Predictions

The following was posted to the Internet by Charles Chandler on 2013-01-15, a month before the Chelyabinsk Event, which was the first time that twin smoke trails were observed:

A meteor coming in at an angle will start spinning, due to the pressure gradient in the air. (The air underneath is higher in pressure than the air overhead.) This sounds outlandish, but for a meteor 1 km across, we should consider that in the first km above the ground, the air pressure goes from about 1000 mb down to about 850 mb, so the air under the meteor is 15% more dense than the air above it. Hence there will be more friction on the bottom than on the top, and this will cause the meteor to "roll" across the air. Moving at 70 km/s would develop an extremely fast spin. And what do we know about charged objects that are spinning rapidly? They generate magnetic fields. So just as the Earth's magnetic field deflects charged particles toward the poles, the meteor's far more powerful magnetic field might be deflecting charged particles towards its axis of rotation (parallel to the ground, and perpendicular to the direction of travel). Hence there might indeed be an electric current flowing through the meteor's center. But it isn't megalightning between the meteor and the ground. Rather, it's a self-induced current due to its extremely rapid rotation.