Comments on: Meteor Hits Russia, Not. Maybe did.

By: Mo

Mo — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 16:57:29 +0000

How do you kno that it is a metore u cant belive the news on everything sicentist are ment to kno months before this shit happens lol for real i think its te russians americans rockets or something that misfired and this is the cover up story eva tho about it that way??!??!!??? 🙂

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:33:14 +0000

Steve, meteors do make trails, and the thing was initially moving faster than any technology we have at present.

By: Steve Tabor

Steve Tabor — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:24:09 +0000

The contrail shown on many videos indicates this was some kind of projectile propelled by one or more combustion engines. It’s a double contrail, so that must be twin engines, each with its own exhaust. Meteors don’t make contrails.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:34:35 +0000

It is also possible that the Russians (and Americans and anyone else with a big military and the technology to do so) routinely check for radiation all the time anyway.

Info on my novel is here: https://gregladen.com/blog/sungudogo/

By: G

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:25:08 +0000

Greg & Eric: I would guess that the reason the Russians immediately checked for radioactivity, and announced that none was detected, was to quickly put to rest any public or political speculation about nuclear weapons detonations, before a panic could occur. Putin may not be a warm & cuddly guy in American terms, but he’s smart and pragmatic particularly when it comes to national security issues.

Greg, where can find your novel?

Delurker, one could say the same about R&D spending on climate impact mitigation. Know what’s _really_ pathetic? We could be building thorium fission reactors right now (we had a working prototype in the 1960s), and retiring the world’s coal-fired power plants. This step alone will buy us enough time to convert the rest of our energy infrastructure to fission & renewables, and all the time needed to develop & deploy fusion. But the sheer inertia of politics and economics is standing in the way. Grrr, grrr, grrr.

So in summary, an object the size of a bus set off a 500-KT detonation, comparable to a small H-bomb. If that had hit a city it would have caused thousands of deaths. We presently aren’t searching for objects this small. We have the technology to “detect & deflect”, we just have to muster the political will to develop it fully and put it into routine use.

That’s where all of us here come in: to write to our elected officials and bug them about this until one of them speaks up and gets the ball rolling.

For points of comparison: the budgets for weather forecasting and weather event preparedness, and the budget for keeping our nuclear arsenal safe from accidents. If we can spend X and Y on those, we can spend Z on this.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:20:50 +0000

Indeed. The meteor was detected (aside from being seen and blowing up all over everyone) by the nuclear missile/explosion detection system.

By: Eric Lund

Eric Lund — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:43:37 +0000

Today we laugh, but in the more tense times of the Cold War, such sentiments might have been considered seriously scary. What if an object was mistaken for a nuclear missile…?

A fair point. The news reports from Chelyabinsk stated that there was no evidence of radiation. Why, I hear you ask, would the protocol involved testing for radiation? Because for about four decades, the most plausible scenario for explaining a 300 kiloton explosion over Chelyabinsk would have been a nuclear missile. And such a missile would likely have been moving from north to south (launched from the US northward over the pole), approximately in the direction this meteor was observed to be traveling.

By: Mike Olson

Mike Olson — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 02:51:39 +0000

I’ve seen some objects that are similar to, “Cincinnati fire kites.” Generally, they are a platform holding a candle with a light bag tied over the platform to catch heat from the flame. When they get high enough, if you don’t know what they are, they look really weird. In short, they look like an old time special effect. The object looks like a large object seen at a distance, but the way the fire burns…it looks like a small object burning close….there is no sense of wind blowing a lot of heat back, but rather the flames show a slow speed effect.

By: Delurked Lurker

Delurked Lurker — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 08:38:46 +0000

The amount of research dollars that go into looking for the species killers is pathetic. This is what is going to end our reign on this planet,

Quite frankly those videos from Russia were terrifying.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 20:48:44 +0000

You need to read my novel in order to understand the history of UFO’s.