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Large-ish Meteor Hits Earth... But No One Notices (discovery.com)
According to data released by the Fireball and Bolide Reports page of NASA's Near Earth Object Program, a large meteor exploded far off the coast of Brazil on February 6, 2016. The meteor was the largest atmospheric impact recorded since the famous Chelyabinsk bolide that exploded over Russia in 2013. Although the Feb 6 meteor didn't cause any structural damage, the meteor unleashed an energy equivalent of 13,000 tons of TNT exploding instantaneously.
Whoosh!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Back in the 80s, I seem to recall wire services carrying reports of a "mushroom cloud" over the ocean. It was reported by commercial pilots, probably reliable witnesses not inclined to make up things for jokes.
Speculation was undersea volcano, unusual thunderstorm convection, and impact. I don't recall them following up on it, and I think it remained a mystery... let's see if I can track this down in a few minutes before hitting submit....
Oh wow, it was easier than I thought it would be. Here's the original story.
It was the 3rd google hit for "pilots spot mushroom cloud". Would that all my searches were that easy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Someone noticed, or we would be reading about it here...
The meteor would need to be at least the size of a fighter jet to be trackable. Beyond a certain size it won't even register on the radar because if radar tracked everything down to the size of small finch it would be overwhelmed by positive signals. A large meteor would almost certainly hit the tracking radar but the objects are moving so fast that by the time they notified anyone it would be over. But most meteors are of the size that they won't even register. The main point of my post is that most meteors don't hit near populated areas, as a percentage of the earth surface the entire USA doesn't even register beyond a single digit percentage making a rare event even rarer.
According to this article 2.7% of the land area is urban, that means ~1% of the total earths surface is urban land. If strikes are completely random then there should be a 1% chance that any given hit is in an urban area. Now I don't believe hits are completely random since the solar system is planer so areas nearer the equator probably have a higher percentage chance, but that may be balanced by more cities being near the equator (there are almost no large cities between 60 degrees north and 90 degrees and in the southern hemisphere it's even more striking with no large cities between 45 degrees south and 90 degrees)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yes, this was incidentally why ballistic missiles launched from subs off the coast of the US were a huge concern. By the time you knew they were coming, you had about ten minutes or less to react. And there wasn't really anything short of other nuclear missiles that could shoot down an ballistic missile until recently, and nothing that could probably be activated on that sort of a notice even now.
A meteor would probably come in as fast as a ballistic missile, and we wouldn't even have the advantage of knowing where the launch sites are and monitoring them.
The big advantage over ICBMs is that they generally come from farther away and so there is more time to see them coming, but that assumes that you get lucky and find it before it enters the atmosphere. If you didn't see it coming, there's going to be zero chance of tracking it long enough to do anything about it, if you even saw it coming. At that point, even if you hit it with something, unless you atomized it the debris are going to impact and do a similar amount of damage.