© Vyacheslav BulatovA local observatory indicated nothing fell from the sky on the day of the flash.
Emergency services refuse to comment cause of extraordinary blast in the dark sky.A huge flash lit up the early evening darkness, as shown by images taken from a dashcam on a road close to Yekaterinburg.
The sky suddenly turns orange-red at 17.39 local time (though the dashcam records it as 18.39).
For the next 11 seconds an orange light with yellow and white in the middle engulfs the entire sky. 'For a few moments night turned into dazzling day, then everything went dark again,' said one witness. The explosion came on 14 November but images only appeared of it today; strangely no sound was picked up.
Theories for the explosion included a missile or an object from space. Yet it did not have the same shape or pattern as the Chelyabinsk meteorite which exploded over the Urals in February 2013.
The author of the footage wrote on the web: 'On Friday (November 14 , 2014 at 5.40pm) I observed a flash in the sky, on the road on the way to Rezh.
'I found nothing about it in the news. Did anyone else see it? What was it?'
The glow was also filmed by the teenagers from Yekaterinburg on mobile cameras. The main question from witnesses is 'What was it?'
According to regional television neither meteorologists nor scientists can explain the strange phenomenon. A local observatory indicated nothing fell from the sky on the day of the flash. Local officials from the Emergencies Ministry refused to comment on the happening.
Comment: This was probably another massive meteor fireball event. We suspect that a distinct fragmentation trail cannot be seen because there was very dense cloud coverage close to the ground, while the incoming object would have been very high up. The intense glow could be due to the same effects we saw over
Recife, Brazil last month.
These seem to be plasma effects as incoming bodies interact with different charge layers of the atmosphere. Here's what NASA reported about Comet Siding-Spring's
close brush with Mars last month:
"Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument detected major changes as dust from the comet slammed into atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, high-energy collisions that caused the thin air to glow."
With this, the Recife event, and the '
Pacific lights' event the month before that, it looks like our atmosphere has reached a certain threshold of comet dust saturation.
Perhaps ancients' reports of 'the sky being on fire' are more literal than previously assumed?
Let the fireworks commence!
engine failure?