Tunguska


It's hard to believe it's been 103 years since the Tunguska event. My grandparents lived through that era. Oh hell, my parents and grandparents were so old that my grandparents were all born in the 1800s. No kidding!

What was the Tunguska event? Something that puzzled scientists for a century and that has intrigued me since I was a child and first heard of it.

In 1908, was a flash event in Siberia in which forests were flattened completely and those 40 miles away from the event were thrown from their chairs and felt the fire of it. Eight hundred square miles were flattened.

Here's a witness's account:
Suddenly in the north sky… the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire… At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing. The earth trembled.

The massive explosion packed a wallop. The resulting seismic shockwave registered with sensitive barometers as far away as England. Dense clouds formed over the region at high altitudes which reflected sunlight from beyond the horizon. Night skies glowed, and reports came in that people who lived as far away as Asia could read newspapers outdoors as late as midnight. Locally, hundreds of reindeer, the livelihood of local herders, were killed, but there was no direct evidence that any person perished in the blast.

There have been amazing theories about Tunguska including the use of one of Tesla's mega-weapon inventions, an atomic bomb introduced by aliens, and the most popularly accepted one--an asteroid. It was nearly 20 years before scientists were allowed into the remote area to study the devastation. Moisture/ice debris from the comet's blast created strangely bright skies all the way to England where it seemed to glow strangely. The blast was heard 1000 miles away.

It's hard to comprehend that such an event occurred on the earth while man was walking about, but I suppose we can all be relieved it happened in Siberia of all places. Had it been the ocean or a major populated area, the earth and its population would be devastated.

Comments

  1. This is an event that I have always found extremely fascinating.

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  2. Yes indeed it is an intriguing case. There is also something else that I found to be extremely intriguing, human spontaneous combustion. I don't know if you ever looked at the documented cases.

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  3. Adrian--oh yes. It's intrigued me since I was a kid. I've done a post or two about it in the past, but you just put me in the mood for it again...

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  4. It is one of history's great mysteries. The asteroid theory is popular, but I just don't see how it could be an asteroid impact...you'd think there'd be more evidence of it. Other asteroid craters there isn't much question as to what it is..but there is with the Tunguska event. Unless maybe it was volatile asteroid and somehow exploded in the air over Tunguska instead of just impacting the surface. I've also heard that a comet might be a possible explanation...but I'm not sure if that is any more likely. If they were testing one of Tesla's weapon inventions...it appears it was a successful test...but why did they stop? That was decades before the atomic bomb. Even if they decided it was just to dangerous...you'd think some kind of document about it would have been declassified by now. I guess it could have been those mysterious aliens that seem to like to stay hidden...but I'm not sure what their purpose would have been in flattening a bunch of trees in Tunguska and then just disappearing. But how are you going to disprove it?!

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  5. Hey Jeff; Yeah, I love the conspiracy theories of weaponry, but it just doesn't fly with me. I think that it hit such a remote area considering all the world's surface is pretty freaking amazing. They proved one time by an experiment that if a mostly ice-made asteroid exploded above ground before striking, it would create that kind of atomized blast, but just how or if that can happen is yet to be proven. I would think even 100 years later, we should have some evidence there with our technology that could shed more light on it. The telling thing is the lit sky everywhere which says to me there was a helluva lot of moisture/ice in the air. Still, the romantic in me wants to blame it on my ultimate hero, Tesla. That guy was badass awesome! Here's another thought, if we were to design a weapon and want to test it, but don't want to ruin our world, would we take it into the past and test it out in a remote area on people who may never see the results or understand what happened? Hmm...

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  6. Even if we can't time travel...to bad there isn't a way to just zoom in on a spot and rewind time and watch it on a screen to just see what happened. Imagine all the things we could learn about...well..a lot of things!

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  7. This is an event that I have always found extremely fascinating....

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  8. Fascinating! I have actually never heard of this before.

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