At 7:14 A.M. on June 30, 1908 in what was then Podkamennaya near Russia’s Tunguska River, a comet exploded in nuclear fission blast. Or was it a sign of the End of Days? Or was it just a piece of a comet that entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded? Wait, no. It was a UFO crash. But still, it might’ve been a black hole passing through Earth itself…and simply shooting free of it before opening.
These are all hypotheses of The Tunguska Event of 1902, which was quite literally an earthquake in mid-air.
Some witnesses of the Tunguska Event have spoken of the event as if it were a religious experience, while others have thought of it as a natural disaster. The Tunguska Event certainly has characteristics of a disaster, namely an earthquake: the shockwave caused minor damage to homes and registered on Eurasian seismographs. While no one saw the explosion, the witnesses were some of the first speculators concerning the nature of the Tunguska Event. The 1908 edition of Siberian Life described the event as “…two strong explosions were heard, as if from large-caliber artillery,” while a Siberian tribe source described the final part of the Tunguska Event as “…one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.”
The most interesting fact about The Tunguska Event is that while it’s certain the Tunguska Event was space-originating matter of some form, no meteorite was ever found. There were also no impact craters found or meteorite fragments driven in the base of the forest trees. The only evidence of the possible meteor’s impact was scorched trees and a single “pot hole” in the ground. The explosion and subsequent vaporization of a meteorite is the most common and plausible explanation of the Tunguska Event; expeditions conducted to the Tunguska region since 1920 have uncovered traces of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen that are keeping with evidence of a meteor impact.
To this day, there has been no definite explanation of the Tunguska Event, and the theories regarding it have ranged from the scientific to the pseudo-scientific, even the outlandish. The Tunguska Event being the result of a meteorite breaking from a comet that exploded 6km above sea level is the most common and accepted theory. Others believe that the Tunguska Event may have in fact been an exploding asteroid. Still, other believe that the Tunguska Event was a descending black hole that shot through Earth’s atmosphere, opened so that it could literally pass through one end of Earth’s surface and out of the other, then closed again as it returned to space. A small fraction believes the Tunguska Event was a crashed UFO that has been covered up by the government.
The Tunguska Event has also been “blamed” on Nikolai Tesla, as some believe it was an event of experiments he was conducting with the Wardenclyffe Tower. This is most likely false, as Nikolai Tesla was unpopular within the science community at this time and was sometimes subject to slander.
As evidenced by the many scientific theories surrounding the Tunguska Event, the Tunguska Event has been a favorite subject of both fiction and science fiction for many years. The Tunguska Event has been a theme in literary works such as The Dresden Files novels, television shows such as Star Trek, even the movie Ghostbusters.
What was the true cause of this mysterious astronomical miracle? You be the judge.