Now that the angle of a meteor is being included in calculations for effect, how about where the angle is side-on. Such a meteor might skip off the Earth's atmosphere, never landing at all. It is still a "meteor" because it did enter the atmosphere enough to heat up and be seen.
More to the point, heard. Tunguska is being implicated. I'd first read about this one when I was about eight. That aerial explosion famously didn't drop debris. They figure the core asteroid might have held together if it was iron, in which case the blast was a shock wave.
They do admit that the damage on the ground should have been elliptical, where Tunguska was circular. I'd say they need to go back to the drawing board. My theory since, I dunno, age ten was that the meteor was a comet with an icy core. Pretty sure that's most theories that don't involve gateways from the overcrowded Sumerian underworld.
Which is not to say that elliptic shock didn't occur in other times and places in history.
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