WATCH: Dash Cams Capture Meteor Explosion Over Bangkok
Don’t worry, we haven’t gone the way of the dinosaur yet.
The helmet cameras and dash cams employed by many commuters in Bangkok, Thailand were put to apocalyptic use Monday when they captured a brilliant daylight fireball.
This wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering event like the too-close-for-comfort celestial fireworks over Chelyabinsk in the Russian Federation that injured 1,000 in 2012.
It did make a splash across social media platforms and among preppers and UFO devotees—and it’s easy to see why, the size of the explosion is hard to ignore, and many find such events inherently mysterious, if nothing else.
In a detailed report, the Bangkok Post presented several possibilities for what caused the startling blast. The possibility it was a meteor was dismissed by one expert and the Post noted a report that a “Space junk flock” was “due to burn through the atmosphere on its way to earth” around the same time as the explosion was captured by commuter cameras.
The head of Thailand’s National Astronomical Research Institute, Saran Poshyachina, indicated to the Post the fireball could’ve been either space junk or a meteor, as far as he was concerned.
Writing for Slate’s “Bad Astronomy,” Phil Plait did some detailed analysis of what he could observe on the videos and concluded the Bangkok fireball was almost certainly a meteor and was not dangerous.
Space garbage or sizzling rocks, whichever—the eerie, fascinating nature of these videos almost makes us wish we could go back in time and give the dinosaurs some GoPros—that must have been one hell of a blast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ69qkPqawM
Photos by Screen capture from video
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