explosions from the sky if parts of russia are shaken after a meteorite slams into the earth will report on today's events and ask what would happen if a meteor headed our way 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 leaves to talk about u.f.o.'s so is there life out in space r.t. goes inside the business that investigates and identified flying objects and we live in a world of updates and tweets but did you know that all of your tweets are being archived by the library of congress who ask why just ahead. it's friday feb fifteenth eight 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

chimney all bit. through over nine hundred people were injured and some three thousand buildings were also damaged from the tremendous shock wave this ten ton behemoth set off upon impact now to give you an idea of the region is a mellowness city located about a thousand miles east of moscow and has some one point one million residents the meteor headed around nine twenty am local time for more r t international correspondent lindsey france joined me earlier i started off by asking her what the latest news is 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 it was media right 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 know 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 saw his 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'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 it 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's 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 you 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 record of 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 are 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 that has to do with space really for many people the first thing that comes to mind is u.f.o.'s and 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 all the answers to another part of very large part could actually be caused by hollywood's depictions of u.f.o.'s an extraterrestrial life whatever the case some people have even dedicated their lives to studying u.s.

policy including scientists with nice by our correspondent on a stasia charcot 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. but if it's going to be 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's 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 u.f.o.'s is largely ridiculed only because it's not a science that can be measured unproven in a lab after now studying the subject for 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 ls 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 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 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 phase and 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 are falling just see people tend to fear the unknown and that's why the subject do 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 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. chasers and what they found out honest off you joined me earlier today 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 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 sassy i mean people are calling in and reporting different sightings or 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 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 just and 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 that we've interviewed people have a different job one person is a psychologist another is 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 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 different local airports for example to see if there is any kind of indication that a specific craft was c. and 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 no 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 multitudes of part in 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 seed 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 listened 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 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 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 to to get this man i wasn't too much just enough or too little. well prior to this standoff big bear that l.a.p.d. opened fire on a van filled with women delivering the l.a. times so you know dorner had killed a cop and then he killed another couple big bear and i think this acting emotionally and not professionally and where help is on revenge in this is clearly shown in not just the police scanner transmissions but in an open transmission that was broadcast on channel nine during the standoff in which two deputies were overheard reaming let's burn this effort burn the m.s.a. referring to door to the suspect and that's what i wanted to do next let me play

devil's advocate here for a summit this man is not your average suspect now 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 the mentality to it do these reasons justify the amount of resources and force that was i used on this man. 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 least with behavior shouldn't be investigated i consider them all sort of these villains the villains of democracy. the police the sheriff's department from san bernardino county has persisted in its lie that it didn't start the fire can skew the cabin chris dorner was hiding it is also sources from the department of also lied to the

los angeles times in play and there was 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 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 know the 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 help. a press conference about the introduction of drones domestic surveillance drones over this guy eyes of berkeley california so we're just seeing a step in a steady graduation military station of american policing. and what is this symbol as it symbolizes police that sees millions not as neighbors but as all potential criminals and that's that's the injures very interesting in the wake

of the christopher dorner case such an alexis blumenthal thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me have you ever wonder to yourself if the people who have ended up in history books are memorialize with statues knew what they are that they were making history as they made it in some cases like neil armstrong and martin luther king jr the answer is yes but in many others the international response after the event happened is what made that moment historic like you did you know that right now at this very moment you're making history if you are on twitter that is 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 liz wahl tells us why you should be careful what you tweet because it could end up 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. 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 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 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 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. i'm pretty sure the n.s.a. and homeland security has already grew up with that stuff so perhaps the takeaway is think before you tweet us because it's going to be stored right here at the library of congress in washington liz wall r.t. so are you worried the ants have any of your tweets been so great that they should be in the history books or so silly that you think that none of no one should ever lay your eyes on them anthony weiner well laura think lori harshness of the resident dot net hit 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 during our tweets 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 yet surprised by the wind at their court every day 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 and i think showing our tweets are kind of low on the priority but it's still a point that they should stop and yeah it's just another way that they can surveil us right yes also i think how would you feel about your government storing all the tweets that scares me the so is that because i mean like you could tweak things i mean i've had to after about three years now and i kind of member watch it back if they can find out and just kind of see what it was that's quite scary yet not that's why our government doing that now yeah isn't that crazy i don't think that's

fair it's not fact 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 a story. every great four generations today all the regional 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 the latest news a photo i mean doesn't really surprise them in the least like your facebook and they track everything you do online i mean they have the right so next and long as the night in between was probably this is 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 they're i mean well more can they 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 the private stuff to use influence with and 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 things are going to get worse because the more high risk the.