The Backstory: The unexplained blast that shook the world

On a beautiful summer morning in 1908, a massive explosion hit Siberia. It downed 80 million trees and lit the night sky 3,000 miles away in Sweden. But to this day, no one knows what caused it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, this will knock your socks off. Literally. What if
I told you there was an explosion in nineteen oh
eight that was over two hundred and fifty times more
powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But it
wasn't mad made. I'm Patty Steele. To this day, nobody
knows what caused the Tunguska event. That's next on the backstory.

(00:25):
The backstory is back. Okay. It's a beautiful, peaceful summer morning,
June thirtieth, nineteen oh eight. We're in the remote Tunguska
region of Siberia, where daytime tempts in the summer can
actually reach into the eighties. But suddenly the tranquility is
shattered by an event so powerful it flattens more than

(00:45):
two thousand square kilometers of forest, some eighty million trees.
But oddly, it doesn't leave a crater. This massive blast
was a Tunguska explosion, estimated to be around two hundred
and fifty times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped
on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. Can you imagine

(01:07):
the shock for the few eye witnesses. It was a
very remote area. They were mostly local tribal folks, as
well as Russian settlers looking for a life away from
the big cities. What did they see and hear? Well?
They describe a vivid blue light, almost as bright as
the sun, and then a massive fireball streaking across the sky.

(01:30):
Next came multiple deafening explosions, and then a pillar of
fire that turns the sky into a deep and frightening
fiery red. Finally, a shock wave moves across the land
that literally knocks people off their feet, shattering windows hundreds
of miles away and even knocking over a train. Eventually,

(01:52):
the pillar of fire was replaced by a billowing tower
of smoke that seemed to reach all the way into space.
And think about this. Reports from the time say those
blasts were deafeningly loud hundreds of miles away, and the
skies three thousand miles away in Europe where it was
still night, as well as all over Asia, were glowing.

(02:14):
There are even several photographs that were taken around midnight
in Scotland and Sweden that looked like they were shot
during the day. But what was it? A meteor, a comet,
maybe a ufo. It took scientists almost twenty years to
actually reach the remote explosion site in Siberia. In nineteen

(02:35):
twenty seven, a researcher visited the center of the blast,
and it was forty years after the blast that anybody
was able to interview the few eye witnesses that were
still left. What really blew scientists away was the story
these people told of the sky lighting up a few
nights before the big blast took place that actually goes

(02:55):
against everything we know about impact explosions caused by comets
or meteors. The leading theory is that an asteroid or
a comet exploded in the Earth's atmosphere, known as an
air burst, releasing energy equal to as much as fifteen
megatons of TNT. But again, there was no impact crater found,

(03:16):
so that's still just a theory. And the problem with
that theory is that early exploration of the site turned
up absolutely no debris linked to an asteroid. And there
are other theories too. Some scientists thought that natural gas
leaking from the Earth could have been ignited by a
meteor causing that huge explosion. That seemed speculative at best. Now,

(03:39):
when you go into the more kind of outlandish explanations,
there are some folks who think that an extraterrestrial spacecraft
crashed at Tunguska, causing the explosion, but sadly for UFO enthusiasts,
that is not backed by any scientific evidence. The small
amount of collected years after the fact was impossible to

(04:03):
test due to environmental contamination. And there's another fascinating theory
that goes against all the laws of nature. It's the
black hole hypothesis. Some think that a tiny black hole
passed through Earth's atmosphere, causing the explosion, but again no
concrete evidence. Most importantly, what did the people who witness

(04:24):
this thing imagine? The fear you'd feel, no explanation, and
almost no way to communicate with the rest of the
world about what you'd seen. A lot of them thought
it was a sign of the end for humanity, sort
of like what dinosaurs experienced millions of years earlier. Now, interestingly,
the Tunguska explosion had a lasting impact on the world.

(04:46):
It influenced policy on the monitoring of space objects and
actually began asteroid tracking programs. It also became a fixture
in pop culture, inspiring books, movies, TV shows like episodes
of of Doctor Who, in The X Files, and of
course countless conspiracy theories. So here's the question. Have we

(05:07):
figured it out yet? No way. Over a century later,
the Tunguska explosion, or event as they call it, is
one of the twentieth century's greatest unsolved mysteries. Was it
a natural, cosmic event or something else. It's just one
example that shows we're still at the dawn of our
understanding of our universe. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a

(05:38):
production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and
Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer
Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
even story suggestions on Instagram at real Patty Steele and
on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(06:00):
Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.