Fire in the Sky

Swarm of fireballs rain down from the sky in Michigan

MissLisa
Youtube
Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00 UTC

Youtube description:

Fireballs in the sky Davison, Michigan September 25,2014 My camera died on the first video. This is after I plugged it in.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkmIc... this is a link to the first video.

Comment:

So many new comets were discovered last year that astronomers named 2013 the 'Year of the Comet'. Less popularlized was the noticeable increase in fireball meteors observed in the Earth's atmosphere. Another year has passed and fireballs are still raining down like never before, with their rate apparently increasing exponentially.

SOTT.net has been cataloguing fireball events since 2002, and a couple of other websites have sprung up since then, but in general the lack of record-keeping and media coverage of this phenomenon is shocking, especially given how extraordinary the phenomenon is (or rather, was - apparently it's 'normal' now!) and whatever it may portend for civilization, sometime in the future, if not immediately.

2013 saw a dramatic increase in meteor fireballs - What does 2014 have in store?

Reader Comments

carefix · 2014-10-03T11:49:13Z

Contrails

Again more aricraft contrails showing the usual tail bifurcation as jets usually have engines either side of the body. Nothing to do with space objects. Looks like the sun is lowish on the horizon as is usual. The proximity of several contrails suggests an airport is likely behing the video taker, maybe 50 miles, but of course important "details" like this are omitted.

Please get someone to look critically at this kind of thing before it gets posted.

7th Storm · 2014-10-03T14:28:22Z

If this looks like airplanes to you, care to explain the absence of perspective on said contrails, and why they are descending vertically?

Niall ·

Where are the jets?

· 2014-10-19T16:08:15Z

dioxic · 2014-10-03T14:28:39Z

Re: Contrail

Not convinced the contrail arguement holds water. To me, they look obviously different to contrails but, that aside, it is clear from the video that the objects are moving pretty much vertically towards the ground. Nosediving is an atypical approach for a plane coming into land at an airport.

carefix · 2014-10-03T18:01:55Z

Re:7th Storm

As there is no reply button..I reply to dioxic.

The absence of perpective is due to the aeroplanes being a long way away so there can be no depth perception. The apparent vertical movement is because the planes are flying towards the horizon away from the viewer. This effect is enhanced by the limited camera field of view. Imagine standing on a cliff looking out to see. A jet aircraft flies directly overhead out to sea. After a few minutes it will cross your horizon. To track its entire visible flight you start by looking up and end looking horizontal with the plane crossing the horizon. Without depth perception it looks like it has come down!

glardu · 2014-10-03T14:55:16Z

Contrails? The still alone says otherwise.

VicSpain · 2014-10-03T14:59:05Z

Looks like planes

it look likes how planes

migras · 2014-10-03T16:47:59Z

Sweden September 30, 2014.

Hi, observation of an unusual object in the night sky over Sweden September 30, 2014.
This video [Link] Object filmed on camera with a wide angle lens, so that you can see the whole sky.
The object seems to be either burned in the upper atmosphere or landed as do the spaceships on the similarity of the shuttle.

Only on this day anywhere in the world space launches and landings landers
not carried out.
Therefore, the object can be described as unidentified.
On my channel there are other similar observations, as well as falling meteors, etc.
Regards.

BabaJaiy · 2014-10-04T00:58:25Z

@ glardu

Actually, the still alone says Jet Airliners. Sorry if this sounds condescending, but there is no other way to put it...spend time in an area that is frequented by fairly heavy Airline traffic...and make many observations over time around both sunset and sunrise. In addition, you might want to pick up the hobby of outdoor photography to train your eye to see what is actually is front of you as opposed to what you think it is ( in this case, something coming down vertically ). After sometime of this type of training and understanding how the eye can be fooled and the mind can assume perceptions...you'll be able to look at pictures such as this and within moments recognize it for what it is...in this case...Jet Airliners.

BabaJaiy · 2014-10-04T01:46:10Z

@ article comment

"...Another year has passed and fireballs are still raining down like never before, with their rate apparently increasing exponentially..."

Really?...how can this be so if you also say "... but in general the lack of record-keeping..." well if there is a lack of record keeping, then how would you know there is such an immense increase in activity as you claim?

From your own research? since 2002?...well that covers only a 12 year period to date...and if record keeping is lacking then how would you know or even possibly compare to all the previous say 100 -12 year periods that occurred in the last 1200 years?

Then how are you going to factor in the actual real exponential growth and use of recording devices falling into as many hands like never before? and the use of the internet to post everything from pictures, video and personal notes of the evening stroll someone took after dinner; all in the form easy links Sott likes to gleefully post as if many posts as such amounts to empirical evidence. Not to mention the growth of human habitation covering the landmasses as never before in contemporary known history?

Actually, if you were to factor in these last 3 points ( recording devices, capacity to disseminate information, and population growth ) then your data or someone else doing the same, be worthwhile looking into.

Until then, it doesn't have much weight, and remains just an opinion...one your entitled to of course, after all it's your website.

Niall · 2014-10-19T16:16:32Z

All of that - and more - is covered in Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection. [Link] Here's an excerpt (tables and images included in the book):

Increase in cometary activity

In a previous chapter we quickly addressed the increase in cometary activity. In the present chapter we will deal more extensively with this phenomenon. To do so we will focus on the following subtopics that are directly correlated with cometary activity: increase in fireballs (fireballs being cometary material entering our atmosphere), global dimming (related to the increase in atmospheric cometary dust), increase in newly discovered comets, moons and asteroids (the three of them being cometary material of various sizes). Then we will deal with the way this increased activity is covered up by the mainstream media and finally we will cover some of the unexpected earthly effects induced by cometary activity.

Increase in fireballs

As we’ve already seen in Chapter 14, data collected by the AMS indicates that the number of confirmed meteor fireballs in our atmosphere has increased by almost 700% over the period 2005–2013. More than 2,000 confirmed meteor fireballs were observed over the USA in 2012; nearly 3,500 were observed in 2013. (+ 64%)

Notice that the sharp increase in reported fireballs (+1931% over the 2005-2013 period) is very unlikely to be solely due to an increase in the number of observers and/or an increase in popularity of the AMS database. Indeed if it was the case the number of observations should keep increasing year after year. This is not the case, for example between 2008 and 2009 the number of confirmed fireballs dropped by 4%.

The AMS database focuses on the USA which constitute less than 2% of the Earth’s surface. Can we deduce from this that the total number of observed fireballs across the planet in 2013 was 50 times the number observed over the USA? If so, the world total for 2013 would then amount to almost one million sightings.

An increase in fireball sightings was not only measured in the USA. The same phenomenon has also been noted in Japan. The chart below compiles the number of observed fireballs as collected by the SonotaCo Network Japan .

Concurrent with this increase in observed fireballs, there is also a growing number of reports of ‘sonic booms’, i.e. exploding sounds that observers generally report as having come from overhead and which are considered unexplained because the source usually identified with sonic booms – jet aircraft breaking the sound barrier – was ruled out. Hard data on this is lacking, but together with my colleagues at SOTT.net, we have collected hundreds of global media reports of unexplained sonic booms over the past ten years. By all accounts, it appears to have gone from being a sporadic, perhaps once monthly occurrence, to a daily and familiar experience. Even Wikipedia, a resource known to err on the side of officially-sanctioned (and often corrupt) science, lists 39 recent reports of mysterious sonic booms reported by the mainstream media. The first report is from 2006 , and over half of them were published in 2012 and 2013. These were only the cases where, apparently, the official number of witnesses mandated an official response.

Not only have fireballs increased in number but they have also increased in mass. On February 15th, 2013, an asteroid with an estimated mass of 10,000 tons entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Ural Mountains in Russia and exploded at a height of about 23 km (15 miles) over the city of Chelyabinsk.

The energy of the bolide was about 500 kilotons, 20–30 times more energy than was released by the atomic bomb dropped by the US government on the civilians of Hiroshima. The largest known object to ‘hit’ the planet since the Tunguska event in 1908, the Chelyabinsk fireball shone 30 times brighter than the Sun and set off a powerful shockwave that left several thousand people injured from flying glass as the windows in almost 8,000 city buildings were blown in, while radiation from the exploding space rock burned people’s eyes and skin.

The material left behind in the atmosphere formed a thin but cohesive and persistent stratospheric dust belt that was tracked by a NASA satellite. By February 19th, four days after the explosion, the plume had been carried by the jet stream entirely around the northern hemisphere and arrived back at Chelyabinsk. Three months later, a detectable belt of bolide dust persisted around the planet.

While the Chelyabinsk event stole the limelight in 2013, and deservedly so, it was just one of many spectacular overhead meteor explosions. To give you an idea of the extent and regularity of global coverage, consider that on the very same day as the Chelyabinsk event, astronomers were tracking an apparently unrelated asteroid (2012 DA14) which was making its closest approach to Earth. This other asteroid had been discovered a year beforehand and was regularly discussed in the media in anticipation of its fly-by, not least because it was roughly the same size as estimates for the Tunguska body but also because it passed inside the orbit of NASA’s geosynchronous satellites.

Just two days previously, on February 13th, another separate fireball had exploded over the Caribbean, sending out a shockwave that shook building foundations in Cuba. Two days before the Caribbean event, on the morning of February 11th, another daytime fireball was videoed from the dashcam of a vehicle travelling on a highway just 250 km west of Chelyabinsk.

Global dimming

Global dimming is the reduction in the amount of solar radiation received on Earth’s surface during fair weather. One of the main causes of global dimming is atmospheric dust. Numerous scientists have demonstrated that a global dimming trend has been in process for decades.

There’s been some debate as to whether atmospheric dust induces a net warming effect on the planet (because it absorbs more than it reflects radiation), or whether it induces a net cooling effect (because it reflects more than it absorbs radiation). In 2008, atmospheric scientist Richard Hansell tested and measured the net effect of atmospheric dust particles on temperatures and concluded that although atmospheric dust both absorbed and reflected solar radiations, it induced an overall cooling effect:

The analysis showed that over half of dust’s cooling effect is compensated for by its warming effect. The finding, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Atmospheres, could clarify scientists’ understanding of how dust influences moisture fluctuations in the atmosphere and surface temperatures around the planet.

As shown in the diagram below, researchers from the Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences found a significant reduction, globally averaged 2.7% per decade, in solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface over the last 50 years.

In the 90’s an inversion occurred and our planet experienced a global brightening in some regions. Then, after the year 2000, global dimming restarted in certain areas and became overall more chaotic with different continents experiencing opposite trends.

Now, according to mainstream science, global dimming is man-made, caused by the accumulation of aerosol particles in the atmosphere due to industrialization. The trend inversion noticed in the 90s is attributed to the ban of several types of aerosols and other anti-pollution measures. However, a paper published in 2005 showed that over the period 1986–2000, although a slight dimming was occurring over land, a brightening occurred over the oceans.

If human activity was indeed the cause of global dimming, and the reduction in human aerosol use the cause for the brightening observed in the 1990s, a brightening over land should have been observed and, possibly, a delayed brightening over the oceans (due to air circulation), since most industrial sources are located on continents. But the paper referenced here shows exactly the opposite.

Since 2000, dimming has been observed in numerous places, including China, India and the whole southern hemisphere, despite the relatively lower presence of anthropogenic pollution in this less industrialized hemisphere. We can deduce from this that while human pollution might indeed affect the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, it’s obviously not the only cause and its effects are probably negligible in the larger context.

Unlike human pollution, cometary activity could, at least partly, explain both the global dimming observed above the oceans during the 1990s and the dimming since 2000. Between 40 and 400 tons of extraterrestrial material is estimated to enter the Earth’s atmosphere daily , most of it arriving in the form of cometary dust. These estimates calculated years ago do not, however, take into account the recent surge in cometary activity.

If we factor in the 655% increase in confirmed fireballs (see AMS statistics above) over the past eight years, the quantity of cometary dust entering Earth’s atmosphere should be at least six times higher than that generally estimated; that is, daily incoming dust measuring between 260 and 2,600 tons.

Increase in asteroids, comets, and moons

Where is all this debris coming from? Well, there has been a significant increase in the discovery of asteroids in recent decades: In 1980, there were 9,000 known asteroids in the solar system . By 2000, there were 86,000 . By 2007, there were 380,000. As of 2013, the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center had data on 1.1 million asteroids.

The data above are scattered and were compiled from various sources because no centralized systematic count of known asteroids exist for the period 1980-2013.

Of the 1.1 million asteroids known in 2013, NASA announced the discovery of the 10,000th NEO – Near Earth Objects on Earth-crossing orbits – in June 2013 . An alarming number especially when we know that most NEOs are discovered just as they fly past Earth, and very often inside lunar distance. Other estimates place between 100,000 and 1,000,000 more undiscovered NEOs on similar Earth-crossing orbits, increasing the current estimated total range of asteroids in the solar system to 100 million.

The number of discovered comets has also increased in recent years. The graph below is based on official data released by the British Astronomical Association in November 2013. The orange bars show the total number of comets identified by NASA’s SOHO project while the blue bars show the total number of new comets. While newly discovered comets were virtually nil at the beginning of the 90s (for example, only one comet was discovered in 1995, (namely 1995 O1 Hale-Bopp ), by 2000 over 150 new comets were being discovered per year, a figure that increased to 265 by 2009.

Note that the figures between 2009 and 2013 are not yet finalized. Once updated, I fully expect the final count for those years to be higher than the current count.

Rather appropriately, 2013 was declared the ‘Year of the Comets’, with a high number of active comets in the Sun’s vicinity. By November 21st, 17 comets were visible with a small telescope, of which five exhibited a magnitude between +4 and +7.5 – meaning they could be seen with binoculars - and two of which (ISON and Encke) could be seen with the naked eye.

Remember, these are only the identified comets, bright enough to be observed at a long distance. Most ‘comets’ remain invisible (as ‘asteroids’) until they start glowing as a result of the heliosphere-induced electric stress they experience when they enter the solar system. If the exceptional fireball events in 2013 were anything to go by, 2014 may have even more celestial surprises in store for us.

Directly correlated with this increase in new comets, and another piece of evidence that strongly points to an increase in cometary activity, is the growing number of ‘moons’ orbiting the planets in our solar system. For example, in 1974 Jupiter had 9 moons. Today it has 67 confirmed moons.

The explanation usually given for this surge in the number of moons is that telescopes have improved. While this certainly may explain the discovery of some new moons, particularly the smaller ones, ‘anomalies’ persist. If the only factor in finding new moons was telescope efficiency, then year on year we should expect to find smaller and smaller moons around the same planet, but this is not the case.

One of the new moons around Saturn is called ‘Calypso’ , discovered by Pascu et al. in 1980. Its diameter is about 20 km (13 miles). We could therefore assume that all the moons discovered after 1980 were smaller. But in 2000, a new Saturn’s moon called ‘Siarnaq’ was discovered from a ground based telescope. Its diameter is about 40 km, meaning that twenty years later, a moon twice as big as Calypso was discovered, thanks to ‘improved technology’.

Another flaw in the assumption that improvements in telescope technology are the unique driver of discovery is the ‘discovery gap’. Sticking with Saturn as our case study, we note that in 1980, the planet had 17 identified moons.
Between 1981 and 2000, just one new moon was discovered. This moon was Pan , discovered in 1990 from Voyager’s picture taken in 1980. Then, between 2000 and 2009, 44 moons were discovered.

Are we to assume that for two decades (1980–2000) technological progress ground to a halt? Did astronomers go on strike? The Voyager probe in 1980 arguably brought data that was well ahead of its time. Apparently it took 20 years to fill the technological gap and have pictures taken from the Earth that meet the accuracy of those taken from Voyager. And yet new moon databases show that in 1980 small moons were being discovered from ground-based observatories. For example Calypso, the small moon mentioned above, was discovered from ground-based observations by Dan Pascu. As a matter of fact in 1980, the year when Voyager was nearby Saturn, 6 new moons were discovered, only half of them were discovered by Voyager, the other half were discovered by ground based telescopes, so the observers were not lagging behind, technologically speaking.

A more logical explanation for this sudden discovery of news moons is that before their discovery they were simply not there; that the new moons were only recently acquired.

One other peculiar feature is the time sequence of moon acquisition, planet by planet. It appears from the data that, following a 20-year period where no new moons were discovered (1980s and 1990s), planets in the solar system all of a sudden started acquiring many new moons. Uranus started acquiring most of its recent moons in 1999, Saturn in 2000 and Jupiter in 2001. This sequence is interesting because in the solar system Uranus is the 7th planet from the Sun, Saturn is the 6th and Jupiter is the 5th.

If the discovery of new moons was due to technological progress, then moons of the closest planet should have been discovered first. But the exact opposite occurred. The early acquisition of new moons by the furthest planet from the Sun suggests that these ‘moons’ originate from the same source, approaching the Sun from outside the solar system. So, as comets or asteroids passing the orbits of the outer planets first, they would only arrive at the inner planets later. This inward trajectory (from outside the solar system toward its center) is consistent with our description of Nemesis’s orbit and the accompanying cometary swarm. Once inside the solar system, we would expect some of the swarm to be attracted by massive celestial bodies in general, and the Sun in particular.

An objection made by mainstream science against this idea that new moons are recently captured asteroids or comets is that moons are conventionally thought of as being a totally different type of celestial body. But there actually doesn’t seem to be any physical difference between them, as we can see when we compare images of the two.

After years of denial, the penny appears to have dropped for mainstream astronomy, and it was finally conceded that moons might indeed be captured asteroids. An international team of astronomers modeled the ultraviolet light reflected from the surface of Phobos, one of the two small moons of Mars, and compared it to the asteroid 624 Hektor and the Tagish Lake meteorite found on Earth and concluded that they bore ‘strong similarities’ .

One could think that the recent increase in new moons, comets, asteroids and NEOs might be due to a sudden surge in the NASA budget dedicated to detecting celestial bodies. As a matter of fact, just the opposite has been happening. NASA Astrophysics departments (the one concerned with the detection program) had a $1.11 billion budget in 2007. By 2013, the budget dropped to $610 million. That’s a 45% drop over six years.

Disguising celestial intentions

The mainstream media’s response to the increase in earthbound space rocks has been similar to its response to the increase in atmospheric dust: they downplay the magnitude of the phenomenon and blame it on human activity. But, sadly for the authorities, the proliferation of mobile phones equipped with cameras has provided extensive evidence that some fairly large-sized meteors are raining down on Earth, with fresh accounts of spectacular fireballs now being reported on a daily basis. With outright denial of the phenomenon no longer possible for them, it has become imperative that the media find rational explanations to ease the inevitable apprehension people feel about what they are seeing.

So the authorities now regularly claim to be conducting bizarre, and previously unannounced, ‘missile tests’ and dealing with equally outlandish ‘accidents’ to account for ‘sonic booms’ and ‘explosive earthquakes’ that are often accompanied by eyewitness reports and video footage of fireballs turning night into day over densely populated areas. Another explanation trotted out with some frequency is ‘falling space junk’.

This media cover-up of the increase in cometary activity by conflating it with military missiles and/or space junk lends an almost prophetic tone to the following text written in 1996:

the Christian, Islamic and Judaic cultures have all moved since the European Renaissance to adopt an unreasoning anti-apocalyptic stance, apparently unaware of the burgeoning science of catastrophes. History, it now seems, is repeating itself: it has taken the Space Age to revive the Platonist voice of reason but it emerges this time within a modern anti-fundamentalist, anti-apocalyptic tradition over which governments may, as before, be unable to exercise control.  Cynics (or modern sophists), in other words, would say that we do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions; rather we need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions! [Emphasis in the original]

The problem is that, unlike conventional missiles, cometary bodies, because of their electric activity, have a strong electromagnetic signature that can trigger lightning bolts between incoming asteroids and the Earth’s surface that can fry electrical devices over a wide area. One naturally wonders if this is related to the media frequently reporting, since around 2008 , the development of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons by the USA, Israel, China, South Korea, and the usual suspect, Iran. The source mentioning the development of Iranian EMP weapons specifically states the following:

An EMP is an above-atmosphere level detonation of a nuclear device that produces enough radiation to wreak havoc with electrical systems.

Because of the protection provided by our atmosphere, an overhead cometary explosion is a far more probable event than a direct impact and could easily be mistaken for an ‘above-atmosphere detonation’. And the EMP generated by such an explosion could, of course, be blamed on the ‘Iranian EMP missiles’. In addition to ‘disguising celestial intentions’, a cover story about Iranian EMP weapons would provide a casus belli for the US and Israel to attack Iran. At the very least it keeps the population (of the USA at least) focused on the enemy ‘over there’ rather than the real enemy ‘out there’, and in that way, dependent on the authorities for protection. The point being, our ‘authorities’ cannot protect us from the celestial threat and, as we shall see, they may in fact play a central role in provoking it.

The recent series of ‘disclosures’ about new EMP weapons is all the more suggestive because the prime generators of electromagnetic pulses are nuclear weapons. This effect was already suspected by the time the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Test in the desert of New Mexico on July 16th, 1945 detonated the first atomic bomb. Their electronic equipment had been shielded because project scientist Enrico Fermi had predicted that an EMP would accompany the explosion. By the 1960s, the EMPs generated by nuclear explosions and their disruptive effects on electronic and electric equipment was being extensively measured and documented. Put simply, nuclear weapons are EMP weapons, an established fact for over half a century. Why then does the media depict EMP bombs as a ‘newly discovered’ weapon? Why all this fuss about half a dozen countries suddenly developing EMP bombs at the same time that such a dramatic increase in comets and fireballs is being recorded?

Another feature of the electric model of the Universe we’ve covered is how a Nemesis-induced grounding of the Sun weakens the E-field between the Earth’s surface and its ionosphere (the ‘atmospheric E-field’). This E-field, through the electric constraint it exerts on incoming meteors, acts as a protective shield:

If a body having a different electrical potential (voltage) penetrates the double layer boundary and moves into the plasmasphere surrounding a planet, charges will flow to try to cancel the voltage difference. Electrical discharges will occur. Thus, if any other body, such as a large meteor, asteroid, or comet should come close enough to Earth to penetrate our plasma sheath, violent electric discharges would occur between the two bodies. It would, of course, be unfortunate to be standing on Earth's surface at the point of origin (or reception) of such a mega-lightning discharge. But the massive discharge itself might either deflect the intruding body or break it up and thus protect Earth from a collision. Such large-amplitude arcs would undoubtedly cause scarring on the surface of both bodies. A very small intruder would be broken up by the discharge. It is likely that this is what happened to comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it entered Jupiter’s giant plasmasphere a few years ago.

Note that the same phenomenon occurs at the solar system scale. Because of reduced solar activity, comets entering the solar system are subjected to a lesser E-field, less electric stress and are therefore less likely to fragment or disintegrate.

If Nemesis’s comet swarm was approaching, the probability of encountering more and bigger asteroids should increase and, because of the weakened heliospheric and atmospheric E-field, the probability increases that more of them would approach closer to the Earth’s surface and trigger overhead explosions or even ground impacts.

In this electric model, we thus see Nemesis and its cometary swarm subjecting our planet to the threat of cometary bombardment while simultaneously neutralizing the very defense mechanism our planet and our solar system possesses against such a threat.

We should keep in mind here that we’re not looking at a scenario where a single large object hits a particular location, as depicted in some popular Hollywood productions. We are probably talking about passing through a vast cloud – composed of cometary dust and fragments of varying sizes (up to and including whole, miles-wide comets) – in which we could expect to encounter countless numbers of objects over an extended period of time. Such cometary bombardment could indeed last centuries if not millennia. Geologist David Jolley discovered that the extinction of the dinosaurs (Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary about 65 MY ago) was due to cometary bombardments that lasted several millennia:

The very short period of time, as little as 2000–5000 years, between two large asteroid impacts on Earth close to the K-Pg boundary constrains the likely impactor delivery mechanism since it necessitates a high probability of delivering several large bodies into the inner solar system within a few thousand years.

Notice that a lasting cometary bombardment involving several objects also explains why high levels of iridium in the K-Pg boundary were consistently found all over the planet (one single impact would have raised iridium levels only locally).

Action at a distance: discharge events

As long as these space rocks continue discharging, fragmenting and exploding up there, they present no danger to us down here, right? Long assumed to be true, that may no longer be the case.

There were multiple reports of meteor fireballs in the skies above Colorado when devastating wildfires broke out there in late June, 2012, with one local fire chief stating that meteorites actually hit the ground. Officially, meteorites are not supposed to be red-hot when they make impact, but many recent reports contradict the assumption that rocks must be icy cold by the time they reach the ground . When we look back at available data for wildfires in the U.S. for the period 2001-2012, a marked upward trend reveals itself , though this doesn’t necessarily mean that increased meteor fireballs translate directly into increased wildfires. Other factors are probably involved, not least of which is increased electrical discharge activity in the form of increased lightning activity, the traditional trigger for many wildfires.

Another phenomenon is an apparent spike in unexplained surface-level explosions, one sub-set of which is explosions or fires at industrial plants. There were nearly 40 such hazardous incidents, including five at fertilizer plants, between April and August 2013:

Date Place Number
Dead/wounded Activity Notes
04/18 West, Texas 15/160 hundreds Fertilizer Lightning
06/14 Donaldsville, Louisiana 1/several Fertilizer
06/24 Union Mills Indiana 1/2 Fertilizer
07/29 Shandong, China Unknown Explosives
08/06 Horlivka, Ukraine 5/3 Fertilizer
08/04 Bartow County, Georgia 0/2 Power plant
04/17 Mount Isa, Australia 0/0 Sulphuric acid
04/22 Dexter, Michigan 1/1 Wastewater
04/26 Shakopee, Minnesota 0/0 Biomass
05/01 Mishazi, China 119/54 Poultry
05/01 Newmarket, Canada 0/6 Doors
05/07 Eufaula, Oklahoma 0/2 Sandblasting Double boom
05/07 Cartersville, Georgia 0/0 Power plant Sonic boom
05/13 Putnam, West Viriginia Virginia 0/2 Acetylene storage
05/15 Cheyenne, Wyoming 0/0 Power plant
05/23 Ramat Hovav, Israel 1/31 Pharmaceutical
06/02 Seward, Illinois 0/1 Hexachlorodisilane
06/17 Postville, Iowa 0/3 Plastic laminates
06/19 Montreal, Canada 2/0 Fireworks
06/20 Foley, Alabama 0/2 Aircraft engines
06/23 Pundong, China Unknown Acrylic acid
06/28 Mt Bethel Pennsylvania, PePennsylvania Jersey 0/0 Silicon
07/05 Takoradi, Ghana 0/1 Power plant
07/11 Suizhou, China 0/2 Biochemicals
07/16 Auburn, Tennessee 0/1 Thermite
07/17 Auckland, New Zealand 0/0 Steel recycling
07/21 Sibley, Iowa 0/5 Drainage tiles
07/22 Nuevo Leon, Mexico 2/12 Steel
07/23 Statesville, NC 0/1 Composites
07/24 Derry, Penn. 0/0 Nickel alloys
07/25 Lowell, Arkansas 0/0 Recycling
07/30 Zhangzhou, China 0/0 Paraxylene
07/31 Tavares, Florida 0/8 Propane
08/01 Makurdi, Nigeria 1/0 Cement
08/06 Luhju, Taiwan Unknown Nitrocellulose
08/06 Byram, Mississippi 0/0 Metal painting
08/11 Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela 0/0 Refinery Lightning

Before investigations had even begun, official explanations in all of these cases invoked similar causes each time: chemical reactions, accidents, defective equipment, human error, etc. However, I would like to propose that cometary discharge or impact may be the cause for at least some of these explosions and fires. The illustration below shows how an industrial plume can act as an attractor for cometary discharge:

A (left illustration): A meteor enters the atmosphere. Its (relative) positive charge pulls negative charges (free electrons) up from the plant and the metallic chimney. Those electrons are captured by the low-mobility smoke particles of the plume, making even more negative the charge of fumes that are already loaded with negative ions. The positive meteor and the negative plume attract each other.

B (center illustration): When the electric charge difference is high enough and/or the distance small enough, a massive discharge occurs. An ascending lightning bolt (upwards electrons transfer) directly connects the chimney and its plume to the meteor.

C (right illustration): The lightning bolt leaves an ionized and negatively charged atmospheric trail that attracts what remains of the positively charged meteor towards the vicinity of the plant. Note that the meteor may have fragmented before reaching the ground.

Fertilizer plants release chlorine (Cl), nitrates (NO2) and nitrites (NO3). These three molecules are powerful oxidants; they have a strong tendency to acquire electrons. If they are not already released in negative ionic form they can be ionized later in the plume. In more general terms, industrial plants tend to eject ‘electron-capturing’ particles and free radicals (oxidants) into the atmosphere.

That’s probably the reason why industrial plumes have been found to hold a negative electric charge. Plumes could therefore act as electric attractors for meteor discharges and possibly meteor/meteorite impacts. They literally act like lightning rods because they are high up in the sky and they hold an electric charge opposite to that of the space rocks. This explanation may account for some of the explosions and fires listed in the table above, particularly where lightning and/or sonic booms were reported by witnesses.

Nuclear plants exhibit similar properties. They emit ionizing radiation which ‘scrape away’ electrons from molecules, creating positive and negative ions. In the conductive plume, the negative ions are attracted to the top of the plume by the positive ionosphere, while the positive ions are attracted to the bottom of the plume by the Earth’s negative surface.

The fact that nuclear plant plumes are mostly composed of water vapor, a good electric conductor, eases the ionic movement described above and the upward flow of free electrons from the ground to the top of the plume.
On April 18th, 2013 the La Salle nuclear plant in Illinois experienced an unusual incident: two of its reactors shut down and a radioactive venting procedure was carried out when it was struck by lightning. However, from 1992 to 2003, U.S. nuclear plants were struck by lightning 66 times, yet none of those strikes caused equipment damage or radioactive leakage.

So, what really happened in La Salle? Was the accident simply due to an insulator defect, as claimed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), or was the source of this ‘lightning’ something out of the ordinary? Nuclear plants are very well equipped with lightning prevention equipment, but cometary discharges exhibit two major differences when compared to ‘normal’ lightning bolts: their polarity is reversed and their intensity can be much higher. The steady increase in cometary activity may cause more such events in the near future.

Space-bound bio-hazard

Actual impacts, overhead explosions and their associated shockwaves and electric discharges are not the only threats posed by earthbound asteroids. Ironically, some of the most deleterious effects of comets might well be those least reported and least studied. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have shown how viruses can be spread in the Earth’s atmosphere by dust in the debris stream of comets. When Earth passes through this stream, the dust and viruses enter the upper parts of our atmosphere where they can remain suspended for years until gravity finally pulls them down.

Microbes can also be brought by meteorites directly to Earth’s surface. That’s the conclusion of the same Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, who published a paper showing the presence of fused fossilized microorganisms in a meteorite that recently hit the ground. Wickramasinghe conducted extensive tests that ruled out any possibility of terrestrial contamination.

A cosmic origin for some microbes may explain why so many new viruses emerge in Asia. The Earth’s atmosphere is thinnest at the Himalayas and surrounding region , therefore ‘drop-downs’ should take less time there. It might also explain why new strains of viruses usually affect birds first, as we see with the numerous avian flus. During their drop-down, microbes are first present in the sky, where they can contaminate birds before eventually reaching the ground. Virus-carrying meteoric material might also explain why Justinian’s plague began just four years after a theorized massive overhead cometary explosion in 536 AD, that produced an 18-month long dust veil , and why the Black Death in 1347 was preceded by intense cometary activity.

Bricks in the wall. Not left alone though. Do the teachers not see themselves as proper peer-group mates? Or are they predatory?

Ectomorph

" Comment: Encouraging news, but it could be a feint. The same regulations on censorship and centralization of power could still be brought in...

KRNABRNY

At the end of the day - may the best ideas prevail. The chips are on the table. Place your bets!

Buffalo_Ken

Excellent SOTT comment.

Dwoods44

Quote: "You gotta include the media, think tanks, and academia in this — in addition to the military-industrial complex and the political class....

Dwoods44

Fire in the Sky

Swarm of fireballs rain down from the sky in Michigan

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