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3 Ton Meteorite Stolen
morpheus83 writes "Russian news agency Interfax is reporting that thieves have stolen a three-ton meteorite from the yard of the Tunguska Space Event foundation, whose director said it was the part of meteor that caused a massive explosion in Siberia in 1908. The massive three tonne rock was bought to Krasnoyarsk after an 2004 expedition to the site of the so-called Tunguska event- a mysterious mid air explosion over Siberia in 1908 was 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The foundation's director Yury Lavbin claimed to have discovered the wreckage of an alien spacecraft during the expedition."
If they were able to bring a 3-ton meteorite out of the tundra to the foundation headquarters, why couldn't they have managed to bring back even a scrap of the supposed alien wreckage?
No more "in Soviet Russia" jokes. They're not funny.
Well, except maybe "I, for one, welcome our new asteroid stealing overlords from Soviet Russia."
To my best knowledge it was never cleared up what exactly caused the accident in the first place..
And now, almost a 100 years later, we suddenly get to hear that they lost a 3 ton meteor (how the hell do you lose a 3 ton rock?) and oh yeah, btw, that was the meteor that caused the incident!....
No worries, we had it lying in our backyard all the time, never felt a urge or saw the reason to let the rest of the world know....
Yeah, right.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
It takes time to move thousands of tons of rock, even with the best equipment. Especially if you're interested in not causing further cave-in. I mean, we could nuke the mine, and get down to the miners no problem. But their odds of survival would be considerably lower using this strategy.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
If someone can steal a swimming pool full of water out of a backyard, one big rock out of a mostly ignored storage yard should be pretty easy.
See, already we've got more coverage than this badastronomy site. Good stuff.
And as for this well known "fact", it's a fact provided you discount this 2004 supposed meteorite find. So using this "fact" to in turn discredit the find is circular.
I actually did park my car on an anthill once, accidentally of course. The ants behaved just like humans and acted like they owned it: It took quite a while to get them all out, and they weren't happy about it. So I'd say this is a mistake any species can make.