explosions from the sky parts of russia are shaken after a meteorite slams into earth more poured on today's events and ask what would happen if a major meteor headed our way. and it's a bird it's a plane no that's something else entirely when something falls from the sky or you see an unexplained object at least two talks of u.f.o.'s so is there a life out there in space r.t. goes inside a business that investigates unidentified flying objects. police officers are now confirming 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 force used to actually find the suspect to look into that issue coming up.

it's friday february fifteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. unbelievable video is coming out of russia today after a meteorite streaked across the morning sky before crashing into the city of children. chills javelins. over a nine hundred people were injured and some three thousand buildings were also damaged from a determined as shock wave that this ten ton behemoth set off upon impact to give you an idea of the region this mountainous city located about a thousand miles east of moscow and has some one point one million residents the meteor hit about two hundred twenty local time for more our senior national correspondent lizzie france joined me earlier i started off by asking her what the latest news coming out of russia is 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 a 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. 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. have

a 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 claim that 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 those fears

were realized what kind of a situation they'd be dealing with at this point for now it's a zinc 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 away with the. meteorite that that hit and decimated two thousand square kilometers of forest in siberia and then there's that at least four major heads 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 in our to moscow r.t. international correspondent lindsey france thank you so much for weighing in on this topic. you know when it comes to meteors astronomy and anything to do with space really for many people the first thing that comes to mind is u.f.o.'s and even aliens part of that could be caused by a sense of wonder and curiosity when it comes to things that we simply don't have

only answers to another part of very large part could actually be caused by hollywood's depictions of u.f.o.'s and extraterrestrial life whatever the case some people have even depicted their lives dedicated their lives to setting us follow including scientists within why spy are to correspondent on a stasi a chuckin it takes a closer look at this business. we may or may not believe you expect me to believe . that a flying saucer came down and took your friend away but courtesy of hollywood us folks have been landing in the us for many years we've all seen them on the silver screen in your head. but at this point if the hundreds of u.f.o.'s. never feel quite safe enough people claim to have spotted them in real life more people in this country have seen us always and i think a prover 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 i 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 u.f.o. 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 those are the cases that we're really interested in this group says curiosity about your photos is largely ridiculed only because it's not a science that can be measured unproven in a lab after now studying the subject with fifty years i can tell you what do

u.f.o.'s 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 debunk most people immediately 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 any. nice spy visit locations collect 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 the jet abduction reports are a large part of the focus tends to be intergenerational if it's happening to you there's a very 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 at night and i don't mean crawling through a new place 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 cool very clinical experience it's very impersonal these you have fallen just see people tend to fear the unknown and that's why the subject is largely taboo can you imagine the president of the united states going on 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 good night 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. chaser than what they've actually found out are to correspondent on

a staff to check in and join me earlier from our new york studio. you know what they have found out is the longer they're looking at 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 these 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 sassy i mean people are calling in reporting different sightings are possible anonymous is 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 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 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. 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's 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 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 that we've interviewed people have a different job one person is a psychologist another 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 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's 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 seen basically what they're trying 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 case comments are published on their websites so it's something that the that keeps growing and with every year they have more and more cases to report on successfully as they say very interesting r t correspondent on a saucy a chair going to thanks for that report just three days after a mountain cabin burned down in seven oaks california the coroner's office has positively identified the body inside as that of x. l.a.p.d. officer christopher dorner while that mystery might have been solved so many other questions remain about this case was the cabin a fire an accident or was it on purpose how did everything really play out and what took with already so long to contact the fire department when it was on fire another important question is exactly how much money and police resources were spent on finding this man and that question is something authorities refuse to answer so what we do know is that some twenty law enforcement agencies were

involved that used helicopter swat vehicles protective details and infrared scanners but to talk more about this massive effort to find just one man i'm joined now by journalist max blumenthal hey there max let's start off by talking about the money aspect of this there's very little that we actually know in terms of hard numbers what do you know about about the type of money that was spent on this project. i know nothing about the money that was spent on the project i was looking at how the standoff ended and it appears that there are multiple involvement in addition to listening to police scanners from san bernardino county i was listening to from san bernardino county sheriff's i was listening to san bernardino county police and inland empire police in southern california and many of them were deployed to the scene so this was expensive and expensive operation clearly that involves multiple departments as well as the

federal government the f.b.i. was involved u.s. marshals were heavily involved now we like i said earlier we listed a bunch of things that we know that they were using anybody that was really watching the coverage of this could tell you the things that we know but why isn't the law enforcement making this type of money the resources this information public why are they making it available i'm not really interested right now and whether it's. in the. the resources or the the money that was used because we still haven't gotten admissions from the san bernardino county sheriff's department that they started the fire that or and chris dorner alive and that they intended to do so leaked audio transmissions that i was listening to clearly indicate that they planned to burn him alive or as they said. deploy the bird there's the body of transmissions of the police scanners also show that they carefully manage the fire to ensure that it was completely consumed the cabin he was in including the

basement and i just found a very c.n.n. report and i tweeted out the screenshot on my twitter feed which is just next to them involves. showing quote a quote from a u.s. marshal spokesman to c.n.n.'s brian todd that the suspect tried to escape from the back of the cabin and was pushed back inside that's the exact language pushed back inside could mean that they fired upon him magers to kill no attempt at negotiation so let's talk about it let's talk about that let's talk about the amount of force that was used it to get this man i wasn't too much just enough or too little. well prior to the standoff in big bear that l.a.p.d. opened fire out of them filled with women delivering the l.a. times. dorner it killed a cop and then he killed another couple big bear and i think this acting emotionally is not professionally and were hell bent on revenge and this is clearly

shown in not just the police scanner transmissions but they did open transmission that was broadcast on nine during the standoff in which two deputies were overheard reaming let's burn this effort burn the m.s.a. referring to the door to the suspect and that's what i wanted to do next let me play devil's advocate here for just a minute this man is not your average suspect first of all he was highly trained secondly he was gunning for police officers and their families and finally his manifesto very much how to do or die mentality to it do these reasons justify the amount of resources and force that was the us on this men. i'm not going to justify anything dorner did he wasn't a hero he was a killer but those who believe that he said he should be denied due process and that the this should this incident should be investigated the police

behavior should be investigated i consider them all sort of these villains villains of democracy. the police the sheriff's department from san bernardino county has persisted in its lie that it didn't start a fire can skew the cabin chris dorner is hiding it is also sources from the department of also lied to the los angeles times in play and there is a constant barrage of gunfire from inside the cabin when in fact the only gunshot reported on police scanners was a single shot after the burglars with which is probably gone or killing themselves so if they're comfortable in their behavior and they think they acted sessional the police why are they lying about it and why is the media doing a better job of investigating all of those are interesting points and what we do know also max is that both of the mayoral candidates that are looking to run for the san bernardino are pushing for an investigation and it looks like that there will be one as to why that that cabin actually burned down the techniques that were

used and more specifically the burners that were used to get that man out i know a lot of people are comparing that to waco but let's let's move let's let's talk about the police department's overall city budgets are tight right now obviously i mean the l.a.p.d. was pushing pennies just to get a couple of hundred police officers from not being laid off but despite these tight budgets it looks like more and more high tech tools are entering law enforcement can it can you talk about that i mean where is the money coming from for that. you don't own money from that is coming from the pentagon from the defense department and it's a program that authorizes the pentagon to give billions of dollars every year in surplus military gear to local police departments so we've seen even small town police departments being basically gifted or granted in fifty is thanks to use against the civilian population yesterday the elevated county sheriff's department held the press conference about the introduction of drones domestic surveillance drones over the sky and eyes of berkeley california so we're just seeing a step in

a steady graduation of military as they should of american policing. and what is this civil eisen symbolizes police that sees civilians not as neighbors but as all potential criminals and that's that's dangerous very interesting in the wake of the christopher dorner case such are locks blumenthal thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me well have you ever wonder to yourself if people who have ended up in history books or memorialized on statues knew that they were making history as they did it and in some cases like neil armstrong and martin luther king jr the answer is yes but in many other steamy international response after the event happen is what made it a historic moment like you know did you know that right now at this very moment you're making history while if you're using twitter that is it turns out that the library of congress is saving some one hundred seventy billion tweets in

a digital archive as part of history are to correspondent less wall tells us why you should be careful of 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 well the popularity of smartphones and i pads users can tweet pretty much anywhere at any time and 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 and 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 culture of the 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 do you search that how do you 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 to 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 people are worried about privacy pretty sure the n.s.a. and homeland security has already cope threw up of this stuff so perhaps the takeaway as think before you tweet because it's going to be stored right here at the library of congress and washington liz wahl r.t. . so are you worried yes well have you ever tweeted something that is so great it should have made history books or something so silly no one should ever lay eyes on it anthony weiner well more harshness of the resident dot net to the streets of the big apple to get your one hundred forty characters on this twitter revolution.

the library of congress announced that it's storing our tweet is this just another method of surveillance or is it 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 yeah 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 i've had to 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 this story it. would be great for generations they're 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 hard drive space and they just need a photo i mean those are really surprised they tried to facebook and they tried everything i mean they have the right. if there's doing this for your protection do you believe that you trust them to use that not as a way to surveil you or invade your.