explosions from the sky parts of russia are shaken after a meteorite slams into earth the report on today's events and ask what would happen if a major media were headed toward north america. and it's a bird it's a plane no it's something else entirely when something falls from the sky or you see an unexplained object it leads to talk of u.f.o.'s so is there life that outer space our team goes inside the business that investigates unidentified flying objects. plus police officers now confirmed that the ex cop who terrorized southern california for days did die inside a burning cabin but questions are being raised about the cost of the manhunt and the huge police effort used to find this suspect we'll look at that issue coming up . it's friday february fifteenth four pm in washington d.c.

i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. well unbelievable video was coming out of russia today after a meteorite streaked across the morning sky for crashing into a city of child. russia that is over nine hundred people were injured and some three thousand buildings were also damaged from the tremendous shock wave this ten ton what he might set off upon impact to give you an idea of the region chelyabinsk is a city that is located about one thousand miles east of moscow and has some one point one million residents the meteor hit around nine twenty am local time and left a fifteen foot hole in the icy lake just west of the city for more on international national correspondent lizzie france joined me earlier i started off by asking her what's the latest news coming out of russia and whether there were any deaths. no it's not reported that there are any deaths at this point however

twelve hundred people have reportedly sought medical attention two hundred of them are children when those bright flashes of light lit up the sky in chelyabinsk bystanders say that what they heard was something that reminded them of an earthquake also with thunder happening at the exact same time in the force of the blast pushed through windows and it pushed people across their offices it was very shocking people didn't know if it was the end of the world if it was meteorite hitting if it was a bomb people were very very frightened as you can imagine and so there have been a lot of injuries because of this is a mid-size city at least three thousand buildings were were ruined when this when this actually happened the impact sites in the area reportedly there are three of them and at this point they've been roped off and are being investigated for radiation so let's talk about the magnitude of the damage you kind of mentioned

a little bit earlier but can you give us a sense of the magnitude of what exactly has been destroyed and how much. you have let's talk about the media itself according to the russian academy of scientists it is estimated that it is about ten tons and it was traveling around thirty to forty five thousand miles per hour when it made an impact now it completely gutted a factory in the area and there are two other sites just west of chelyabinsk that are being investigated one of them is a ice covered lake at this point as i said earlier sorties claimed three thousand buildings have been ruined either by collapsed roofs or by all of the windows just being shattered on top of that when initial impact was made this morning cell phone coverage was down and then of course natural gas lines had to be shut off in case of an explosion so a state of emergency was temporarily declared and then of course hospitals were put on high alert and emergency services were brought in by the thousands of people

just to stabilize the situation because as you can imagine no one really knew at that point what had taken place absolutely i can imagine there is a lot of chaos and questions so what's been the reaction of the people on the ground i'm hearing that people were actually relieved that it was a meteor hit and not something else why is that. yeah if you can imagine you've got to really look at the area this has taken place and this is an old nuclear test facility in fact during the soviet era it was a sort of a nuclear playground where scientists would would test nuclear nuclear products and at this point it's actually got seven nuclear fuel sites in this area so when people saw heard this explosion and such as bright flash of light their immediate fear for many of them they say was that there was a manmade nuclear disaster in fact this area went through two of those disasters one in the fifty's one in the sixty's so one of the immediate concerns aside from

a u.f.o. or a bomb was that this was another nuclear disaster and you can imagine if those those fears were realized what kind of a situation they'd be dealing with at this point for now it is in factory knocked out smashed windows some injuries but no deaths so far now as i understand it it's definitely not the first time that a meteor has struck this region it's not even the second or the third time are there any ideas floating around about why this area seems to be such a magnet for meteors. you know especially especially right now it seems to be such a hot topic with scientists because the area like you say does seem to be a magnet for this sort of thing to go back to nineteen. meteorite that that hit and decimated two thousand square kilometers of forest in siberia and then there that at least four major hits in siberia and in the far far east of russia since then and it's just it's a very odd phenomenon and it's something that scientists are it's

a very hot topic right now and it's especially even with people who aren't scientists why is this happening so much and it's something very shocking although the thing that's very interesting also is all those crashes there have never been one recorded death or one injury except for what took place today the only recorded injury in a meteorite crash happens have taken place in alabama and nineteen fifties when a woman was sleeping on her couch and meteorite crashed hit her on the arm that's the only recorded injury except for today in chelyabinsk but hopefully we won't lose anybody and hopefully they'll figure out why siberia seems to be such a magnet for these meteorites and i'm sure you're going to be keeping on the story long as well as all of our team over an hour to moscow r.t. international correspondent lindsey france thank you so much for weighing in on this topic. now when it comes to meteors astronomy or anything really that has to do with space for many people the first thing that comes to mind is u.f.o.'s and

even aliens now part of that could be caused by a sense of wonder and curiosity when it comes to things that we simply don't have all the answers to another part of very large part could actually be caused by hollywood's depictions of us u.f.o.'s and extraterrestrial life whatever the case some people have dedicated their lives to studying new f ology including scientists with n.y. spy r t correspondent on a saucy old church going to take a look at this business we may or may not believe you expect me to believe. that a flying saucer came down and it took your friend away but courtesy of hollywood us both of them landing in the us for many years we've all seen them on the silver screen do your best. witnesses claim to have seen hundreds of photos like that are very different feel like. enough people claim to have spotted them in real life

more people in this country have seen your photos and i think approve of george bush's presidency including a handful of celebrities and politicians did you see a u.f.o. . i did and the rest of the account i did it was an identified flying object ok it's like it's not identified i saw something you don't know was a nice spy is a group of new york based u.f.o. investigators blow up shows that it has a traditional flying saucer shape but we don't know what it is the us followed just are contacted by dozens of people every month claiming to have had you have full encounters and wanting to find out more about what they had witnessed a u.f.o. just means we see something in the sky we don't know what it is and as i said ninety nine percent of the time it has a conventional explanation but that one percent of the time most of the cases that we're really interested in this group says curiosity about u.f.o.'s is largely ridiculed only because it's not

a science that can be measured unproven and after now studying the subject for fifty years i can't tell you what do you are for with it and i believe that anybody who tries to tell you what it is you better run the other way in the digital world of today a legit footage of unidentified flying objects is easy to fake so more often than not attention seekers create endless myths to debug most people i mediately think you're talking about a spaceship and that's the farthest thing from what they should be thinking because it could be just about anything nice by visit locations collective physical evidence and contact airports for radar traces and entire study was done on this particular case which happened up in saratoga springs which makes it a fairly credible case going after but based soley on this picture you would say that's a jet abduction reports are large part of the focus tends to be intergenerational if it's happening to you there's a very there's very compelling evidence that it's also happening to your parents

that it's going to happen to your children being swept up by unknown creatures is the most common story of close encounters consistently repeated throughout the world they can come in through windows. that night and i don't mean crawling through into a state they tend to just kind of come come through in a material sense and there's always a craft that's nearby they seem to be taken up into this craft and they are examined it's very clear very clinical experience it's very impersonal these you are falling just see people tend to fear the unknown and that's why this subject largely taboo can you imagine the president of the united states going on the air some night and saying we're being visited by beings from we don't know where and we have no control over what they do thank you very much goodnight folks i mean you know what. would happen i mean people would panic they'd go crazy after all the years of research even for these u.f.o. investigators more questions than answers remain and especially if you're going to

r.t. new york for more on these u.f.o. chasers and what exactly they're trying to find out on a fallacy of joins me now with more hey there nost v.s.o. first thing that hearst what exactly have these people found out. well you know what they have found out is the longer they're looking and investigating the more questions they have than answers because the like we heard in this report out of the all of the cases they receive all of the reports they receive only about one percent are worth pursuing according to them most of the other ones are debunked immediately and very reasonable explanations are found right away and so these guys move into the cases that really are the more curious ones the ones that are a little more hard to explain and like we said we heard you know they say decades and decades they have dedicated to this work and they still don't know exactly what kind of shape or form this life in outer space has no it sounds a little bit like a movie on a stasi i mean people are calling in reporting different sightings are possible

anonymous not anomalies excuse me however does anybody actually actually take these people seriously in the work that they do well you know absolutely of course because. around fourteen percent of americans as far as i remember claimed to have cited you have photos at one point or another in their life that's not a very small number and certainly a lot of people are very curious about the subject of u.f.o.'s these people say you know the only wish more scientists would get involved but because the studying of u.f.o.'s is still a very fringe topic that you know people are made fun of for investigating they're saying it's not getting enough attention thus you know simply not having enough funds even this group of people works out of a planetarium in staten island instead of having a lab maybe where they could really look into things more closely so that's one of the things they're saying is you know there are serious reasons for not being. able to investigate this more but they're saying it's interesting enough and they have a viable enough evidence according to them to believe that there's there's quite

a lot to explore and i know that you know a lot of people are critical of u.f.o.'s and aliens and extraterrestrial life how are these people actually received among the astronomers in the scientific community. well you know in the scientific community of course there is serious doubt in terms of the existence of the of these u.f.o.'s anywhere out there but it's really people are split i mean these this particular group of. other people of course that work on this they believe it's a science they believe it's a science that really under explored they believe it's definitely worth pursuing and you know in the years to come considering throughout the years there have been so many reports and so many cases they say you know this is really something that should be treated more seriously and it's for them at least it's a shame that not people not enough people are seemingly treating it as seriously as it should be all right honest it is a serious topic that obviously these people are taking very seriously their jobs now let me ask you this what are they actually doing in their spare time or is

being a us follow just a full time job well no that's not their full time job at all because unfortunately because this is such an underdeveloped fields it doesn't really pay so this is really a hobby and this particular group with that we've interviewed people have a different job one person is a psychologist another is the director of the planetarium and one is an engineer and they're just a group of people that got together many years ago to explore this and they wish this is something that would pay enough to sustain a living but it doesn't so far for them but it's still worthy of pursue will according to these curious people we only have about thirty seconds left on associate but did you get to a chance to actually look at what these people do and how they actually find this information out. well it's very complicated because it they find a case that they're interested in and they make phone calls to you know police departments they try to find witnesses they try to get in touch with the different local airports for example to see if there is any kind of indication that a specific craft was seeing basically what they try to do is find proof if one

report comes in that other people have seen something similar in that place and time and that gives them enough evidence to kind of keep investigating and then you know all of their reports and case comments are published on their website so it's something that the keeps growing and with every year they have more and more cases to report on successfully as they say very interesting article respondent on a saucy a chair going to thanks for that report. so let's stay with this topic of the great unknown that is space for hundreds upon hundreds of years scientists from copernicus to galileo have dedicated their lives to unraveling the secrets of space fear or fascination all of it has left people around the world vexed just a couple of hours ago a massive asteroid called twenty twelve d a fourteen past the earth so close that it was within viewing distance it just missed us by about seventeen thousand miles which is actually extremely close now if you thought the meteor i had hit that had

hit russia had inflicted a lot of damage that one was only the approximate size of a kitchen table this asteroid was one hundred fifty feet wide now i don't know about you but when i hear the terms asteroid and meteor and things like that i always think of hollywood flicks like armageddon and deep impact but what would it really be like if an asteroid or a meteor hit the earth joining me now to discuss is geoff chester he's from the u.s. navy observatory there jeff hello thank you for our for joining me so let's talk about all this media hype that was surrounded by this asteroid that just passed by how close was it really to earth well it didn't hit us that's the good news it passed within about seventeen thousand miles of the surface of the earth that's actually inside the belt of geostationary communications satellites which really your programs around the world. so in terms of how close it was it was pretty

close now the point is though that it did miss the big thing about this particular asteroid is that it is the largest one of its size caliber to come this close since we've been observing the heavens now we have only been able to observe objects of this size and predict their paths within perhaps the last twenty years so we have. an inventory of several thousand of these objects whose orbital paths we know we know when they're going to come close to us and so on and so forth but we don't know where they all are so this in some ways is kind of a wake up call to us because there are other objects out there which will come close which will probably come closer and as was very aptly demonstrated this morning over russia can actually hit us now the difference between the one that hit over russia the swarming and two thousand and twelve d a fourteen is on the order

of one or two orders of magnitude in size so we see a fair number of these smaller meter size objects enter the earth's atmosphere burn up or come down more or less harmlessly in places. almost all the time there's something like ten thousand tons of meteoric material that rains down continuously on the earth every day so i ask you let me ask this what would happen if a an asteroid hit the earth i want to show you a picture really fast this is a picture of the crater in arizona commonly known as the baron's or crater it was created about fifty thousand years ago it's and massive obviously i mean if something like this were to hit us today what type of damage would it cause well let's consider the fact that if it were to land in the in the middle of a major metropolitan area so for instance if two thousand and twelve d a fourteen were to land on the national mall we would not be here to talk about it it would be

roughly the equivalent destruction of a two or three megaton nuclear warhead so we're talking about basically blast damage that would probably wipe out most of the structures in the district of columbia in the surrounding suburbs not just the tri state area or beyond that would be within the beltway there are probably some people that would argue that might be a good thing. but not as far as i'm concerned but in terms of you know planet wide destruction that's still a relatively small or relatively small event it is generally accepted now that an asteroid perhaps fifteen kilometers or so in diameter impacted about sixty five million years ago and that of that basically ended the rule of the dinosaurs so even though we're told we're talking vast differences

in scale here but every time you increase by say one order of magnitude in the size of the object you're increasing the volume in the mass of that object by a factor of three or four orders of magnitude and therefore the destructive power so is it inevitable that we are going to be hit by asteroids it's just going to happen whether it's twenty years or two thousand years from now it's the navigable we are in the sights of something out there we don't know i can tell you confidently that of the thirteen hundred or so known near earth asteroids none of them are going to hit us within the next thousand years but what i can't tell you anything about is the other two or three thousand of those objects that we haven't discovered yet. so it's something that we do have to keep an eye on it has happened in the historic times there was an event in one thousand nine hundred

eight over the tongue region of siberia an object probably similar in size to the asteroid that passed the spike today entered the atmosphere and caused a shockwave that basically blew down trees whole stands of trees for hundreds of kilometers around it again it was a very remote area it was so remote that it took them almost twenty years to get an expedition in there to study it. it can happen it's a very interesting topic and i'm sure this is not going to be the last time that we hear about something like this happening and questions being brought up jeff chasseur he's the from the u.s. naval observatory thank you so much for your time sir welcome. what have you ever wonder to yourself of people who have ended up in history books or memorialize with statues knew they were making history as they did it in some cases like meal armstrong and martin luther king jr the answer is yes but in many others the international response after the event happened is what you make what actually made

that moment in history like you did you know that right now at this very moment in time you're making history believe it or not it's twitter users that are making this history turns out the library of congress is saving some one hundred seventy billion tweets in a digital archive as part of history or to correspondent liz wahl tells us why you should be careful what you tweet you could be changing history. it's part of the social media landscape that has revolutionized the way we communicate. twitter allows users to broadcast their thoughts one hundred forty characters at a time. from the very first tweet to declaring historic presidential victories to the downright dumb all of it has been stored at the library of congress with the popularity of smartphones and i pads users can tweet pretty much anywhere at any

time in the library of congress is taking note of the way people are communicating and expressing themselves along with journals and other publications social media is being stored as a part of history it began in two thousand and ten when twitter agreed to hand over to the library every tweet since the social media site launched the tweets keep being stored with an estimated half a billion tweets per day. it's a massive undertaking basically taking this body of information about cultures country and putting it into some kind of storage well we're talking about one hundred fifty. well now that the library has collected this massive archive it's not clear what they're going to do with it how to search that how to how do you how do you catalog that and split it into searchable pieces of content and they haven't been able to figure that out yet. the libraries blog says quote although the library has been building and stabilizing the archive and has not yet offered

researchers access we have nevertheless received approximately four hundred inquiries from researchers all over the world so far the library tells us the goal is for researchers to have access to the database not the general public and we asked are there any limits to what information the library can distribute the library tells us they've set a few no tweets newer than six months old will be handed over to researchers and the tweets can be used for commercial purposes and researchers can make a big chunk of tweets available for downloading on their website still questions remain if you delete a tweet does the library still store it and how easily can law enforcement obtain your tweets if people are worried about privacy pretty sure the n.s.a. and homeland security is already threw up in that stuff so perhaps the take away as think before you tweet because it's going to be stored right here at the library of congress and washington let's walk r.t.

. so what do you think have you ever tweeted something that you think could make history of that you wish what end turns out even your deleted tweets could be making part of that history well our to our resident dot net host laura harshness to the question of should you be tweeting and should law is the law library of congress be keeping them to the streets of new york city. the library of congress announced that it's storing our tweet is this just another method of surveillance or is that a way of archiving the times this week let's talk about that did you know that our government is starting to store all of our tweets they're archiving them in the library of congress not surprised you're not surprised by that now they're quite everything are you ok with that no absolutely not. so what do we do about it you

know i don't know because they're doing a lot of other stuff that they should be doing like killing people across the world but you know there's only so much we can do i think so our tweets are kind of low on the priority but it's still a point that they should stop there and it's just another way that they can surveil us right. but i think how would you feel about your government storing all those tweets that scares me the so because i mean like you could tweak things i mean if i took it for about three years now and i kind of member what we had back then if they can find out and just kind of see what it was that's quite scary that's what our government's doing that now yeah isn't that crazy i don't think that's fair it's not fair have you ever tweeted something you might not want stored for all time usually a tweet recipes and food related things so i'd love it if there's a story it. would be great for generations to be able to reject recipes exactly do you think it's just another example of the government doing something idiotic i

don't know maybe they got a good deal on a hard drive space and they just need. i mean those are very surprised i mean i know they try to facebook and they track everything you do online i mean they have the right to an extent and long as they not invade someone's private they're just doing this for your protection do you believe that you trust them to use it not as a way to surveil you or invade your privacy yeah i believe there i mean what more can you do i mean if you put stuff out there that you don't want to be out there then you shouldn't do it that way you should just keep it private stuff so you should influence within all over the place is it going to get worse as we move into the future or are we going to figure out this privacy thing are has to get worse because the more high risk obviously the more it was when you get more like i don't it comes between making weapons and stuff so to say they want to get as much information about terrorism and stuff like that they're going to document more it's to protect they're going to embed us with chips and you know everything we do yes basically whether or not you think the government storing our tweets is an invasion of privacy the bottom line is.