Thousands of residents of Bashkiria, Udmurtia and Tatarstan (Russia) watched a powerful flash of light that lit the night sky from edge to edge, and then came thunderous sounds and the earth trembled.
A bright flash was observed simultaneously in a territory of several thousand square kilometers. What happened in the sky over Bashkortostan, south Udmurtia and over the eastern regions of Tatarstan on Christmas night at the moment is not known. Scientists have not yet come to a consensus.
What is known is that it was not a technogenic catastrophe, there were no emergencies or accidents in these republics, there were no reports of accidents in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. As a result of the outbreak, earthquake shook, but there is no evidence of any worms or destruction.
Originally, when thousands of reports of the outbreak began to arrive, scientists responded by saying that it was a “meteorological phenomenon”, the so-called “blue flash”, or, more simply, a lightning or thunderstorm, but later they had to abandon this version because of its complete insolvency , too much was the territory on which this abnormal phenomenon was observed, and the usual thunderstorm could not cause such a vast shaking of the earth’s surface in such a vast territory.
The version about the usual thunderstorm of criticism could not stand and scientists changed it to the version about the cosmic origin of the phenomenon. They suggested that a large meteorite exploded in dense layers of the atmosphere. Combustion of the cosmic body is accompanied by its destruction and explosion resulting in a shock and sound wave, which could cause earthquake.
On the question of what the cosmic body exploded in the sky and what size it was, which illuminated everything around for thousands of kilometers and the earth trembled from the explosion, astronomers did not give a clear answer. Perhaps it was a meteorite, maybe a car, or maybe some earth orbiting spacecraft fell on the ground. What it was exactly scientists do not know. They stated the incident with a general phrase, “It was a kind of cosmic body, of unknown composition and size, which burned in the dense layers of the earth’s atmosphere, which was accompanied by cotton.”
