Tom Findlay has just had a book published, A Beginner's View of our Electric Universe, so he was directly asked a couple of pertinent questions by one of the correspondents on the Eric Aitchison email thread (see, it ain't all chronology and other subjects crop up). On the subject of the Russian Meteor he said its entry into the atmosphere involved a 17 second passage at around 40,000kph during which it is claimed the rock was heated by air friction alone to such a degree that it melted and disintegrated with a force greater than 30 Hiroshima bombs.
You will find this sort of reply by the authorities anywhere you care to look and therefore it would be interesting to know how electricity might change that consensus view. Findlay questions the mainstream scenario and says the reason why the high altitude detonation was so powerful was that it was electrified in nature and occurred in the way it did because a tremendous charge difference was built up between the meteor itself and the charge level within our upper atmosphere. The event was fundamentally a capacitive, over stress effect, when the body of the meteor was electrically shattered by what could be described as 'internal lightning' – taking place within the structure of the space rock itself. The same thing happened with the Tunguska object in 1908, he enthuses.
Well, that is definitely a different take from mainstream. Findlay continues by saying the term shock heating cannot stand alone – there are other parameters to bear in mind. A rock the size of the Russian meteor could never have been destuctively heated throughout its body in a mere 17 seconds if air friction was the only force in play. You can take any fragment of a non-metallic meteorite and you'll see a bllackened surface of possibly one millimetre in thickness. The inside will be as in the original unaffected state, indicating he says, an appreciable transfer of heat. Is this right?
He adds that there was an instantaneous release of radiation that was felt as a searing heat by observers on the ground in Chelyabinsk. Is it possible, therefore, that earthquakes in the Bronze Ages were instigated not by blast but by lightning produced by a bolide exciting the Earth itself, and leading to a rash or storm of tectonic events, especially at weak spots such as plate boundaries or major faults. Is Claude Schaeffer's earthquake model in line with mainstream or with EU thinking?