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Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Did A Meteorite Really Fall to Kill A Man in Tamil Nadu on Saturday, the 6th Feb 2016?

A falling small meteorite killed an innocent man in the campus of Bharatidasan Engineering College-one of the private engineering colleges in Vellore in Tamil Nadu reportedly on 6th February 2016 (Saturday). I do not know how many people really noticed this news. If this is true, perhaps it is the first time that a meteorite fall causing any human casualty in the world! The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Ms.Jayalalithaa had reportedly confirmed that it was indeed a meteor fall that caused the mishap!

Vellore SP P.K. Senthil Kumari and other police officials inspect the site of a meteorite fall at a college in Natrampalli, Vellore district on Saturday. Photo: Special arrangement
T N Police inspecting the site of the meteor fall

The crater formed after the object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on the campus of Bharathidasan Engineering College, near Natrampalli, in Vellore on Saturday.
apparently does not match the site photos on the top or appeared later!

It was a mysterious explosion at noon in the college campus which killed one driver and injured two gardeners of the college besides causing some other damages. No one initially understood what had happened and even suspected a terror attack as the initial reports indicated.

Whether a meteor fall is actually a natural disaster that could be feared or not is a matter of scientific debate. Meteors are small stone like particles from space that keep falling down to planets like earth. They have great destructive power due to the high velocity at which they fall down. However, earth and its inhabitants are more or less fortunate because our atmosphere causes the falling cosmic stones to burn out fully by friction once it enters our atmosphere. The burning out is usually visible to the naked eye and is commonly known as shooting stars or falling stars!  Due to the 'burn-outs' only a few such cosmic stones have some thing left to really hit the earth's surface and cause any damage. Yet there are rare occasions when some meteor residue can strike and cause explosive like destruction on earth. Such incidences have been reported in history all over the world, as is given in the international comet quarterly.

During my younger days when I used to stay in my village, Elanthoor, in central Kerala in south India, I remember watching the unpolluted clear night sky in search of finding occasional shooting stars. Some elders used to consider witnessing a shooting star as a bad omen. But fortunately in my village home none believed in those superstitions and rather I was encouraged to watch the celestial wonders of the skies. But only on one occasion I happened to witness a shooting star so close that I believed that it really hit the ground somewhere nearby. That was some twenty years ago.

In the village we children used to pick up unusually heavy iron containing black stones with a molten rock appearance which we used to call ulkka which in my native language Malayalam meant a meteor! Obviously in the olden times people were aware of these falling sky  stones! 

A photo released by the police shows a part of the meteor.
The news image from the Indian Express depicting an  investigator
holding a piece of the alleged meteor that had fallen in Vellore!

In the cities of India, shooting stars are not very much an observable phenomena now-a-days because of the high urban pollution and the urban area lighting.

Though the Tamil Nadu government had officially declared the Vellore incident last week as indeed a case of a meteor fall, there are many who might think it as due to some thing else. Even the scientific community too may not provide any conclusive verdict so soon.

Large sized meteor falls can release very large energy equivalent to several mega tonnes of explosives or that of the present day nuclear bombs. Scientist believe in the formation of large impact craters and mass destruction of life on earth thousands of years ago due to meteor falls. Technically such incidents can happen even now. But we are fortunate that it happens very rarely! Besides we have the protective atmosphere that keep us safe from the meteor showers!

At this juncture, let me quote a statement of truth revelation from my book of life guidance-the Urantia Book- about meteorites:

"Millions upon millions of meteorites enter the atmosphere of earth daily, coming in at the rate of almost two hundred miles a second. On some other people inhabited worlds (without such atmospheric protection) the advanced inhabitants must do much to protect themselves from meteor damage by making electrical installations which operate to consume or shunt the meteors. Great danger confronts them when they venture beyond these protected zones. These worlds are also subject to disastrous electrical storms of a nature unknown on earth. During such times of tremendous energy fluctuation the inhabitants must take refuge in their special structures of protective insulation."

In other words, the above statement reveals the fact about the existence of at least some other worlds in the universe which are much more hostile to life than the conditions that we face on earth. In those worlds the inhabitants have to use their intelligence and creativity to device means for self protection!

Don't you think us fortunate in that sense?

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