Comment: Over the past month two other large meteor fireballs have been recorded over England:

• Video shows meteor fireball exploding over Northern England
• Huge meteor fireball spotted in skies over Cornwall, UK

Comment: A local resident, Rajesh Kumar Gupta, said that he felt an explosion and after leaving his house felt a gust of strong wind, according to reports. Farmers in Fauladpur city of Shahjahanpur also saw the meteorite.

Ajay Chaudhary, a resident of Kotkasim area, said that while getting milk in the morning, there was a sudden light and rocket-like object appeared in the sky.

Sachin Bamba, chairman of astronomical organization Space India, says that it is a meteor, which has fallen on the earth.

A meteorite impacting an industrial area might be explained by the following: industrial plumes can act as electric attractors for meteorites because they rise high up in the sky and they hold an electric charge opposite to that of the space rocks.

Comment: Based on past actual pandemics such as 'the Black Death' about 600 years ago, and the 'Justinian Plague' about 600 years before that, which recorded mortality rates of up to 70% in some localities, this coronavirus is not at the level of 'global pandemic'. We will all know if or when such an event is happening...

One criticism we have of Professor Wickramasinghe's theory is that he may be reaching by trying to pin it on a specific, recent meteor event over China. That strikes us as being too linear, based on what he himself has written in the past - concerning the origins of SARS in 2003, funnily enough - about China being a catchment area for new viral material because of its proximity to the Himalayas and a zone of thin atmosphere...

In a letter to The Lancet, Wickramasinghe explains that a small amount of a virus introduced into the stratosphere could make a first tentative fallout east of the great mountain range of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, followed by sporadic deposits in neighboring areas. Could this explain why new strains of the influenza virus that are capable of engendering epidemics, and which are caused by radical genetic mutations, usually originate in Asia? Wickramasinghe argues that if the virus is only minimally infective, the subsequent course of its global progress will depend on stratospheric transport and mixing, leading to a fallout continuing seasonally over a few years; even if all reasonable attempts are made to contain an infective spread, the appearance of new foci almost anywhere is a possibility.

It seems more plausible to us that, because meteors can and do detonate anywhere, viruses or virus DNA they carry in their particles swirl all the way around the planet and then (tend to) settle to ground level through the 'Chinese opening'. That may only be a general rule, however, as some meteors probably do penetrate all the way through to the troposphere, and certainly some of their meteorites make it all the way to the ground.

However, the primary factor motivating our reporting on the increase in meteor events is not the risk they present from impacting the ground and causing immediate global catastrophe, which is thankfully rare on a civilizational timescale, but because of the far more potent danger they present of delivering new viruses against which there is no defense.

See also:

• New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection
• Book Review: New Light on the Black Death by Mike Baillie
• 15,000-year-old unknown viruses found in Tibetan glacier
• Killer viruses from outer space might be more common than we think

Comment: Less than two weeks ago a huge meteor fireball was spotted over Cornwall in Southern England.

Comment: There have been a LOT of spectacular meteor events lately. Here are a few:

• Jan 30th: Spectacular meteor fireball over Southern California was small asteroid or comet fragment, NOT space debris re-entry
• Jan 26th: Meteor fireball caught on camera exploding over the sky of Lebanon
• Jan 21st: Huge meteor fireball spotted in skies over Cornwall, UK

Comment: On February 1st, NASA's spaceweather.com reported:

On Jan. 30th around 10:30 pm PST, a spectacular fireball crawled across the skies of southern California. In Los Angeles and San Diego, millions of people watched it fragment into dozens of pieces high overhead. But what was it? Initial speculation focused on decaying space junk. The slow pace of the fireball combined with its fragmentation--as if parts of a satellite were breaking off in the atmosphere--suggested an orbital decay event. It appears, however, that the fireball was something else entirely.

Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has triangulated data from multiple cameras that picked up the fireball. His conclusion: It did not come from Earth. Instead, the fireball was a small asteroid or comet fragment belonging to the Apollo/Jupiter family. It was orbiting the sun when Earth got in the way, hitting our planet at a speed of 15.5 km/s (~35,000 mph). For comparison, manmade objects in low-Earth orbit typically hit at 7.9 km/s (17,700 mph) when they decay.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 101 reports of the event.