Cando event
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The Cando event was an explosion that occurred in the village of Cando, Spain, in the morning of January 18, 1994. There were no casualties in this incident, which has been described as being like a small Tunguska event.
Witnesses claim to have seen a fireball in the sky lasting for almost one minute. A possible explosion site was established when a local resident called the University of Santiago de Compostela to report an unknown gouge in a hillside close to the village. Up to 200 m³ of terrain was missing and trees were found displaced 100 m down the hill.
Opinions are divided about the causes of the explosion. Zdeněk Ceplecha of the Ondřejov Observatory in the Czech Republic explains the incident might have been a blast of subterranean gases which, removing the topsoil in a sudden explosion, vented into the air. The convective action of such a rising plume would create an electric charge separation sufficient to ignite the gases, accounting for the fireball-like observations. The same explanation has been recently circulating about the Tunguska event, against the old meteor theory. See New Scientist, 7 September 2002, p. 14 [1] [2]. Local residents, however, claim it was a meteor, as an object "the size of a full moon" was seen in the skies of the Spanish region of Galicia. Not surprisingly, the mystery became fertile ground for conspiracy theories that point to military or "alien activities".
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- The Very Strange Galician Meteor Mystery Article by Henry Gee in "news @ nature", March 30, 1998
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