I find in a phone book.
Why the hell should I believe there is someone behind these words on a screen, that is you? All I know is I think I have experienced words found on the internet attributed to “Pedric”. Considering how many “internet dreams” I’ve had, with much more engaging and original content, why should I take those few words as “proof of Pedric”?
From beng on February 16, 2013 at 10:07 am:
Didn’t stop him the last time it got mentioned. His identity is news to you, but not new news.
Pedric
Will do. It is Sunday morning here so check back in say 72 hours and hopefully I will have a response.
However, contemporaneity is only one aspect of your claim which was twofold and only one aspect from which to judge the accuracy of information as being historical fact.
“…the fact is there’s no available direct historical evidence that Jesus is a historical figure. There isn’t a single contemporaneous reference — no documents, no historical writings, nothing…”
To get things started without being able to provide references at this stage, Dixon provides a summary of the evidence in his book ‘a spectators guide to Jesus’
1. The pagan historian Thallos in the 3rd volume of his ‘Histories’ around 55AD describes a natural eclipse of the sun coinciding with the crucifixion of Christ.
2. The stoic writer Mara bar Serapion shortly after 70AD refers to Jesus as a king and teacher
3. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – 120) scathingly refers to Jesus’ execution under Pilate and describes the movement surrounding him as a deadly superstition
4. The Roman administrator Pliny the Younger (AD 61 -113) mentions the early Christian worship of Jesus ‘as a god’
5.The Roman historian Suetonius, around 120 AD, refers to disturbances among Roman Jews over the claim that Jesus was the Christ
6. The Greek satiris, Lucian of Samosata ( AD 115 – 200) ridicules Jesus as a crucified sophist
7. The Greek intellectual Celsus, around AD 175, insists Jesus’ conception was suspect and his miracles mere Egyptian magic.
8. The first century historian Josephus recounts Jesus’ fame as a teacher, healer and martyr and the report of his resurrection by his followers
9. In another text the same writer recounts the martydom of a man called James described as the ‘brother of Jesus the so-called Messiah’
10.The Talmud, an ancient exposition of Jewish law contains a passage (AD 100-200) justifying Jesus’ execution as he ‘led Israel astray’ and ‘practiced sorcery’
11. In a later text (post AD 200) it also insists Mary was an adulteress
Please remember that I responded initially to RGB who was questioning the very existence of Christ as a historical figure and my statement was that secular historians do not question the fact that he existed. I made no claim as to his divinity.
Edwin A Judge, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History and founder of the Ancient History Documentary Rese3arch Centre, Macquarie University, said:
“…An ancient historian has no problem seeing the phenomenon of Jesus as a historical one. His many surprising aspects only help anchor him in history. Myth or legend would have created a more predictable figure. The writings that sprang up about Jesus also reveal to us a movement of thought and an experience of life so unusual that something much more substantial than the imagination is needed to explain it…”
Finally, to paraphrase Dixon, the books of the New Testament have always presented themselves as historical texts. They are a collection of letters written to specific social settings and groups. The fact that they are of a so-called religious nature doesn’t diminish their historical context and value.
I hope this is interesting and promotes good discussion.
Regards
Michael
John Dickson not Dixon – sorry
I saw one of these when I was in 6th grade. I was sitting on my grandparents’ front porch, about an hour before sunset, when a huge fireball which was brighter and larger than the sun rapidly descended, and then exploded in the sky. However, I never heard any sound from it.
kadaka, fortunately, your personal mysteries have no baring on whether or not forensics allow one thing or another to be reliabily inferred.
Michael, most of those I dealt with a long time back, when arguing religion, science, and creationism on early web BBS. For example, from my personal library, D.J. Shove and A. Fletcher, “Chronology of Eclipses and Comets, AD 1-1000” (Boydell 1987), discuss the ‘crucifixion eclipse’ having occurred on November 24 of the year 29, and was total near Bithynia, now northwestern Turkey. This is the only eclipse to occur in the Eastern Mediterranean during that time.
Since Jesus was supposedly crucified just before Passover, that event would have been March 25 in AD 29, or April 7 in AD 30, or April 3 in AD 33. If one grants the usual AD 33 as the crucifixion year, then the eclipse was ~4.5 years early. If we grant a wrong crucifixion date, and set the unknown but correct date to be AD 29 or 30, then the eclipse was 6 months early or late.
Regardless, however, even if the Biblical authors got an eclipse correct (which they did not), that would lend no credence to their stories about Jesus.
Notice that not one of your proofs amounts to contemporaneous testimony. They don’t count for more than hearsay. Papias, from the second century (ca. 140), is the earliest known writer to mention any of the New Testament authors, and he recounts that none of them knew Jesus.
Simply exercising normal emergency survey protocols. The “assumption” is that it was a meteor entry, but a few Russian officials have asserted all sorts of things like a failed military test, something that was intercepted by defensive missiles etc.
In emergency management you often have to characterize a situation by defining what you don’t know. There is a remote but real possibility that it could have been some sort of military payload, or a satellite with a radioactive power source, such as the satellite that crashed in Canada in the 1970’s and crapped up a lot of real estate with radioactive material. Since radioactivity is not obvious to unaided senses it is just good practice and probably standard protocol for the government to ask for verification that the impact area does not display any radioactivity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
I agree that is a military Geiger counter. The fact that he is using an extended probe to monitor the surface indicates he is looking to detect both gamma and beta emitters, (mean free path of beta radiation is only inches in air, so you have to be close to the source to detect it.). Gamma can travel much farther so can easily be detected at several meters from the source if the contamination is significant. That style of probe is not capable of detecting alpha emitters such as plutonium but can detect the gamma and beta emitting daughter products of its decay.
The over pressures of the sonic boom are at the low end of those studied in Nuclear weapons effects. The assumption is that to break window glass and blow out windows as shown in the video clips requires an over pressure of approximately 0.5 psi. Blowing out doors and such structural damage typically takes over pressures close to 2.0 psi. The flash and track shown on the video clips are clearly what you would expect from a meteor entry and not the nuclear flash of a weapon but the damage to buildings and reports of seeing a bright flash at great distance would probably incline the military to do some monitoring to be sure it was not due to a low yield weapon burst. Not that they think that is likely but simply as a matter of being diligent in their post even analysis.
As i mentioned above in a disaster emergency event often you must define the problem by figuring out what cannot be the cause of the event, and narrow down the possibilities. Often officials far from the emergency area are scrambling to make sense out of a lot of confusing and flat out wrong initial information. That almost always causes them to start checking all the possible explanations regardless of how remote or unlikely they seem to be at the time.
Larry (former emergency management planner)
Larry Ledwick: You gave a very accurate description of civil defence procedures — exactly the stuff we were trained to do when everybody believed a nuclear shootout was bound to happen next year or the year after that.
I just want to add that Chelyabinsk was home to a host of nuclear weapons-related activities. It is surrounded by several “numbered towns” such as Chelyabinsk-65, all of which where either research labs or production facilities. So people in that area are almost instinctively alert for the possibility of a radioactive fallout, possibly accompanied by a loud bang, and many have memories of such events actually happening (not the least of which was a deliberate attempt of a nuclear-powered canal excavation).
Add to that the fact that many keep a Geiger detector at home, and you have the “if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” effect.
By the way, that Geiger detector can also detect alpha-particles. The detector tube in it has a mica window and the housing has a sliding door that opens to expose it.
From Pedric on February 16, 2013 at 8:20 pm:
Forensics?
You have a formulaic reply pattern, and gave the expected rebuttal, which was actually very simplistic and yielded no indication you had read and contemplated my missive. A quick scan and then the output, as would be expected from a bot these days.
This is the internet, filled with faked personalities and faked people. I have never heard of you before today. Bots that can be deployed to flood blogs and comment sections with “real responses” are in high demand.
With these few paltry examples of “your comments”, I severely doubt forensics can reliably infer if “Pedric” is really several people, or just one, or a person at all.
Your existence remains unproven.
Hi Pedric
I’ll pass your comments onto John and see what he has to say in reply. As soon as I have his response I’ll post it.
Cheers
Michael
There’s a story going round that the meteorite was shot down by a Russian missile. However this is technically impossible, the object was travelling far too fast, at several km per second.
I think this originated from a mis-translation of a Russian news story in some countries, the word for “exploded” at 20 km height being mis-translated as “shot”. Several dutch language news stories contain this statement that the missile was shot down and people I have spoken to in Belgium believe this. Or possibly it came from some over-enthusiastic nationalism in Russia combined with paranoia such as that from ultra-nationalist Zhirinovsky who immediately claimed the object was a US missile, an equally ludicrous idea.
Correction – I meant this statement that the meteor was shot down, not the “missile”!