Another weird news item already this morning, a bit which should have been in the news-media cycle before now — apparently last week there was this humongous explosion over the Sverdlovsk region of Russia’s Ural Mountains, and so far, no explanation for it.

Via BusinessInsider this morning:

Scientists and emergency services are hunting for the cause of an incredible blast that lit up the sky over Russia’s Urals last week.
Dashcam footage has emerged on YouTube of what is being dubbed “Chelyabinsk #2? in reference to the meteor that exploded over the southern Ural region in February last year.

An oddity amongst oddballs.

(Illustration: Tessa Hunt-Woodland‘s ‘Solar Flare,’ found here).

The event supposedly took place last Friday in vast Russia’s east, captured on video (pix at the above link) and although it appears exciting enough, no one yet has identified the source.
From the Moscow Times also this morning:

While a physicist attributed the flash to an exceptionally bright meteorite, the Emergency Situations Ministry blamed it on a local military base disposing of explosives, regional news site E1.ru reported Tuesday.
The army later denied having anything to do with it.
The fireball, which burst in the region’s nighttime sky on Friday evening, was captured on video by several witnesses who have since posted their footage online.
One of the videos shows an orange glare appearing above a highway, quickly forming a huge fireball before shrinking and disappearing — all within a few seconds.
Another video shows a burst of orange light in the sky above the countryside, eliminating the surrounding fields and a tree grove and then retreating.
“Wow, what even was that?” a boy can be heard saying in the video.
He and his friends also expressed their astonishment by using expletives.

Although there been no official reason for the big flash in the sky, there’s a nefarious Putin angle, too, maybe part of a satellite-killer spacecraft Russia has been operating in space since last May. That item made the news-media rounds last week.
Or maybe a rocket launch: ‘One other explanation put forward is that a rocket launch caused the flash, with the area lying on the flight path of launches from Plesetsk cosmodrome. However, according to the Russian Space Agency, the most recent launch from the facility took place on October 29.‘

Meteorites, military denotation of explosions or whatnot, another mystery until it’s not…
And the location is somewhat near the region where that Chelyabinsk meteor exploded over the Southern Urals nearly two years ago, so there’s that…