A peculiar phenomenon left people living in Samara scratching their heads after a bright flash of unclear origin briefly illuminated various districts of the Russian city, followed by a loud clap which sounded like an explosion.
The video quickly sparked a heated discussion on Russian social media network Vkontakte, with netizens arguing whether the flash was a product of some kind of object exploding in atmosphere or merely a lightning.
"Oh Lord, it’s just a lightning, and yes, it’s big and loud! Don’t blow this out of proportion", user Galina Galina wrote.
"What a bunch of dumb **** our people are, they saw this year’s first thunderstorm and can’t figure out what it is", echoed Yoshkin Kot.
"This wasn’t a thunderstorm, half of the region heard it", Alexei Kazakov disagreed.
"When a thunderstorm strikes, it does not cause windows in the whole city to tremble. A meteor entered the upper layers of the atmosphere, started burning up – then the flash occurred, and maybe a small shard of what caused this clap fell down somewhere near the city", Gosha Tsoy speculated.
Evgeny Baransky, head of a local amateur astronomer club, also told media that based on the available data, the flash was likely caused a meteor.