At 7 am on June 30th, 1908 a fiery object entered the earth's atmosphere somewhere over western China and Mongolia and headed toward the Tunguska forest in the Siberian Taiga 2,200 miles east of Moscow. Hunters and fishermen saw an object in the sky that was brighter than the sun and moving at high speed. Travellers on the Trans-Siberian railway saw a fiery ball moving in the sky from south to north.
There followed an explosion that sent a fiery column up into the atmosphere, and people in the village of Vanovara saw a light on the horizon followed by a mushroom cloud. A series of thunderclaps followed that were heard over 500 miles (800 kilometres) away and a train driver in Kansk stopped his train thinking that one of his freight cars had exploded. The shock wave came next, and seismograph machines around the world registered a sizable tremor and an air blast that went twice around the globe. At Irkutsk (550 miles from the epicentre) the needle quivered for almost an hour.
In England, on July 3rd, the "Daily Express" carried reports of tennis being played at ten o'clock at night and of luminescent clouds seen over Europe and North Africa. For weeks the nights were as bright as day and the light was described as "pink" and "yellowish-green". People in London were able to take photographs and read books outdoors at midnight.
A letter to the editor was published which came from a golfer at Holcombe, Ingleby that said that it had been light enough for play on the links course at Dormby House Club, Brancaster, Norfolk during the night, and one night "I myself was aroused from sleep at 1:15am, and so strong was the light at this hour that I could read my book by it in my chamber quite comfortably." The letter continued, at 4:15am the whole sky was salmon pink and birds began the dawn chorus. Another report in the paper said that "the extraordinary running of night trains over the Grampian Hills without lights had taken place for the first time on record."
At first the lights were mistaken for the Aurora Borealis (the northern lights) but it soon became clear that this wasn't the case. Proper investigation however had to wait a while, namely for the end of the First World War, the loss of a Tsar and for the Russian Revolution.
The recently installed Bolsheviks set up "The Academy of Science" in Petrograd to investigate meteor falls on Russia, and in 1921 they commissioned an astronomer and meteorite expert, Leonid Kulik, to investigate the explosion of 1908, and he began by gathering press clippings, eye witness accounts and meteorology reports. The Irkutsk paper "Sibir" described it as "a most unusual phenomenon of nature" and it carried an account gathered from eye witnesses;
"In the village of Nizhne - Karelinsk in the north west high above the horizon, the peasants saw a body shining very brightly (too bright for the naked eye) with a bluish-white light. It moved vertically downwards for about ten minutes. The body was in the form of a "pipe" (i.e. cylindrica). The sky was cloudless except that low down on the horizon in the direction in which this glowing body was observed, a small dark cloud was noticed. It was hot and dry and when the shining body approached the ground it seemed to be pulverized and in its place a huge cloud of black smoke was formed and a loud crash, not like thunder, but as if from the fall of large stones, or from gunfire, was heard. All the building shook and at the same time, a forked tongue of flame broke through the cloud. The old women wept, everyone thought that the end of the world was approaching."
Nizhne - Karelinsk had been 200 miles (320 kilometres from the epicentre).
Kulik read reports that said things like "fiery heavenly body,” "a flame that cut the sky in two" and "a pillar of smoke," and reading such reports brought home the scale of the explosion. Had it happened at sea, the tidal waves would have rivalled those when Krakatoa had erupted and swept away 36,000 people. Had it struck just six hours later it would have wiped out St. Petersburg, six hours after that, New York, but thankfully it had struck one of the most remote regions on the planet, and while this would hamper the investigation, it meant that not one life had been lost.
His appetite well and truly wetted, and convinced that a meteorite held the key to the solution, Kulik set out on the first expedition to find the blast site, which can now be reached by helicopter, but at that time was a much more arduous journey. Backed by the Academy of Sciences he left Petrograd in 1927 on the Trans-Siberian railway and disembarked at a small station at Tayshet in March of that year. Using horse pulled sleds he and his team headed for the village of Dvorets on the river Angara, and then on to the tiny village of Vanovara, about 100 miles from the blast site. Vanovara was nothing more than a small trading post, and the local Mongol fur traders whose hunting territory extended up the Tunguska river could still clearly remember the explosion even after two decades.
During their brief stay Kulik enlisted the help of two local men to act as guides, Okhchen and Potapovich, whose brother had been deafened by the blast that also carried his tent away, and during their time with them they were able to glean further insight into the events of 1908 from the locals.
One man had been standing on his porch, and the blast had knocked him clean off it so hard that he had lost consciousness. His daughter and her friend came running back from the stream after hearing the explosion and found him lying on the ground. Another man was carrying out some repairs on the rear of his house when he felt a sudden hot blast which burned his ears so much that he ran inside the house with his hands clasped over them.
The landscape that stood between Vanovara and the blast site was extremely hostile, and any villages that used the river for transport and trading were built right on its banks so as not to extend very far into the forest. Even today when new cities such as Bratsk were built in the forest, and for strategic reasons the new railway across the Taiga, modern machinery struggled through the cold and the snow of winter, and the heat and the mud of summer. So into this terrain Kulik set off with his horses again, but found that they were struggling to negotiate the snow, so he bought some reindeer, loaded them up and set off yet again. Within two days he and his party were having to hack their way through dense forest with axes. Eventually they reached the quieter waters of the upper Tunguska and its junction with the river Chambe and the river Mekirta, and as Kulik stood on it's south bank, he caught his first sight of the damage that the blast had done, and what he had now waited for six years to see.
From where he stood there were a number of small hillocks profiled against the sky, and they had been stripped of trees. Kulik climbed to the top of a nearby ridge, which he would name Khladni Ridge, to get a better view of the area, but none of the team were prepared for the sight that greeted them. It was a sight that they would never forget, for as far as the eye could see (about 12 to 16 miles (20 to 25 kilometres) every tree without exception lay flat on the ground facing to the south east with almost regimental precision. Before the blast the forest had been very dense with no clearings but now it lay devastated, flattened to the ground. The new trees which had grown since the explosion were still only small and covered in snow, so even then, a full twenty years after the blast, the devastation was crystal clear for all to see.
While he was beholding the site before him, Kulik was struck by a thought, because all of the trees lay facing in the same direction, this could not be the centre of the blast, this was only the edge of the damaged area, so he knew he must press on to find the epicentre. However, his two guides refused to go any further so he was forced to return to Vanovara to find new ones, and while he was there they built wooden boats to cross the rivers which had been swelled by the spring thaw, and it was June before he once again reached Khladni Ridge.
They now followed the line of the trees north west, clambering over and under the fallen trunks until they came to a natural ampitheatre where they made camp. The next day Kulik climbed around the top of the "bowl" until he was sure what he had found. All of the fallen trees around them now pointed away from the bowl, so at last he knew that he had found the blast’s epicenter and he would call this "cauldron" as he referred to it, The Tunguska South Swamp, and he had travelled 37 miles (60 kilometres) from the edge of the damaged area, at Khladni Ridge, to find it.
All this time Kulik had felt that the blast and the crater he had now found had been caused by a meteorite impact, and he saw nothing here to change his mind. In the 1920s this was quite a brave supposition as only a few people in the world believed that a meteorite could reach the earth and cause such damage, and later Daniel Baringer would buy the 500 feet (150 metre) deep, 50,000 year old "Devil's Canyon" crater in the Arizona desert in order to try and prove that it had been made all those years ago by a meteorite. Indeed he would go on to prove that very thing. The "Devil's Canyon" meteorite had pulverised on impact and the fragments had been scattered, so Kulik now looked for any debris in the south swamp. He wrote;
"The area is strewn with dozens of peculiar flat holes varying from several metres to tens of metres across and several metres also in depth. The sides of these holes are usually steep, although flat sides are also encountered; their base is flat, mossy, marshy, and with occasional traces of a raised area in the centre."
Due to their depleted provisions there was no time for the team to investigate any further so they set off on the return journey living off the land until they got back to Vanovara. On the way back to Leningrad, Kulik vowed to lead another expedition and find the meteorite debris in the pits, but what he didn't know was that these pits were a common occurrence in the Taiga, apparently caused by ice rising to the top of the peat and melting.
On his return he told of the mass devastation that he had seen, and the Academy of Sciences agreed to finance a further expedition which was joined by the eminent cameraman Strukov from Sovkino, but this second trip seemed to be doomed from the start: Kulik's raft overturned in the rapids and he was almost swept away by the strong current, a moment that Strukov caught on film, as well as other tricky crossings full of slipping feet and near over balancing, the difficulty of working under mosquito veils and the sweeping panoramic views, Strukov seemed to catch every important moment on film, a film record we still have today. Several members of the team fell ill suffering from boils and vitamin deficiencies and were forced to return early. Equipment used to look for iron meteorite traces in the pits failed to provide convincing results, and Kulik returned empty handed, apart from Strukov's film footage of course, and it was this footage that would again convince the Academy Of Sciences to fund yet another expedition. On this third trip Kulik and his team dug trenches and pumped out the pits up to a depth of 118 feet in places, but these excavations would not provide a single trace of a meteorite despite the team staying there for the summer of 1929, through the winter, and into 1930.
The cold weather saw Krinov, the expeditions Deputy leader, lose a toe to frostbite on a trek back to collect supplies, and another man fell prey to appendicitis. The team were by now beginning to think that their excavation of the holes was futile as all other meteorite strikes had yielded the kind of fragments they were searching for, yet despite all of their efforts they had found nothing. One pit was found to contain a tree stump at its base, proving that it could not be a meteorite crater, and Krinov's photograph of this was kept hidden from Kulik, who was by this time a man obsessed in his hunt for a meteorite, and who would consider no other possibility.
He was also further frustrated by the fact that an aerial view of the area was beyond the logistical capabilities of the day, and yet again he returned to Petrograd empty handed, with no physical trace of the meteorite that he was so adamant had caused the blast.
Tragically the Soviet Union now fell under a "dark era" known as "The Great Terror" where literally everybody came under threat of denunciation, exile or execution as Stalin took out his vengeance on the Bolsheviks. They were removed along with senior members of the Red Army and thousands of old party members until, in 1937, Stalin had removed all opposition to himself and Kulik was once again safe to set out for the south swamp for the fourth time. This time however Kulik got his aerial survey and scientists were fully able to assess the vastness of the damaged area. They found that the devastation was spread over 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometres) yet they noticed something that Kulik could not have failed to do, but he clearly did not attach as much significance to it as he should have done. In the middle of the devastated forest were a large number of trees left standing, though they had been stripped of their branches by a down ward blast.
They also found that there had been two blast waves, first the explosion itself and then a ballistic wave, followed by fierce but short lived fires and some flash burning. What they did not find was any sign of an impact, that something had actually hit the ground, and this, combined with Kulik's lack of success at the scene, seemed to show that it could not have been a meteorite that had caused the explosion and the ensuing damage. A curious discovery was that the trees in the area seemed to show in their rings a period of accelerated growth shortly after 1908, in some cases up to twelve fold, while other trees in that part of Siberia did not.
For a second time the mystery had to take a back seat while Europe fought World War Two, and despite being over 50, Kulik volunteered to fight as Hitler's forces moved ever closer to Moscow, in fact reaching its suburbs. In the fighting Kulik was wounded, captured and died, as did many of those who had accompanied him on his trips to Tunguska, and the war ended with an event that was decidedly tragic, yet ironically would serve to kick start the Tunguska investigation and throw new light on what the scientists had found. That event was of course the dropping of the bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima. Scientists could now see a distinct comparison between the damage done at Hiroshima and the damage done at Tunguska all those years earlier.
American observers noticed that right at the blast’s very epicentre there had been relatively little damage done to the buildings of Hiroshima and some remained standing like the trees at the south swamp - upright yet hit by a downward blast - and also the trees that survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima showed a period of accelerated growth after 1945, and this was evident in the rings in their trunks which are much closer together than usual. In addition to that, both sets of trees also showed more damage on the side nearest to the blast while remaining relatively undamaged on the other. It was now that the eye witness accounts from Siberia took on a whole new meaning; "a flame that cut the sky in two" and "a pillar of smoke." Had these been the first ever recorded sightings of a nuclear explosion and its resulting mushroom cloud?
The Russian scientists already knew that the Tunguska cloud must have reached high up into the atmosphere because it was seen from so far away, but they did not expect to find that it had been up to 1,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Perhaps this is an exaggerated estimate, but only 18 square miles of Hiroshima were flattened compared to the 770 square miles at Tunguska. The similarities were too close to ignore but surely Tunguska could not have been a nuclear explosion because nobody in the world had nuclear technology in 1908, and in fact it was July 1945 before Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's atom bomb was exploded at Almagordo, New Mexico. The first wartime atomic bomb was that at Hiroshima, and there are surely no nuclear explosions in nature without man's intervention, but still the evidence for it kept on surfacing. The reindeer at Tunguska suffered burns, but were these the same as those suffered by the cattle at New Mexico when the dust clouds from the atomic tests hit them? When Russian, American and British H-Bombs were tested in the 1950s it was noticed that they produced extraordinary aurora lights on the opposite side of the earth and disturbances in the ionosphere.
In 1908 the British explorer, Ernest Shackleton, was in the Antarctic at the magnetic opposite of the earth to Siberia, and he was camped by the volcano Mount Erebus where both he and his team remember witnessing an extraordinary display of aurora lights though they did actually occur both before and after the explosion. Dr. Nikolai Vasilieyev of Tomsk University says that he knows of no phenomenon other than a nuclear blast that produces these effects at magnetic opposites.
Using the recent evidence obtained from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other test sites to make a statement that would seem to put Kulik's meteorite theory to bed once and for all, they were able to conclude that the explosion over the south swamp had been an "air burst," that is, whatever had caused the blast had exploded above the ground rather than on impact with it. They concluded that it had taken place at an altitude of 5 miles (8 kilometres) and armed with all these new findings the first expedition since World War Two set out in 1958, by which time it was possible to fly to Vanovara, but from there it was still necessary to use the precarious boats and reindeer for the journey’s final leg. By the time the team reached the site they found that nature had been trying to recover for 50 years and the new trees that Kulik had seen hidden beneath the snow were by now fifty years old, but despite this new growth the devastation could still be seen clearly.
The 1961 and 1963 expeditions were led by the geophysician, Dr. Alexsai Zolotov, who came to the conclusion that the explosion had been a nuclear one, but the post war trips yielded some samples that Kulik and his team had failed to find. These samples were tiny particles that were found both buried in the soil and embedded into the trees. They were packed and sent back to be analysed and they were found to be extra-terrestrial, being made up of magnitite and silicate, but the magnitite contained too much nickel to be from the earth. Also recovered by Zolotov and his team were other elements seldom found on earth such as ytterbium.
Expeditions to the scene have since been led by Dr. Vasilieyev, and at the site he has been investigating what he terms as "electromagnetic chaos," geophysical and biological effects that are not characteristic of meteorite falls. He says that;
"There have been the most violent genetic changes, not only in plants but in the small insect life. There are ants and other insects quite unlike anywhere else. Some of the trees and plants just stopped growing. Others have grown many times, many hundreds per cent faster than they were doing before 1908."
Vasilieyev also says that there have been no unusual levels of radiation found, while others say that radiation levels were high. However, these tests weren't done until 1960, and the now evident radiation could be due to Russian atomic tests done during the 1950s and 60s, but he does say that there was an electromagnetic storm of huge proportions. Former expedition leader Zolotov feels that there are only two possible explanations for an object exploding in mid air, and they are;
The main evidence for this theory was the eye witness accounts, but there is some confusion about these accounts themselves. There were two distinct groups of witnesses, and these two groups each say that they saw the fiery object flying on different trajectories. It was deduced from various accounts that the object had entered the earth's atmosphere and become visible somewhere over Lake Baykal and then travelled from south east to north west as it plunged towards the earth. It was during this descent that it was believed to have changed direction. Aerodynamics expert A. Y. Monoskov analysed many accounts about the flight path and the subsequent explosion, and came to the conclusion that it had performed a 375 mile arc and had slowed down, but more importantly it had altered course twice.
This evidence was picked up on by Ufologists who said that obviously it was no meteorite or comet but a craft of some kind, and they say that the samples found at the site are not consistent with meteorite falls and match no matter found on earth. Ufologist and investigative author on Roswell, Kevin Randle, asked a friend of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Dr. James Van Allen, about the traces of Caesium 137 found at the site, and Van Allen blamed them on Russian Atomic tests, he then asked him if a comet could slow down or alter course twice, Van Allen said that it couldn't but neither could a space craft in distress. However, it turned out that no eye witness had actually seen the object changing course despite over 700 giving their account.
The two groups of witnesses were where the confusion arose because those in the western area apparently saw the object on a different trajectory to those witnesses in the Baykal area, but this fact seems to have escaped people like Zolotov who insist that the craft must have vapourised and left behind only the tiny globules of magnetite and silicate.
The damage done to the forest around the epicentre did not spread out evenly in a circular shape when viewed from the air as it should have been with a normal explosion but was more elongated, as was the object described by some witnesses, i.e. cylindrical or pillar-like. Most importantly they say that it was moving far too slowly to be a celestial body, possibly as slowly as 1 kilometre per second which is no faster than some military aircraft, and they say that if it was a nuclear powered craft, all the other anomalies found in the south swamp would be explainable. The Ufologists have even come up with a reason for why the craft was here, they say that it must have been low on water supplies and was heading for the largest body of fresh water in the world, Lake Baykal.
There was clearly no shortage of theories, and in 1973 came the strangest to date. A. A. Jackson and M. P. Ryan of the Centre for Relative Theory at the University of Texas said that the earth must have been hit by a black hole, and they even formulated mathematical calculations to show that the black hole would have passed straight through the earth and come out on the other side somewhere in the Atlantic between Iceland and Newfoundland. Despite scouring Icelandic and Newfoundland newspapers and ship's logs, no reports of any unusual activity could be found, but could a black hole have actually caused what is now known to have been an air burst? If it couldn't, then could the anti matter theory of Clyde Cowan and Hall Crannell of the Catholic University at Washington, and C. R. Atluri and W. F. Libby of the University of California explain it instead?
Anti matter is the exact opposite of matter, and destroys matter whenever they come into contact with one another. It is believed that anti matter may exist out in the depths of the universe, and again calculus came to the rescue of a struggling theory. There was one however, that not even advanced mathematics could rescue, and that was one printed in the previously respectable Leningrad newspaper "Svesda" in March 1964, and the article was written by Genrich Altov and Valentina Sureleva, who said that the eruption of Krakatoa had sent a blast of radio waves shooting far out into space, and that some intelligent beings in the constellation of Cygnus had received these radio waves and had mistaken them for an attempt at communication. They then sent back a message of their own in the form of a laser signal that was far too strong and damaged the earth, but not surprisingly this doesn't explain the fiery object, the air burst, or the samples found at the site.
Dr. Vasilieyev and Professor Dolgov (who examined the samples taken by Vasilieyev) say that the evidence points most likely to the blast being caused by a comet as they have found large amounts of Hydrogen, a typical cosmic element, and large amounts of carbon dioxide which seems to make up the heads of comets in its frozen state, and they have also found methane which is yet another component of comets.
Comets are one of the most fascinating of all celestial bodies and are believed to come from a huge cloud of comets around the edge of the solar system called the Oort cloud. They are a mixture of ice and dust which fly around the solar system on an elliptical orbit and for most of their journey they are invisible to us until they get near to the sun which begins to melt them. This melting creates a cloud of gas and dust around them, and this cloud is then blown by solar winds into a long tail which always points away from the sun even if the comet is travelling in that direction.
The solid part in the comet's centre is called the nucleus and this is usually under 6 miles (10 kilometres) across. The cloud is called the head, or the coma, and this can be up to 600,000 miles (1,000,000 kilometres) across, but the tail can be hundreds of millions of miles long. The dust that the comets leave behind as they melt near the sun is the cause of meteor showers as the earth passes through this dust which gets burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. The smaller particles are burned up and are known as meteors and those that don't burn up completely and make it through to earth's surface are called meteorites.
The first question is could a comet or meteorite enter the earth's atmosphere and plummet toward the earth without being noticed until just before it exploded? Secondly could the explosion create the effects of a nuclear blast like those at Tunguska?
We need only look at the battered surface of our own moon to see that there are many collisions in space, so obviously a comet could come into contact with a planet and it is widely believed that it is just such an impact that may have brought about the downfall of the dinosaurs 60 million years ago, but our atmosphere protects us from many potential catastrophic collisions by burning up or deflecting possible "invaders," whereas the moon, which has little or no atmosphere, is littered with many craters where it has been hit by meteorites in the past. It is possible that the asteroid belt, found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is the remains of a planet that was destroyed by an impact deep in history that broke it apart.
Hughes and Brown say that, contrary to popular belief, nuclear effects can be reproduced naturally as it happens regularly during solar flares. They say that a comet could explode when it meets a mass of air equal to its own mass, and this explosion would be similar to a solar flare producing radio activity. The clouds of dust created during the explosion would spread out around the earth and reflect the sun's light thus creating the bright nights experienced around the world in 1908.
This theory is the favourite of most scientists, but could a comet with a coma of many thousands of miles across have approached, however close to the sun's glare, undetected? The fact is that it could do if it approached in the day sky on the sunward side of the earth. Two British scientists, John Brown of Glasgow University and David Hughes of Sheffield University, say that if a comet approached the earth from low in the dawn sky it would be very difficult to detect, and they quote the example of the comet "Mrkos" which had rounded the earth and was heading away from us before it was eventually spotted.
Before the advent of radio astronomy we were unaware that there were streams of undiscovered meteors because they were hidden in the daytime sky. The best example of such a meteor stream is the one first discovered by Lowell in 1947, the ß Taurids, (Beta Taurids) and what is interesting about the ß Taurids is that the earth passes through them every year on June 30th (the day of the Tunguska explosion) and in 1908, shortly after the Tunguska explosion, Japan experienced an unusually high meteorite fall, so obviously some of the meteors in the ß Taurid stream had entered the earth's atmosphere. Surely then one of them must have been responsible for the blast at Tunguska. There are two things we can learn from this case, and they are that:
There followed an explosion that sent a fiery column up into the atmosphere, and people in the village of Vanovara saw a light on the horizon followed by a mushroom cloud. A series of thunderclaps followed that were heard over 500 miles (800 kilometres) away and a train driver in Kansk stopped his train thinking that one of his freight cars had exploded. The shock wave came next, and seismograph machines around the world registered a sizable tremor and an air blast that went twice around the globe. At Irkutsk (550 miles from the epicentre) the needle quivered for almost an hour.
In England, on July 3rd, the "Daily Express" carried reports of tennis being played at ten o'clock at night and of luminescent clouds seen over Europe and North Africa. For weeks the nights were as bright as day and the light was described as "pink" and "yellowish-green". People in London were able to take photographs and read books outdoors at midnight.
A letter to the editor was published which came from a golfer at Holcombe, Ingleby that said that it had been light enough for play on the links course at Dormby House Club, Brancaster, Norfolk during the night, and one night "I myself was aroused from sleep at 1:15am, and so strong was the light at this hour that I could read my book by it in my chamber quite comfortably." The letter continued, at 4:15am the whole sky was salmon pink and birds began the dawn chorus. Another report in the paper said that "the extraordinary running of night trains over the Grampian Hills without lights had taken place for the first time on record."
At first the lights were mistaken for the Aurora Borealis (the northern lights) but it soon became clear that this wasn't the case. Proper investigation however had to wait a while, namely for the end of the First World War, the loss of a Tsar and for the Russian Revolution.
The recently installed Bolsheviks set up "The Academy of Science" in Petrograd to investigate meteor falls on Russia, and in 1921 they commissioned an astronomer and meteorite expert, Leonid Kulik, to investigate the explosion of 1908, and he began by gathering press clippings, eye witness accounts and meteorology reports. The Irkutsk paper "Sibir" described it as "a most unusual phenomenon of nature" and it carried an account gathered from eye witnesses;
"In the village of Nizhne - Karelinsk in the north west high above the horizon, the peasants saw a body shining very brightly (too bright for the naked eye) with a bluish-white light. It moved vertically downwards for about ten minutes. The body was in the form of a "pipe" (i.e. cylindrica). The sky was cloudless except that low down on the horizon in the direction in which this glowing body was observed, a small dark cloud was noticed. It was hot and dry and when the shining body approached the ground it seemed to be pulverized and in its place a huge cloud of black smoke was formed and a loud crash, not like thunder, but as if from the fall of large stones, or from gunfire, was heard. All the building shook and at the same time, a forked tongue of flame broke through the cloud. The old women wept, everyone thought that the end of the world was approaching."
Nizhne - Karelinsk had been 200 miles (320 kilometres from the epicentre).
Kulik read reports that said things like "fiery heavenly body,” "a flame that cut the sky in two" and "a pillar of smoke," and reading such reports brought home the scale of the explosion. Had it happened at sea, the tidal waves would have rivalled those when Krakatoa had erupted and swept away 36,000 people. Had it struck just six hours later it would have wiped out St. Petersburg, six hours after that, New York, but thankfully it had struck one of the most remote regions on the planet, and while this would hamper the investigation, it meant that not one life had been lost.
His appetite well and truly wetted, and convinced that a meteorite held the key to the solution, Kulik set out on the first expedition to find the blast site, which can now be reached by helicopter, but at that time was a much more arduous journey. Backed by the Academy of Sciences he left Petrograd in 1927 on the Trans-Siberian railway and disembarked at a small station at Tayshet in March of that year. Using horse pulled sleds he and his team headed for the village of Dvorets on the river Angara, and then on to the tiny village of Vanovara, about 100 miles from the blast site. Vanovara was nothing more than a small trading post, and the local Mongol fur traders whose hunting territory extended up the Tunguska river could still clearly remember the explosion even after two decades.
During their brief stay Kulik enlisted the help of two local men to act as guides, Okhchen and Potapovich, whose brother had been deafened by the blast that also carried his tent away, and during their time with them they were able to glean further insight into the events of 1908 from the locals.
One man had been standing on his porch, and the blast had knocked him clean off it so hard that he had lost consciousness. His daughter and her friend came running back from the stream after hearing the explosion and found him lying on the ground. Another man was carrying out some repairs on the rear of his house when he felt a sudden hot blast which burned his ears so much that he ran inside the house with his hands clasped over them.
The landscape that stood between Vanovara and the blast site was extremely hostile, and any villages that used the river for transport and trading were built right on its banks so as not to extend very far into the forest. Even today when new cities such as Bratsk were built in the forest, and for strategic reasons the new railway across the Taiga, modern machinery struggled through the cold and the snow of winter, and the heat and the mud of summer. So into this terrain Kulik set off with his horses again, but found that they were struggling to negotiate the snow, so he bought some reindeer, loaded them up and set off yet again. Within two days he and his party were having to hack their way through dense forest with axes. Eventually they reached the quieter waters of the upper Tunguska and its junction with the river Chambe and the river Mekirta, and as Kulik stood on it's south bank, he caught his first sight of the damage that the blast had done, and what he had now waited for six years to see.
From where he stood there were a number of small hillocks profiled against the sky, and they had been stripped of trees. Kulik climbed to the top of a nearby ridge, which he would name Khladni Ridge, to get a better view of the area, but none of the team were prepared for the sight that greeted them. It was a sight that they would never forget, for as far as the eye could see (about 12 to 16 miles (20 to 25 kilometres) every tree without exception lay flat on the ground facing to the south east with almost regimental precision. Before the blast the forest had been very dense with no clearings but now it lay devastated, flattened to the ground. The new trees which had grown since the explosion were still only small and covered in snow, so even then, a full twenty years after the blast, the devastation was crystal clear for all to see.
While he was beholding the site before him, Kulik was struck by a thought, because all of the trees lay facing in the same direction, this could not be the centre of the blast, this was only the edge of the damaged area, so he knew he must press on to find the epicentre. However, his two guides refused to go any further so he was forced to return to Vanovara to find new ones, and while he was there they built wooden boats to cross the rivers which had been swelled by the spring thaw, and it was June before he once again reached Khladni Ridge.
They now followed the line of the trees north west, clambering over and under the fallen trunks until they came to a natural ampitheatre where they made camp. The next day Kulik climbed around the top of the "bowl" until he was sure what he had found. All of the fallen trees around them now pointed away from the bowl, so at last he knew that he had found the blast’s epicenter and he would call this "cauldron" as he referred to it, The Tunguska South Swamp, and he had travelled 37 miles (60 kilometres) from the edge of the damaged area, at Khladni Ridge, to find it.
All this time Kulik had felt that the blast and the crater he had now found had been caused by a meteorite impact, and he saw nothing here to change his mind. In the 1920s this was quite a brave supposition as only a few people in the world believed that a meteorite could reach the earth and cause such damage, and later Daniel Baringer would buy the 500 feet (150 metre) deep, 50,000 year old "Devil's Canyon" crater in the Arizona desert in order to try and prove that it had been made all those years ago by a meteorite. Indeed he would go on to prove that very thing. The "Devil's Canyon" meteorite had pulverised on impact and the fragments had been scattered, so Kulik now looked for any debris in the south swamp. He wrote;
"The area is strewn with dozens of peculiar flat holes varying from several metres to tens of metres across and several metres also in depth. The sides of these holes are usually steep, although flat sides are also encountered; their base is flat, mossy, marshy, and with occasional traces of a raised area in the centre."
Due to their depleted provisions there was no time for the team to investigate any further so they set off on the return journey living off the land until they got back to Vanovara. On the way back to Leningrad, Kulik vowed to lead another expedition and find the meteorite debris in the pits, but what he didn't know was that these pits were a common occurrence in the Taiga, apparently caused by ice rising to the top of the peat and melting.
On his return he told of the mass devastation that he had seen, and the Academy of Sciences agreed to finance a further expedition which was joined by the eminent cameraman Strukov from Sovkino, but this second trip seemed to be doomed from the start: Kulik's raft overturned in the rapids and he was almost swept away by the strong current, a moment that Strukov caught on film, as well as other tricky crossings full of slipping feet and near over balancing, the difficulty of working under mosquito veils and the sweeping panoramic views, Strukov seemed to catch every important moment on film, a film record we still have today. Several members of the team fell ill suffering from boils and vitamin deficiencies and were forced to return early. Equipment used to look for iron meteorite traces in the pits failed to provide convincing results, and Kulik returned empty handed, apart from Strukov's film footage of course, and it was this footage that would again convince the Academy Of Sciences to fund yet another expedition. On this third trip Kulik and his team dug trenches and pumped out the pits up to a depth of 118 feet in places, but these excavations would not provide a single trace of a meteorite despite the team staying there for the summer of 1929, through the winter, and into 1930.
The cold weather saw Krinov, the expeditions Deputy leader, lose a toe to frostbite on a trek back to collect supplies, and another man fell prey to appendicitis. The team were by now beginning to think that their excavation of the holes was futile as all other meteorite strikes had yielded the kind of fragments they were searching for, yet despite all of their efforts they had found nothing. One pit was found to contain a tree stump at its base, proving that it could not be a meteorite crater, and Krinov's photograph of this was kept hidden from Kulik, who was by this time a man obsessed in his hunt for a meteorite, and who would consider no other possibility.
He was also further frustrated by the fact that an aerial view of the area was beyond the logistical capabilities of the day, and yet again he returned to Petrograd empty handed, with no physical trace of the meteorite that he was so adamant had caused the blast.
Tragically the Soviet Union now fell under a "dark era" known as "The Great Terror" where literally everybody came under threat of denunciation, exile or execution as Stalin took out his vengeance on the Bolsheviks. They were removed along with senior members of the Red Army and thousands of old party members until, in 1937, Stalin had removed all opposition to himself and Kulik was once again safe to set out for the south swamp for the fourth time. This time however Kulik got his aerial survey and scientists were fully able to assess the vastness of the damaged area. They found that the devastation was spread over 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometres) yet they noticed something that Kulik could not have failed to do, but he clearly did not attach as much significance to it as he should have done. In the middle of the devastated forest were a large number of trees left standing, though they had been stripped of their branches by a down ward blast.
They also found that there had been two blast waves, first the explosion itself and then a ballistic wave, followed by fierce but short lived fires and some flash burning. What they did not find was any sign of an impact, that something had actually hit the ground, and this, combined with Kulik's lack of success at the scene, seemed to show that it could not have been a meteorite that had caused the explosion and the ensuing damage. A curious discovery was that the trees in the area seemed to show in their rings a period of accelerated growth shortly after 1908, in some cases up to twelve fold, while other trees in that part of Siberia did not.
For a second time the mystery had to take a back seat while Europe fought World War Two, and despite being over 50, Kulik volunteered to fight as Hitler's forces moved ever closer to Moscow, in fact reaching its suburbs. In the fighting Kulik was wounded, captured and died, as did many of those who had accompanied him on his trips to Tunguska, and the war ended with an event that was decidedly tragic, yet ironically would serve to kick start the Tunguska investigation and throw new light on what the scientists had found. That event was of course the dropping of the bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima. Scientists could now see a distinct comparison between the damage done at Hiroshima and the damage done at Tunguska all those years earlier.
American observers noticed that right at the blast’s very epicentre there had been relatively little damage done to the buildings of Hiroshima and some remained standing like the trees at the south swamp - upright yet hit by a downward blast - and also the trees that survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima showed a period of accelerated growth after 1945, and this was evident in the rings in their trunks which are much closer together than usual. In addition to that, both sets of trees also showed more damage on the side nearest to the blast while remaining relatively undamaged on the other. It was now that the eye witness accounts from Siberia took on a whole new meaning; "a flame that cut the sky in two" and "a pillar of smoke." Had these been the first ever recorded sightings of a nuclear explosion and its resulting mushroom cloud?
The Russian scientists already knew that the Tunguska cloud must have reached high up into the atmosphere because it was seen from so far away, but they did not expect to find that it had been up to 1,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Perhaps this is an exaggerated estimate, but only 18 square miles of Hiroshima were flattened compared to the 770 square miles at Tunguska. The similarities were too close to ignore but surely Tunguska could not have been a nuclear explosion because nobody in the world had nuclear technology in 1908, and in fact it was July 1945 before Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's atom bomb was exploded at Almagordo, New Mexico. The first wartime atomic bomb was that at Hiroshima, and there are surely no nuclear explosions in nature without man's intervention, but still the evidence for it kept on surfacing. The reindeer at Tunguska suffered burns, but were these the same as those suffered by the cattle at New Mexico when the dust clouds from the atomic tests hit them? When Russian, American and British H-Bombs were tested in the 1950s it was noticed that they produced extraordinary aurora lights on the opposite side of the earth and disturbances in the ionosphere.
In 1908 the British explorer, Ernest Shackleton, was in the Antarctic at the magnetic opposite of the earth to Siberia, and he was camped by the volcano Mount Erebus where both he and his team remember witnessing an extraordinary display of aurora lights though they did actually occur both before and after the explosion. Dr. Nikolai Vasilieyev of Tomsk University says that he knows of no phenomenon other than a nuclear blast that produces these effects at magnetic opposites.
Using the recent evidence obtained from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other test sites to make a statement that would seem to put Kulik's meteorite theory to bed once and for all, they were able to conclude that the explosion over the south swamp had been an "air burst," that is, whatever had caused the blast had exploded above the ground rather than on impact with it. They concluded that it had taken place at an altitude of 5 miles (8 kilometres) and armed with all these new findings the first expedition since World War Two set out in 1958, by which time it was possible to fly to Vanovara, but from there it was still necessary to use the precarious boats and reindeer for the journey’s final leg. By the time the team reached the site they found that nature had been trying to recover for 50 years and the new trees that Kulik had seen hidden beneath the snow were by now fifty years old, but despite this new growth the devastation could still be seen clearly.
The 1961 and 1963 expeditions were led by the geophysician, Dr. Alexsai Zolotov, who came to the conclusion that the explosion had been a nuclear one, but the post war trips yielded some samples that Kulik and his team had failed to find. These samples were tiny particles that were found both buried in the soil and embedded into the trees. They were packed and sent back to be analysed and they were found to be extra-terrestrial, being made up of magnitite and silicate, but the magnitite contained too much nickel to be from the earth. Also recovered by Zolotov and his team were other elements seldom found on earth such as ytterbium.
Expeditions to the scene have since been led by Dr. Vasilieyev, and at the site he has been investigating what he terms as "electromagnetic chaos," geophysical and biological effects that are not characteristic of meteorite falls. He says that;
"There have been the most violent genetic changes, not only in plants but in the small insect life. There are ants and other insects quite unlike anywhere else. Some of the trees and plants just stopped growing. Others have grown many times, many hundreds per cent faster than they were doing before 1908."
Vasilieyev also says that there have been no unusual levels of radiation found, while others say that radiation levels were high. However, these tests weren't done until 1960, and the now evident radiation could be due to Russian atomic tests done during the 1950s and 60s, but he does say that there was an electromagnetic storm of huge proportions. Former expedition leader Zolotov feels that there are only two possible explanations for an object exploding in mid air, and they are;
- because of energy from within the object itself.
- from natural energy caused by its movement.
The main evidence for this theory was the eye witness accounts, but there is some confusion about these accounts themselves. There were two distinct groups of witnesses, and these two groups each say that they saw the fiery object flying on different trajectories. It was deduced from various accounts that the object had entered the earth's atmosphere and become visible somewhere over Lake Baykal and then travelled from south east to north west as it plunged towards the earth. It was during this descent that it was believed to have changed direction. Aerodynamics expert A. Y. Monoskov analysed many accounts about the flight path and the subsequent explosion, and came to the conclusion that it had performed a 375 mile arc and had slowed down, but more importantly it had altered course twice.
This evidence was picked up on by Ufologists who said that obviously it was no meteorite or comet but a craft of some kind, and they say that the samples found at the site are not consistent with meteorite falls and match no matter found on earth. Ufologist and investigative author on Roswell, Kevin Randle, asked a friend of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Dr. James Van Allen, about the traces of Caesium 137 found at the site, and Van Allen blamed them on Russian Atomic tests, he then asked him if a comet could slow down or alter course twice, Van Allen said that it couldn't but neither could a space craft in distress. However, it turned out that no eye witness had actually seen the object changing course despite over 700 giving their account.
The two groups of witnesses were where the confusion arose because those in the western area apparently saw the object on a different trajectory to those witnesses in the Baykal area, but this fact seems to have escaped people like Zolotov who insist that the craft must have vapourised and left behind only the tiny globules of magnetite and silicate.
The damage done to the forest around the epicentre did not spread out evenly in a circular shape when viewed from the air as it should have been with a normal explosion but was more elongated, as was the object described by some witnesses, i.e. cylindrical or pillar-like. Most importantly they say that it was moving far too slowly to be a celestial body, possibly as slowly as 1 kilometre per second which is no faster than some military aircraft, and they say that if it was a nuclear powered craft, all the other anomalies found in the south swamp would be explainable. The Ufologists have even come up with a reason for why the craft was here, they say that it must have been low on water supplies and was heading for the largest body of fresh water in the world, Lake Baykal.
There was clearly no shortage of theories, and in 1973 came the strangest to date. A. A. Jackson and M. P. Ryan of the Centre for Relative Theory at the University of Texas said that the earth must have been hit by a black hole, and they even formulated mathematical calculations to show that the black hole would have passed straight through the earth and come out on the other side somewhere in the Atlantic between Iceland and Newfoundland. Despite scouring Icelandic and Newfoundland newspapers and ship's logs, no reports of any unusual activity could be found, but could a black hole have actually caused what is now known to have been an air burst? If it couldn't, then could the anti matter theory of Clyde Cowan and Hall Crannell of the Catholic University at Washington, and C. R. Atluri and W. F. Libby of the University of California explain it instead?
Anti matter is the exact opposite of matter, and destroys matter whenever they come into contact with one another. It is believed that anti matter may exist out in the depths of the universe, and again calculus came to the rescue of a struggling theory. There was one however, that not even advanced mathematics could rescue, and that was one printed in the previously respectable Leningrad newspaper "Svesda" in March 1964, and the article was written by Genrich Altov and Valentina Sureleva, who said that the eruption of Krakatoa had sent a blast of radio waves shooting far out into space, and that some intelligent beings in the constellation of Cygnus had received these radio waves and had mistaken them for an attempt at communication. They then sent back a message of their own in the form of a laser signal that was far too strong and damaged the earth, but not surprisingly this doesn't explain the fiery object, the air burst, or the samples found at the site.
Dr. Vasilieyev and Professor Dolgov (who examined the samples taken by Vasilieyev) say that the evidence points most likely to the blast being caused by a comet as they have found large amounts of Hydrogen, a typical cosmic element, and large amounts of carbon dioxide which seems to make up the heads of comets in its frozen state, and they have also found methane which is yet another component of comets.
Comets are one of the most fascinating of all celestial bodies and are believed to come from a huge cloud of comets around the edge of the solar system called the Oort cloud. They are a mixture of ice and dust which fly around the solar system on an elliptical orbit and for most of their journey they are invisible to us until they get near to the sun which begins to melt them. This melting creates a cloud of gas and dust around them, and this cloud is then blown by solar winds into a long tail which always points away from the sun even if the comet is travelling in that direction.
The solid part in the comet's centre is called the nucleus and this is usually under 6 miles (10 kilometres) across. The cloud is called the head, or the coma, and this can be up to 600,000 miles (1,000,000 kilometres) across, but the tail can be hundreds of millions of miles long. The dust that the comets leave behind as they melt near the sun is the cause of meteor showers as the earth passes through this dust which gets burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. The smaller particles are burned up and are known as meteors and those that don't burn up completely and make it through to earth's surface are called meteorites.
The first question is could a comet or meteorite enter the earth's atmosphere and plummet toward the earth without being noticed until just before it exploded? Secondly could the explosion create the effects of a nuclear blast like those at Tunguska?
We need only look at the battered surface of our own moon to see that there are many collisions in space, so obviously a comet could come into contact with a planet and it is widely believed that it is just such an impact that may have brought about the downfall of the dinosaurs 60 million years ago, but our atmosphere protects us from many potential catastrophic collisions by burning up or deflecting possible "invaders," whereas the moon, which has little or no atmosphere, is littered with many craters where it has been hit by meteorites in the past. It is possible that the asteroid belt, found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is the remains of a planet that was destroyed by an impact deep in history that broke it apart.
Hughes and Brown say that, contrary to popular belief, nuclear effects can be reproduced naturally as it happens regularly during solar flares. They say that a comet could explode when it meets a mass of air equal to its own mass, and this explosion would be similar to a solar flare producing radio activity. The clouds of dust created during the explosion would spread out around the earth and reflect the sun's light thus creating the bright nights experienced around the world in 1908.
This theory is the favourite of most scientists, but could a comet with a coma of many thousands of miles across have approached, however close to the sun's glare, undetected? The fact is that it could do if it approached in the day sky on the sunward side of the earth. Two British scientists, John Brown of Glasgow University and David Hughes of Sheffield University, say that if a comet approached the earth from low in the dawn sky it would be very difficult to detect, and they quote the example of the comet "Mrkos" which had rounded the earth and was heading away from us before it was eventually spotted.
Before the advent of radio astronomy we were unaware that there were streams of undiscovered meteors because they were hidden in the daytime sky. The best example of such a meteor stream is the one first discovered by Lowell in 1947, the ß Taurids, (Beta Taurids) and what is interesting about the ß Taurids is that the earth passes through them every year on June 30th (the day of the Tunguska explosion) and in 1908, shortly after the Tunguska explosion, Japan experienced an unusually high meteorite fall, so obviously some of the meteors in the ß Taurid stream had entered the earth's atmosphere. Surely then one of them must have been responsible for the blast at Tunguska. There are two things we can learn from this case, and they are that:
- Comets and meteors may have a much closer link with one another than we previously thought.
- That this catastrophe could happen on any June 30th.
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