Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 09:55:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Military Warning!


Here's something for you to throw out to the audience
during your next live sky show.

"In the early darkness of April 23, as Washington was
beginning to relax after the spy plane crisis in
China, alarm bells began to go off on the military
system that monitors the globe for nuclear blasts.

"Orbiting satellites that keep watch for nuclear
attack had detected a blinding flash of light over the
Pacific several hundred miles southwest of Los
Angeles. On the ground, shock waves were strong enough
to register halfway around the world.

"Tension reignited until the Pentagon could reassure
official Washington that the flash was not a nuclear
blast.

"It was a speeding meteoroid from outer space that had
crashed into the earth's atmosphere, where it exploded

in an intense fireball."

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
>From The New York Times, 29 May 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/29/science/29ROCK.html

For additional information, you may also want to read
the article in SPACE.COM
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/nuke_meteor_010524.html


Carl Sagan pointed out that such errors in judgement
has been happening for decades. In _Cosmos_, chapter
IV "Heaven and Hell" (copywrite 1980, Random House,
New York), he wrote of the Tunguska Event, "If sich an
impact occured today it might be mistaken, especially
in the panic of the moment, for a nuclear
explosion.... For example, an American Vela satellite
detected an immense double flash of light from the
vicinity of the South Atlantic and Western Indian
Ocean on September 22, 1979. Early speculation hald
that it was a clandestine test of a low yield (two
kiloton, about a sixth of the energy of the Hiroshima
bomb) nuclear weapon by South Africa or Israel."


=====
Erich Landstrom, NASA JPL Solar System Educator
Solar System Educators Program http://www.ssep.org