Meteor impact video....??

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Dangus</i>
<br />Just curious if any of you think this is for real.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It is from a Toyota commercial that is currently running on TV. They cut off the end part where the Toyota survives and the screen flashes: "Toyota - meteor-proof!" -|Tom|-

Ah, I didn't know the origin of it, but I considered it a fake as well. It's still a fun one. It does make me wonder what a close encounter with an incoming meteorite would actually look like though. Is there any real documented evidence of such encounters, or even video/pictoral material to accompany that?

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"Regret can only change the future" -Me

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." Frank Herbert, Dune 1965

No actual impacts. But one or two close calls have been recorded on video. One I have seen (Colorado, 1972 - a meteor passed through the atmosphere over the Rockies, closest approach was about 10 km IIRC). The other I have heard of but not seen yet.

Neither was big enough to cause any real damage. IIRC.

The History Channel does a show on meteors from time to time. A few seconds of the Colorado video is part of it.

LB

On March 12, 2005, I watched a meteor coming in on a very low trajectory for at least 7 seconds. I think it first entered the atmosphere over Eugene, OR, on a north-north-westery course and impacted the ocean west of Westport, WA. A few seconds after it went below the tree tops, I saw three successive plumes of red steam as the meteor apparently skipped across the 8-foot swells of the Pacific Ocean. For my complete report visit my lonely personal website, XUZME . You will need to log in with a Passport from MSN or Hotmail to access the the jpg images. It's not quite a photo of the meteor, but a doctored photo of the actual location, with my best recollection of what I saw drawn in.

I don't know if it was a refrigerator-size object a mile away or a Battleship-size object fifty miles away. The steam may have been red because it was that hot, or it may have been illuminated by sunlight far beyond my horizon. For all I know, this meteor may have sunk near where I saw the red steam; it may have continued back into space; or it may have gone suborbital and impacted the ocean again thousands of miles away.

Storms approaching Westport from the west seldom appear on weather radar. Mountains block doppler radar from both Seattle and Portland along this part of the coast. If the meteor was detected by radar, it would have been from some other source.

That's awesome, Phil.

In the summer of 2003 I witnessed a daylight meteorite, it drew a path of light in the sky for 2 or 3 seconds, two hours before sundown.
One thing that was remarkable is that I looked up for no reason while I was watering my plants and saw the whole thing.
The other remarkable thing is that a friend, lying on his back less then a half mile away in a local park, enjoying the evening sun, had the same lovely view.
The colors of the tail were white-pink-green, and you could see it break up into smaller pieces.
Obviously it blew up high in the atmosphere

That's too bad nobody's managed to capture one really well at relatively close range, or zoomed in on a long range one. I think it would almost require a radar tracking camera array that could detect meteors and aquire the image automatically, zoom and all. If I am ever rich, I think I'll invent such a thing!

The most recent meteor I saw was in late September, maybe early November. I was out in a corn field at about 3am(long story), and I thought someone shined a flashlight on me from behind. I turned around and there was a huge streak of fire running through the sky. It was maybe 70 degrees relative to the ground, and tracked down the sky somewhere to the South, travelling slightly from West to East. It was pretty impressive. I wish it had been close enough I could have tracked down the remains(if any exist). Meteors of that sort of intensity are oten worth a lot of money, and are also big on the coolness factor []

I remember one time on the Discovery Channel, there was a guy in upstate New York(I think), who's car got hit by one in the middle of the night. It hit the rear passenger side of the trunk and blasted a hole clean through it. Some collector gave him like 27,000 dollars for the car and another 75,000 for the meteorite. That just shocked me. I wish I had that sort of money to blow on meteorites!(or anything else for that matter....)

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"Regret can only change the future" -Me

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." Frank Herbert, Dune 1965