THAT METEOR EXPLOSION THAT NO ONE TALKED ABOUT

Yes, you read that headline correctly: apparently, according to this article shared by Mr. B., there was a meteor explosion - and a rather large one at that - over planet Earth that no one noticed, or as is more likely, no one talked about, until now:

Huge meteor explosion over Earth last year went unnoticed until now

The impact alleged occurred in the Bering strait, and was captured by a Japanese weather satellite. But there's something odd about the story, and as you might guess, it has my high octane speculation mind pondering some possibilities. Here's the part that made me wonder:

The giant fireball hit at 2350 GMT on 18 December over the Bering Sea, a part of the Pacific Ocean between Russia and Alaska.

...

The meteor was 10 metres in diameter, had a mass of 1400 tonnes and impacted with an energy of 173 kilotons of TNT, he wrote on Twitter.  The impact energy was about 10 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The meteor exploded at altitude above Earth’s surface, says Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen’s University Belfast, UK. “It would have been quite spectacular,” he says.

The explosion was detected by infrasound stations around the world, which pick up low-frequency acoustic waves inaudible to humans. These stations were initially set up during the cold war to detect nuclear explosions.

It is the third-largest impact in modern times, after Chelyabinsk and a massive explosion that occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908. Known as the Tunguska event, the air burst flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres.

It's that reference to Chelyabinsk which makes me wonder. My "guestimation" is that there's about a 1% possibility, or less, that my high octane speculation is true, but nonetheless, I offer it anyway, because the mention of the Chelyabinsk incident is what makes me think this is may not be your typical normal exploding meteor, but that perhaps this meteor was "not talked about" because (as Mr. B. suggested in the email containing this article) someone "took it out."

What made the Chelyabinsk meteor incident unusual was that a month prior to the incident, then Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev had appeared on Russian television talking about the need for an international cooperation to build out an asteroid-meteor defense system, and that if Russia could not obtain this, it would just have to go ahead and do it on its own. He then offered the observation that asteroids could be destroyed by missiles armed with thermonuclear weapons "or other means," which he left conveniently unspecified. Then after the meteor incident, a number of videos appeared on Russian television showing a "something" behind the meteor, just prior to its explosion, leading to speculation in Russia and elsewhere that "someone" had taken it out. The timing of the Chelyabinsk incident so shortly after Mr. Medvedev's remarks almost made it seem as if someone had "ordered up a meteor" so that it could then be exploded, punctuating Mr. Medvedev's statements rather dramatically.

And so the same thing here: meteor impacts and even exploding meteors are a relatively common occurrence, and hence they normally don't make the news unless, like Chelyabinsk, they occur over a major population center, or in this case, are relatively large. But it's that reference to Chelyabinsk itself that makes me wonder if, in fact, the incident may have more going on than meets the eye.

Granted, it's a very remote possibility, but with all the talk about space and space weapons, I don't rule it out.

See you on the flip side...