SIGHTINGS


 
The Earth Came Within Six
Hours Of Obliteration
On August 10, 1998
Sunday People [London]
From Gerry Lovell <ed@farshore.force9.co.uk>
11-8-98

 
 
 
Note - This huge asteroid was only discovered 6 and 1/2 weeks before passing by the Earth. Only 6 and 1/2 weeks...
 
 
At midnight on Monday, August 10, this year the world came just SIX hours from being obliterated as a giant asteroid hurtled towards us at 50,000 miles per hour.
 
The Sunday People can today reveal that a mile-wide space rock missed us by just one million miles.
 
In cosmic terms it was a second away from being hit by a juggernaut.
 
If it hadn't veered in a slightly different direction it would have:
 
- KILLED a quarter of the population.
 
- DESTROYED all animals and crops after blotting out the sun.
 
- CREATED a tidal wave an astonishing 17 miles high - Concorde only reaches 10.5 miles.
 
- DEVASTATED just about everything for 2,000 miles around.
 
The asteroid - the speed of which was the equivalent of travelling from London to New York in 21 seconds - would have made the rest of the world appear like the aftermath of a global nuclear war.
 
Only people with access to underground nuclear bunkers would have had any chance of survival. The asteroid is the biggest in recorded history to have come so close to the Earth - a chilling echo of the Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster movie Armageddon in which Bruce Willis saves the world.
 
The cataclysmic near miss was only known to a select group of scientists. This is why the terrifying information has never been made public until now.
 
It only came to light through research by amateur astronomer and Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik.
 
He is calling on the Government to spend £9.5 million on a giant telescope which would track objects from space which are on a collision course with Earth.
 
Mr Opik, MP for Montgomeryshire, is also campaigning for a network of six telescopes around the world to monitor objects heading towards us.
 
He said: "Once every 100,000 years something big hits Earth and once every hundred years a 50-metre one does - causing an explosion 5,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
 
"We live in the roulette wheel of the cosmos - never knowing when a big one might hit us."
 
The asteroid was first spotted by astronomers in New Mexico on June 24.
 
They flashed a warning to observatories world-wide - including the one in Armagh, Northern Ireland, which tracks objects that might hit Earth.
 
It was the Irish astronomers who worked out that the asteroid would miss us by six hours.
 
Armagh astronomer Dr John Chambers said: "It would have gone straight through the ocean and hit the rock underneath, throwing up not just a gigantic tidal wave but a huge amount of dust."
 
But he added: "While we were safe from this one there could well be another on its way."
 
The next asteroid scientists know about is the ten-mile wide Toutatis - due to come within 13 hours of Earth on September 29, 2004.





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