Mysterious Burst of Light over Russia Leaves Scientists, Locals Guessing

By Fred Weir
www.csmonitor.com
11-19-14

On Friday evening, a yellow flash filled the skies over Russia's sparsely populated Urals region. Was it a meteor? A rocket launch? No one seems to know.

      Moscow — An enormous and as yet totally unexplained fireball eclipsed the skies for more than 10 seconds over Russia's sparsely populated Urals region last Friday – and news of the incident is only now trickling out.

Several locals posted YouTube videos taken from dashcams and smartphones, showing an apparently soundless, bright orange sunburst-like explosion erupting behind evening cloud cover near the town of Rezh, in Sverdlovsk region, about 930 miles east of Moscow. Russian media inquiries to emergency services, the military, and academic astronomers have yielded a host of theories but no hard answers as to the cause of the blast.

According to the E1.Ru news portal in Yekaterinburg, Russian military sources deny having anything to do with the blast . . ..

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By RT
YouTube
11-18-19

     A huge flash lit up the early evening darkness, as shown by images taken from a dashcam on a road close to Yekaterinburg. Emergency services refuse to comment cause of extraordinary blast in the dark sky. . . .

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UFO NEWS: Eerie Flash in the Sky Over the Sverdlovsk Region | VIDEO

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By urfo.org
11-18-14

     A strange celestial event happened last weekend in the Sverdlovsk region. First, the sky turned red, and then lit up with a bright yellow light.

The correspondent of " New Region ", last weekend sverdlovchane witnessed the strange celestial phenomenon; comment has been made by weather forecasters nor Sverdlovsk Hydrometcenter nor representatives Kourovka Observatory. The best observation point to witness the phenomenon was seen in the sky over the city Rezhom. Video was filmed by Anton Glavatskih, a schoolboy and his classmates. Locals suggest that it could be a meteorite, similar to the one that fell in the Chelyabinsk region in February 2013, and possibly explosions on the old Rezhevskoy chemical plant. . . .

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1kg Meteorite Piece Found in Russian Urals, Biggest Chunk Yet Discovered

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By www.rt.com
2-25-13

     The fallen meteorite has turned into a cash cow in the Urals. Both experts and amateurs are aggressively searching the area for remnants, while entrepreneurs sell dozens of 'meteorite fragments' online, print t-shirts, guide tours and bake cookies.

The biggest officially-confirmed fragment of the meteorite was found on Monday by a local ski expedition.

"It weighs about a kilogram," Viktor Grokhovsky from the Urals University says, "We haven't precisely weighed it yet, since it needs to be conserved first so not to get acidified."

The number of fragments found by authorized meteorite specialists amounts to a few hundred by now. Online 'meteorite' sales, though, suggest there are hundreds more, only with no way of proving that any of them are real.

Grokhovsky believes bunches more are still to be found, including a possible biggest chunk that he says may lie at the bottom of Lake Chebarkul. It could be up to 60cm in diameter, he assures. . . .

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By NASA
2-15-13

    New information provided by a worldwide network of sensors has allowed scientists to refine their estimates for the size of the object that entered that atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, at 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15).

The estimated size of the object, prior to entering Earth's atmosphere, has been revised upward from 49 feet (15 meters) to 55 feet (17 meters), and its estimated mass has increased from 7,000 to 10,000 tons. Also, the estimate for energy released during the event has increased by 30 kilotons to nearly 500 kilotons of energy released. These new estimates were generated using new data that had been collected by five additional infrasound stations located around the world – the first recording of the event being in Alaska, over 6,500 kilometers away from Chelyabinsk. The infrasound data indicates that the event, from atmospheric entry to the meteor's airborne disintegration took 32.5 seconds. The calculations using the infrasound data were performed by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."

The trajectory of the Russia meteor was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, which hours later made its flyby of Earth, making it a completely unrelated object. The Russia meteor is the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia. . . .

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CORRECTION: Crater shown on Russian TV with meteor videos is from Derweze, Turkmenistan and not related to recent meteor strike.

It has been ablaze since the 1970s, when Soviet geologists reportedly found an underground cavern with deposits of natural gas and decided to burn it off . . . interesting on its own merits

Remainder of news segment is of various vid captures of the meteor and damage . . .

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By rt.com
2-15-13

     Around 950 people have sought medical attention in Chelyabinsk alone because of the disaster, the region's governor Mikhail Yurevich told RIA Novosti. Over 110 of them have been hospitalized and two of them are in heavy condition. Among the injured there are 159 children, Emergency ministry reported.

Army units found three meteorite debris impact sites, two of which are in an area near Chebarkul Lake, west of Chelyabinsk. The third site was found some 80 kilometers further to the northwest, near the town of Zlatoust. One of the fragments that struck near Chebarkul left a crater six meters in diameter.

Servicemembers from the tank brigade that found the crater have confirmed that background radiation levels at the site are normal.

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By rt.com
2-15-13

     A series of explosions in the skies of Russia’s Urals region, reportedly caused by a meteorite shower, has sparked panic in three major cities. Witnesses said that houses shuddered, windows were blown out and cellphones have stopped working.

According to unconfirmed reports, the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit at the Urzhumka settlement near Chelyabinsk. A missile salvo reportedly blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.

A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan.

Lifenews tabloid said 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 city's Internet and mobile service.

Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunder had struck at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.

Police in the Chelyabinsk region are reportedly on high alert, and have begun ‘Operation Fortress’ 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. . . .

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