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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.
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...
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.
New data has traced the trajectory of the meteor, and it originated from the Klendathu region.
They were probably aiming for Buenos Aires.