Monday, September 26, 2011

Argentina: Meteor Incident Becomes News Worldwide

The report of a death and injuries related to the impact of an alleged meteor in the Argentinean community of Esteban Echevarria has already made headlines around the world. Spain's El Mundo newspaper has reprinted the original information with some interesting follow-ups presented here:

[...} Ricardo Casal, Minister of Justice and Safety for Buenos Aires, acknowledged that "hypotheses now range from an explosion to something strange. Nothing is being discarded. We must analyze," noted the minister, underscoring that there was no explosion of the gas cylinders in the destroyed homes.

A local resident distributed a photo in which a red light can be seen against the early morning sky. "The mattress on which I slept jumped off the ground, the ceiling joists twisted and all of the windows in my home blew out. When I went out to the street, there was fire falling from above, setting fire to a post some 20 meters away," stated another resident of the 9 de Abril neighborhood.

"My daughter sleeps in the front room, and she told me that upon opening the window, since she smelled an odor like gunpowder, she saw fireballs dropping from the sky, and that's when she saw the explosion that struck my son-in-law in the leg," added the man.

Another female resident living some 200 meters away from the site, claims having heard "a whistling sound, and seconds later came the explosion that made everything shake. When I went outside to look, I saw fire descending from above, something blue. It wasn't the normal color of a regular fire, it was all blue fire."

Jorge Coghlan, director of the Santa Fe Astronomical Observatory, says "there are lightning bolts that manifests themselves in such a way." Faced with the hypothesis of a meteor strike, the expert explained that "meteors, upon entering the earth's atmosphere, begin disintegrating, creating a tube of radiation that breaks against the ground."

Some of the theories surrounding the unusual event in Argentina invoke "fragments of comet Elenin" as one of the possible answers to the mystery, owing to the fact that no impact crater has been found.