I’m not familiar with this. Can you provide more info?
I, too, have seen an exploding meteor–it was during the Leonid shower in '99. IIRC, it was also multicolored before ‘detonation’–the trail was a bit of a rainbow.
Exapno: Well, it’s a little bit off the topic, but the first find of a google search comed up with http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_whoradio.html , which ends:
"It wasn’t until 1943—a few months after Tesla’s death— that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla’s radio patent number 645,576. The Court had a selfish reason for doing so. The Marconi Company was suing the United States Government for use of its patents in World War I. The Court simply avoided the action by restoring the priority of Tesla’s patent over Marconi. "
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Driving home late one night on I-15 (around Temecula in '96), I saw a bright green meteor streaking almost vertical to the ground. For what it’s worth it was to the east of Mt. Palomar. I mentioned this at work two days later and someone replied, he too, had seen the same thing (turned out he was on the same portion of the freeway as I was). No explosions though and no mention of the media over the next few days.
The only one I’ve seen explode was in East TN about two years ago. Color was a lighter shade of green. Sort of a high speed fireworks show.
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DRomm. Thanks. That’s quite a site.
I found a theory that’s even whackier than the Tesla one. Check out the last paragraph from this site.
When I first saw the drawing of the guy getting his backside blasted off, I figured it was a pun. As a mere earthling, I can’t read Slug’s mind, but I thought he was making the leap from Tungus to tuchus, a Yiddish word meaning buttocks. I may have misspelled that.
AskNott, I’m glad someone else thought that.
A crackpot article I read once, one that favors the idea that it was an exploding UFO, said that sores appeared on the local reindeer that resembled radiation sores that showed up on cattle after the Almagordo nuclear test. And so we now know the origin of–RUDOLPH!
I had Tungus once. The effect was that I couldn’t eat or drink much, or speak clearly. Fortunately, antibiotics cleared it up in a couple of days. 
DRomm, while I agree that popular culture is a good way to prepare the masses for the one day hoped for meeting of alien cultures, I think Star Trek et al is a better approach than alien abduction nonsense. One approach inspires thought about the situation and evaluating the situation on its own merits, the other inspires fear and dread and fosters distrust and hatred. Fiction is fine, as long as we’re all clear that it’s fiction. But bunk is bunk, and should be put down mercilessly.
And I, too, thought it was 13 kilometer, not 13 meter.
Not thirteen Kms, I think. There are, as far as I know, no asteroids of that size with an earth crossing orbit.
There was an asteroid that passed around 100,00ks of earth fairly recently. I think it was about 200m diameter, or thereabout.
Thing was, astronomers noticed it three days AFTER it had passed by earth.
-Oli
Yes, it was probably an exploding comet, although measurements of Amalthea suggest that even many asteroids are conglomerates of ice and rock-
but it could have been a Strangelet, or an OMG particle- some possible records of these strange entities have been put forward by seismologists…we won’t know until we catch one (or manufacture it perhaps)
Comets, meteors, UFOs, Tesla death rays… Bah! My favorite explanation (not that I believe it or anything) is the one given by the natives themselves. As explained on this site, they attributed the event to evil spirits known as Agdy sent by a powerful shaman to devastate the area. Way to fit into the local mythos!
Gandalf better watch his backside…
In an article in today’s ?USA Today telling about the odds of an asteroid hitting the earth, it states that “In 1908, an asteroid perhaps a mile wide exploded in Siberia.”
Is this a bit of an exageration or what?
My favorite fake explanation was in the SF book “Monday Begins on Saturday” by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky. This story involved a lot of fanciful research into among other things … the theory of reverse time. The theory they put forward was that a spaceship that happened to live in reverse time just happened upon Earth … and noticed a huge conflagration and so they went over to investigate, only to find out that THEY were the conflagration. Oops.
Getting back to reality … better 1908 than 1958 or 1968. Imagine an unexplained multi-megaton explosion over Russia during any time in the Cold War! Brrrrrrrrrr.
My favorite fictionsl treatment of this is in the anthology Sherlock Holmes in Orbit
SPOILERS!!
In the story entitled something like “The Russian Nobleman”, Holmes comes out of retirement and gets Watson to accompany his answer to a summons to the home of a Russian Nobleman in Siberia. Just in time, Holmes realizes it’s a trap, and gets himself and Watson out just before the Tunguska Meteorite hits. It turns out that the “Russian Nobleman” never existed – the message was a fraud, arranged by Professor Moriarty before his death at Reichenbach Falls to trap Holmes, in the event Moriarty failed in Switzerland. Moriarty was able to calculate the fall of the meteorite because he was an expert on the topic, having written “On the Dynamics of an Asteroid”.