The Vitim event or Bodaybo event is believed to be an impact by a bolide or comet nucleus in the Vitim River basin. It occurred near the town of Bodaybo in the Mamsko-Chuisky district of Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia, Russia on September 25, 2002 at approximately 10:00 p.m. (local time, UTC/GMT +9 hours: ISO 8601 format 2002-09-25T13:00Z). The event was also detected by a US military missile-defense satellite.
Some attempts were made to define the magnitude of the explosion. U.S. military analysts calculated it was between 0.2–0.5 kilotons, while Russian physicist Andrey Olkhovatov estimates it at 4–5 kilotons.
Information about the event appeared in the mass media and among scientists after only a week. Initially no one was able to understand the magnitude of the explosion. A small expedition, sent by the Institute of Sun–Earth Physics (Irkutsk), tried to find a meteorite within about 10 km from Bodaybo town (people told them– "it has fallen beyond the nearest mountain!").
Some people suggest that this phenomenon is similar to the Tunguska event of 1908.
Read more about Vitim Event: Expeditions, Kosmopoisk Expedition
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“Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)