Thank you so much! I appreciate that!

Oh my, that's a lot of really stupid typos, thanks >_<

Now "atmosphere" has a new typo.
Oh and one I missed earlier:
science fiction [nonsense]

And one more thing I forgot because it's not exactly a typo: Space rocks are "meteoroids" in space, "meteors" while they're entering atmo, and "meteorites" after they've hit the ground. So the news anchor should be saying "meteor" here (assuming he himself has done his homework).

Such a claim wouldn't get past certain folks in certain corners of the internet that are heavily discredited, like 4Chan, but for most people the scale of such things is not well comprehended.

It's certain though that some onlookers will come by, and the story will have to develop some new mutations to survive nosy people, and not just the people hiding alien lifeforms on their couch. I'd expect claims of radiation, aftereffects and so on, real concerns for sure, but something the present idiots probably doesn't believe in.

Depending on the year, it's possible the military would have had some sort of technology in place, since there have been near misses with interstellar objects, of which the referenced event is one, and I have found via sources such as InfoWars (don't even start) an incident dating back to 2013 of allegations the Russians may have used their air defense systems to intercept a meteorite, though the Russians denied the claim publicly. With enough ordnance, you can perhaps actually do something to alter an incoming object, but the size and mass of such objects makes it difficult to do so. Bunker busters or better type ordance would be required to effectively intercept an object like this, if I had to guess.

Scifi is great.

Chelyabinsk was estimated to be a 20M object with a 0.64 MT areal burst. The Barringer crater meteor in Arizona was estimated to be a 50M iron object with a 10 MT ground impact. Chixalub by comparison was a 10 KM object and impacted with 80 Million MT of energy. It would take a good lead time and a lot of energy to stop or alter some of these objects.

Well fortunately, unlike missiles, jets, or other manmade objections, rocks don't jink or fly in otherwise erratic patterns to evade. Sure, they have a lot of velocity behind them, but they're far more predictable than anything our defense systems are designed to stop. And hey, if one doesn't do it, the next ten or so might. Or, at the very least, reduce it's velocity, and reduce or transform the kinetic power of the impact.

We don't know the IC year though. It's entirely possible this is some capability that is entirely reasonable with the military tech on hand. Or they're lying through their teeth, or it's theoretically something they could do, but haven't because that's typically not something needed to be done, or they hadn't the equipment in place yet.

There are options here besides blanket skepticism and doubt that it could happen at all. It's just an engineering problem after all.

With enough of a lead time (read: years), an Earth-crossing asteroid could be deflected with a relatively small amount of energy, by landing some sort of nuclear or solar-electric engine on the object and applying force to gradually bend its course away from the intercept vector. Or if the asteroid has a spin, it could conceivably be dug into and weakened (or its spin accelerated) to the point where it breaks into multiple diverging objects, none of which are on the original course. Ofc for a rock (let alone a metallic object) measured in kilometers, a "relatively small amount" of energy is still huge.

I personally support developing intercept technology of the install-an-engine variety, because I think bigger than just deflecting a dangerous asteroid. Once the engine is in place, you could start thinking about steering it into an actual Earth orbit, ready to host a space mining operation. Landing equipment on an asteroid is definitely possible, the Japanese have already done it and even gotten samples back.

"Install an engine" wouldn't work on rubble-pile asteroids, it's like pushing a sand castle.
I expect that putting an asteroid into Earth orbit would meet immense political resistance; putting it in orbit around the Moon or at L4 or L5 seems more likely.