June 3, 2025 • 26 mins
In 1908, something tore through the skies over Siberia and exploded with the force of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Trees were flattened across 800 square miles, yet no impact crater was ever found. What caused the Tunguska Event? A meteor? A comet? Something stranger? In this episode, we analyze the science and the some of the wild theories behind the largest cosmic explosion in recorded history, and explore other mysterious blasts from history.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
On a quiet summer morning in 1908,
deep in the Siberian wilderness of Russia,
the sky exploded without warning.
A strange, sudden,thunderous blast shook the air,
flattening an estimated80 million trees in an instant.
People over 40 miles awaywere thrown to the ground
(00:24):
by the shockwave, and in the aftermath,hundreds of square miles of trees
were leveled in a radial pattern,all pointing away
from a mysterious centralpoint of destruction.
No one could find an impact crateror any obvious evidence of a meteorite.
The initial theory for the explosionat Ground Zero trees stood upright
(00:45):
but stripped of their branches and bark,which only deepened the mystery.
What could unleash such a ferocious powernow known as the Tunguska event?
And after nearly 100 years of studiesand simulations, the consensus is that
this is the largestcosmic impact event in recorded history.
But for decades it defied explanationand sparked wild theories
(01:09):
from antimatter and many black holesto a UFO crash or a weapon.
Many still believed fringe theories,
even in the face of robustscientific knowledge of this event.
Today we explore this amazing story.
The theories,and we'll dive into some similar events
throughout history that could help explainany lingering questions.
(01:33):
Because Tunguska was not a one off.
It could happen again.
This is a study of strange.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm your host.
And to all sorts of strangeness,Michael May.
And today, the Tunguska event.
This is a topic.
You've probably seen it in TV shows,read articles, listen to podcast, etc.
(01:56):
it is a very popular topicand it has been for a long time,
and that's typically what I steerclear of on this show.
I like to find mysteries and talesthat are less well known,
but I've had a number of listenerssuggest this to me, and it's a story
that I've been fascinated withsince I first learned about it.
Probably when I was a kid.
So here is my take on the Tunguska event.
(02:19):
And to make it a little more interesting,
you'll want to listen to the whole episode
because I'm going to sharesome other events
that have happened throughout historythat could be very similar to Tunguska,
and are just as mysteriousas this is a listener suggestion.
If you have a suggestion for meto cover on a study of strange.
Send me an email Steve strange@gmail.com,or direct message me
(02:41):
on Instagramwhere you'll find a study of strange.
And yeah, I said direct message instead ofDM because I'm an old man at heart.
So anyway, let's get into it.
On June 30th, 1908,
around 7:15a.m., in the skies above the Stoney
Tunguska region of Siberia, indigenousVenki herders and Russian
(03:03):
settlers witnessed a fireballstreaking across the sky.
A witness in the village of Vana Vara,about 40 miles south,
recalled the sky split into two and fireappeared high over the forest.
I felt a great wave of heat,as if my shirt had caught fire.
Then a deafening bangand wind that flung him from his chair.
(03:26):
People tens of miles away
were knocked off their feetand out of their beds by the shockwave,
and the heat ignited parts of the forestand scorched trees.
Fortunately,the area is sparsely populated.
It's very remote, so few human casualtieswere initially reported.
Later research suggests that around30 local people were in the affected zone,
(03:48):
with many knocked unconsciousand probably three deaths from the blast.
Thoughexact fatalities remain unconfirmed.
The first reportedthe explosion was in a small newspaper
in the area on July 2nd, 1908,which quotes
the peasantsaw a body shining very brightly,
(04:08):
too bright for the naked eye,with bluish white light.
The body was in the form of a pipe, i.e.
cylindrical.
The sky was cloudless, except thatlow 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,
(04:28):
which was covered with forest,at this point it seemed to be pulverized,
and in its placea loud crash, not like thunder,
but as if from the fall of large stonesor from gunfire was heard.
All the buildings shook,and at the same time
a forked tongue of flamesbroke through the cloud.
All the inhabitants of the villageran out into the street in panic.
(04:49):
The old women wept.
Everyone thought the endof the world was approaching.
Todayit is understood that this was an enormous
atmospheric airburst over central Siberia
that flattened 2000km² of forest,
or about 770 ish square miles.
(05:10):
It is regarded as the largest impactrelated event in recorded history,
with an estimated energyof 10 to 15 megatons,
which is about a thousand timesthe size of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The blast occurred 5 to 10km,or three miles above the ground.
There was a bright fireballvisible up to 500 miles away,
(05:32):
and the shockwave was so enormousthat it was picked up
on sensors around the world
because the explosion happened in a remoteregion near the Tunguska River.
The immediate knowledgeand investigation was very limited.
Only a small amount of actual witnessreports were collected at the time,
though more had been collected inthe decades that followed as researchers
(05:53):
and expeditions went into the regionto collect information.
I explained
a little of the aftermathin the introduction to this show,
but I encourage you if you're interested,look up pictures of the Tunguska
event to get a sense of the oddradial pattern of the flattened trees.
You'll easilysee there's no impact crater, which itself
(06:13):
caused and still causes people to questionwhat actually happened here.
Now, before I get into the fun theories
of aliens and Tesla rays and more,let's look at what was recorded
at the time and the subsequent expeditionsand studies.
So immediately after the event, unusual
atmospheric effects were observedacross Europe and Asia.
(06:35):
Night skies glowed so brightlythat the famous story about this event
is that people in Europe claimedthey could read Midnight
Observatory, specificallythe Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
and Mount Wilson in California,which had only been operating about a year
at this time, recorded a decreasein atmospheric transparency,
(06:57):
which is likely due to high altitude dustor ice particles.
These bright nights were latercited as evidence that the Tunguska object
might have been a comet, releasing copious
ice vapor into the upper atmosphere.
Between 1908 and 1920.
The event, often called the Great SiberianMeteor and newspapers of the time,
(07:20):
remained mysterious due to the remotenessand political turmoil in Russia.
No scientific expedition reachedthe blast site for almost 19 years.
However, the basic occurrence,a violent explosion
from the sky in Siberiahad been known in academic circles.
Early speculation in these yearsranges from a meteorite
(07:42):
or comet impact to a volcanic explosion.
But there wasn't a consensus like there is
now, since no one hadgone to the site to study it.
And that changed in 1921.
Soviet mineralogist Leonid Kulik,curator of the Saint Petersburg Museum's
(08:03):
meteorite collection, had heard reportsof this possible meteorite fall.
Kulik persuadedthe Soviet Academy of Sciences
to sponsor an expeditionto find and recover meteorite material.
Culex 1921 trip to the regionwas unable to reach ground zero.
The terrain is very swamp like.
(08:24):
It's hard to navigate through.
But he interviewed localswho vividly recalled
the flashes and rumbles of June30th, 1908,
and these accounts strengthened his beliefthat a large meteorite struck
and that tons of meteorite material
and iron await discovery in Siberia.
(08:45):
And this trip is when a lot of officialwitness accounts were first collected.
Kulik finally reached Tunguska,ground zero, in the spring of 1927.
He was astonished by what he found
an epicenter with no impact crater
but a vast zone of destruction.
He estimated 80 million trees had beenflattened radially, all lying with tops
(09:08):
pointing away from a central pointand near the epicenter.
He observed the telegraph pole forest,as he called it.
Trunks of large trees,stripped of branches in part but left
standing completely upright, presumablydirectly below the aerial blast.
Scorch marks
in charred tree stumps indicatedintense heat.
(09:30):
Yet no evidence of a typical meteoriteimpact was found.
Kulik initially suspectedthe meteors remains might be buried
in the swampy ground,and he noted several circular peat bogs
and even drained one of them,only to find an old tree at the bottom,
proving that it was actually a natural bogand not a recent crater.
(09:50):
And he found no meteorite fragments.
I do believe and feel free to correct meif you know,
but this is when the first photographswere taken of the site,
nearly 20 years after it happened.
The next decades saw subsequentexpeditions.
Kulik himself returned
three more times and helped conductaerial photography in 1938.
(10:13):
Throughout, Kulik remained
convinced that a large meteorite explodedor hit the ground,
and he searched unsuccessfullyfor a large iron mass or fragments.
By the late 1930s.
The working theory was shifting towardsan atmospheric explosion,
or airburst, as they're called,rather than an actual ground impact,
(10:33):
which explains the absence of a crateror sizable debris.
Between 1958 and 1961, Soviet scientistscontinued investigations.
These teams sampled soiland the peat layers.
They discoveredmicroscopic spheres of silicate globules.
It's hard to say embedded in the soiland in resin from trees
(10:53):
containing nickel and other elementsindicating extraterrestrial origin.
To be clear, when you hear thatphrase extraterrestrial origin,
if you're like me, you immediatelythink aliens.
This does not mean aliens.
That just means a cosmic airburst.
So a meteor or a comet.
And scientistsalso wanted to make sure that they were
claiming extraterrestrial origin,because that means it's not a volcano.
(11:17):
So allof this is to say, in layman's terms,
a giant spaceobject entered the atmosphere.
It's burning up as it's traveling,
and it explodes about three milesabove the ground
with a forcea thousand times the bomb at Hiroshima.
That all being said,more exotic theories emerged.
(11:39):
And it's time to dive into those.
And I'm going to start with a miniblack hole.
In 1973, two physicistfrom the University of Texas
at Jackson, the fourth, and Michael PRyan Jr, suggested a mini black hole
passed through Earth, entering in Tunguska
and allegedlyexiting somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
(12:03):
They proposed that a primordial blackhole of asteroid mass
could release ten megatons of energyas it zipped through the atmosphere.
While it was proposedby very smart science dudes,
this theory has some problems.
First,there is no widely accepted evidence
or theory that tiny black holeseven exist in the universe.
(12:25):
Additionally,there are no records and no evidence
at all of the exit wound,
so to speak, and this black holetraveling through the Earth.
Lastly, I read a comment about this theorythat said that if
these mini black holes are realand they traveled through Earth,
it would actuallyhave torn the earth apart.
(12:48):
The next theory to discuss
and this will be my brother'sfavorite one, is a UFO crash.
Looking at the scale of this eventand the strange details
of fireballshurtling through the sky and exploding,
many people started to embrace an ideathat the explosion was caused
by a UFO crash, and alien ship
(13:08):
could have technology or fuel on board
that could cause a massive explosionof such a size.
Now, of course,people have a UFO theory to this.
Almost everything I come acrossas a UFO theory of some kind,
but this idea seems to originatenot in 1908,
(13:28):
but in the 1940s, sort of the heightof a flying saucer frenzy.
Specifically,the Russian science fiction writer
Alexander Casavant says 1946 short storyexplosion,
which brought the ideato the public at large.
This is an example of one of my favoritethings is when pop
(13:48):
culture influences history and science
and theories about very real things.
Sadly, there has been no other evidenceto back up a potential UFO
crash or explosion.
The next theory is anti-matter.
In the 1950s, scientists Philip J.
Wyatt and Willard Libby,amongst some other scientists, proposed
(14:11):
that the Tunguska event might have beencaused by an anti-matter meteor.
They even suggested thatthe unusually high levels of carbon
14 and tree rings might be linked toanti-matter annihilation.
This is when anti-matterwas just a concept, and before anyone
had any clue about how to even studyor check for its actual presence.
(14:34):
Now, I have never heard of the possibility
of an anti-matter meteoruntil I was researching this story.
Nor do I have my head quite around thethe basic understanding of what that is.
So to help me explain this, here'swhat Google Wikipedia has to say about it.
Anti-Matter comets and anti-mattermeteoroids are hypothetical comets and
(14:54):
meteoroids composed solely of anti-matterinstead of ordinary matter.
Although never actually observedand unlikely to exist anywhere
within the Milky Way, they have beenhypothesized to exist in their existence.
On the presumption that hypothesis iscorrect has been put forward as one
possible explanation for various observednatural phenomena over the years.
(15:17):
In terms of this theory, though,
technologyto scan for evidence of anti-matter
has been developedand background radiation levels
at Tunguskaare not in alignment with the theory.
Next, a weapon.
This theory still circulates,
(15:38):
and I say that having readso many articles
and post over the last few daysresearching the story of many people
that still very much believethat this happened because of a weapon.
Some think it was a Soviet nuclear weapon.
First, I'll quickly debunk that becausethe Soviet Union did not exist in 1908.
(16:00):
Second, nuclear and atomic bombswhere we weren't even close
to understanding what that even meant.
So if a government had a weaponthat created this kind of destruction
at Tunguska,
a history just would be very different.
But that's not the most interesting weapontheory.
My favorite isthat Tunguska was caused by a weapon
(16:21):
invented by NikolaTesla, aka the Tesla Death Ray.
At almost
the exact same time as this explosion,Nikola Tesla
was experimenting with the Tesla coiland wireless transmission.
Tesla theorizedthat the Earth itself would conduct
electricitywith what he called terrestrial waves.
(16:43):
And it's during these experiments thatsomething happened, or so the theory goes.
An accident,perhaps, that caused a massive release
of electrical power,causing the explosion above Tunguska.
Or a sibling to this theoryis that Tesla was building a weapon
specifically, and the press generallywas calling this the death ray.
(17:04):
And some reportstalked of a wireless torpedo
called the Tesla automaton.
I think I said that right.
The theory proposesthat Tunguska was a weapons test
and Tesla was experimentingwith wireless broadcasting.
This is very true.
And using radio waves for all sortsof technological theories and ideas.
(17:27):
In his later years,Tesla claimed that he created a weapon
that could shoot energyand hit planes over 200 miles away.
However,there are no witnesses to this weapon,
to a prototype, and zero evidence of itever being built,
let alone was itsomething that could actually
have had the strengthand force of the Tunguska event?
(17:50):
Even the way he described it,it wasn't even near that.
Despite this, there are many articles
and claims that Tesla had a death ray.
Not to repeat myself too much here,but all of these claims
and all of these stories,they're all fascinating.
They're all amazing.
They all have so many specifics thatyou cannot validate or confirm or back up,
but they're all fascinating, and so muchso that I should do
(18:13):
an episode of this showjust about this topic.
And as much as I don't believethat he built a death
ray, and I don't believeTunguska was because of Tesla.
I bet there's more to
this storythat is true with him working on weapons.
It just seems like something,
something in that worldhad to have been going on, you know?
(18:34):
Anyway, that's for another episode.
I'm going to end my theory sectionhere on the least exciting theory,
but it needs to be discussed becauseit was a main theory for a long time,
and that's that this could have beena natural gas eruption
or a volcanic like event,but there's been so many studies
now over the years that we really knowthat that is not the case.
(18:54):
All of the evidence pointsto a cosmic origin,
and the volcanic ideais just a very quick debunking
Tunguska.
Well, it is unique and it is the largestevent of this kind in recorded history.
It is not the only large scaleatmospheric explosion or impact event.
(19:16):
Other similarstrange incidents have occurred.
These events prove cosmic encounterswith Earth happened
that they're dangerousand that they will happen again.
So I'm going to turn tosome similar events throughout history
in March or April of 1490 and QueenYang China.
(19:36):
There are chronicles and reportsand some writing of the sky lighting up
and becoming very hot, and explosions
and stones falling like rain.
Some records say thattens of thousands of people were killed,
though official historiesomit the actual casualty figures.
(19:57):
This is believedto have been a meteor shower or series
of bolide explosions in the atmosphere.
The exact nature of this is obviouslyunconfirmed due to limited data
being from so long ago,but it definitely has
similar qualities to the story.
Going backeven further than that, in 1650 BCE,
(20:20):
tall l'homme,a Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley,
was allegedly destroyed by extreme
heat and a blast from the sky.
There are no written witness accounts,
but there is archeological evidence,and excavations allegedly show mud
brick walls sheared off, pottery surfacesmelted into glass, and human remains
(20:44):
fragmented as if exposed to incineratingtemperatures and shockwaves.
Nearby citiesalso collapsed right around the same time.
A cosmic airburst like to Gasca is theleading hypothesis, researchers propose.
A meteor exploded at low altitudeover the Jordan Valley.
(21:04):
A quick note on this event
this one does needa lot of ongoing research.
Apparently there was only one paperpublished claiming about this evidence,
and the scientific community is pushingback on it, saying the data is presented
correctly or collectedcorrectly or something like that.
So they want more research into the event,but it's still worth notating
(21:26):
because it does share,
at least on the surface, a lot ofsimilarities with the Tunguska event.
A catastrophic explosion
occurred on May 30th, 1626,
above Beijing,and reportedly killed 20,000 people.
According to the stories,the sky was clear
(21:49):
and then very suddenlythere was a loud roar and rumble,
and it gradually reached the southwestof the city, followed by dust clouds,
the shaking of houses like a shockwave,
and then a bright flash or explosion,
which contained a great light, followed
by another huge bang.
(22:11):
The stories say that about 1.5mi²was just completely
destroyed and flattened,and homes were torn apart
and trees were actually uprootedand thrown into the air.
If this event is true, and I do believethere is some truth to it,
it shows the amount of destructionthat can happen
(22:32):
from an event like thiswhen it's over a populated area.
Now, jumping back to
the 20th century and August of 1930,in the Amazon Basin in Brazil,
a likely meteor showeror airburst happened over the jungle.
Missionaries reported threeloud explosions
and seeing fireballs,and people were frightened.
(22:57):
There is littlecontemporary documentation,
but this was discovered in recordsdecades later.
No crater has been found.
However, tree damage and witness reportssuggest a small asteroid
broke apart in the atmosphereand exploded above ground.
In 2018,NASA obtained images over the Bering Sea,
(23:19):
where they saw a large meteoror fireball, as they call it,
and it exploded 16 miles above the sea.
The explosion, releasedwith the force of around
173 kilotons of energy,or more than ten times
the energy of the atomic bombblast over Hiroshima.
And lastly, of these historical accounts,I wanted to end on the one
(23:41):
that everybody should look up becausethere's a lot of video footage of it.
This is from February 15th in 2013.
I always pronouncethis name of the city wrong.
Chelyabinsk, Russia.
That's definitely not right. Apologies.
This happened in broad daylight,just like Tunguska.
A bright fireball just shooting
(24:02):
across the sky brighter than the sun.
And minutes later it exploded.
It shattered in a shockwave,shattered windows
in six cities,and it injured approximately 1500 people.
Eyewitnesses felt intense heat,
and they saw thishuge, long smoke trail in the sky.
(24:25):
There's no crater from this event.
Some small fragmentsdid fall as meteorites
and as much as this explosion was hugeand it's worth watching the videos
if you haven't seen it.
And it injured1500 people and caused destruction,
it was still a very scaled downversion of what
happened in Tunguska in 1908.
(24:49):
The Tunguska event
has capturedthe imagination of countless people,
and not just because of alternativetheories in pop culture,
but because it is a remarkable scientificdetective story.
Even since I first started learning aboutthis story back in the 90s, watching TV.
I feel like our understanding of itis just so much
(25:10):
farther along than when it was.
And to Gasca is still studiedacross all sorts of disciplines,
from astrophysicsand geology to archeology.
It is estimated an event of this
size, a cosmic event of this size, happensevery few millennia.
I've also read that it could happenevery 2 to 300 years, and that's scary.
This is actually a scary storybecause we don't have
(25:33):
control over an event like this happening,and if it happens over a place,
it's not remote.
It can do a lot of damageand kill a lot of people.
And in a way, it kind of helps me understand our humble place in the universe.
And that'll do it for this episode.
(25:54):
Thank you so much for listeningto A Study of Strange.
If you're new to the show,take a quick second.
Hit that subscribe button.Leave a rating and review.
It goes a long way to helping us out.
Until next time. Thank you and good night.
On a quiet summer morning in 1908,
deep in the Siberian wilderness of Russia,
the sky exploded without warning.
A strange, sudden,thunderous blast shook the air,
flattening an estimated80 million trees in an instant.
People over 40 miles awaywere thrown to the ground
(00:24):
by the shockwave, and in the aftermath,hundreds of square miles of trees
were leveled in a radial pattern,all pointing away
from a mysterious centralpoint of destruction.
No one could find an impact crateror any obvious evidence of a meteorite.
The initial theory for the explosionat Ground Zero trees stood upright
(00:45):
but stripped of their branches and bark,which only deepened the mystery.
What could unleash such a ferocious powernow known as the Tunguska event?
And after nearly 100 years of studiesand simulations, the consensus is that
this is the largestcosmic impact event in recorded history.
But for decades it defied explanationand sparked wild theories
(01:09):
from antimatter and many black holesto a UFO crash or a weapon.
Many still believed fringe theories,
even in the face of robustscientific knowledge of this event.
Today we explore this amazing story.
The theories,and we'll dive into some similar events
throughout history that could help explainany lingering questions.
(01:33):
Because Tunguska was not a one off.
It could happen again.
This is a study of strange.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm your host.
And to all sorts of strangeness,Michael May.
And today, the Tunguska event.
This is a topic.
You've probably seen it in TV shows,read articles, listen to podcast, etc.
(01:56):
it is a very popular topicand it has been for a long time,
and that's typically what I steerclear of on this show.
I like to find mysteries and talesthat are less well known,
but I've had a number of listenerssuggest this to me, and it's a story
that I've been fascinated withsince I first learned about it.
Probably when I was a kid.
So here is my take on the Tunguska event.
(02:19):
And to make it a little more interesting,
you'll want to listen to the whole episode
because I'm going to sharesome other events
that have happened throughout historythat could be very similar to Tunguska,
and are just as mysteriousas this is a listener suggestion.
If you have a suggestion for meto cover on a study of strange.
Send me an email Steve strange@gmail.com,or direct message me
(02:41):
on Instagramwhere you'll find a study of strange.
And yeah, I said direct message instead ofDM because I'm an old man at heart.
So anyway, let's get into it.
On June 30th, 1908,
around 7:15a.m., in the skies above the Stoney
Tunguska region of Siberia, indigenousVenki herders and Russian
(03:03):
settlers witnessed a fireballstreaking across the sky.
A witness in the village of Vana Vara,about 40 miles south,
recalled the sky split into two and fireappeared high over the forest.
I felt a great wave of heat,as if my shirt had caught fire.
Then a deafening bangand wind that flung him from his chair.
(03:26):
People tens of miles away
were knocked off their feetand out of their beds by the shockwave,
and the heat ignited parts of the forestand scorched trees.
Fortunately,the area is sparsely populated.
It's very remote, so few human casualtieswere initially reported.
Later research suggests that around30 local people were in the affected zone,
(03:48):
with many knocked unconsciousand probably three deaths from the blast.
Thoughexact fatalities remain unconfirmed.
The first reportedthe explosion was in a small newspaper
in the area on July 2nd, 1908,which quotes
the peasantsaw a body shining very brightly,
(04:08):
too bright for the naked eye,with bluish white light.
The body was in the form of a pipe, i.e.
cylindrical.
The sky was cloudless, except thatlow 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,
(04:28):
which was covered with forest,at this point it seemed to be pulverized,
and in its placea loud crash, not like thunder,
but as if from the fall of large stonesor from gunfire was heard.
All the buildings shook,and at the same time
a forked tongue of flamesbroke through the cloud.
All the inhabitants of the villageran out into the street in panic.
(04:49):
The old women wept.
Everyone thought the endof the world was approaching.
Todayit is understood that this was an enormous
atmospheric airburst over central Siberia
that flattened 2000km² of forest,
or about 770 ish square miles.
(05:10):
It is regarded as the largest impactrelated event in recorded history,
with an estimated energyof 10 to 15 megatons,
which is about a thousand timesthe size of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The blast occurred 5 to 10km,or three miles above the ground.
There was a bright fireballvisible up to 500 miles away,
(05:32):
and the shockwave was so enormousthat it was picked up
on sensors around the world
because the explosion happened in a remoteregion near the Tunguska River.
The immediate knowledgeand investigation was very limited.
Only a small amount of actual witnessreports were collected at the time,
though more had been collected inthe decades that followed as researchers
(05:53):
and expeditions went into the regionto collect information.
I explained
a little of the aftermathin the introduction to this show,
but I encourage you if you're interested,look up pictures of the Tunguska
event to get a sense of the oddradial pattern of the flattened trees.
You'll easilysee there's no impact crater, which itself
(06:13):
caused and still causes people to questionwhat actually happened here.
Now, before I get into the fun theories
of aliens and Tesla rays and more,let's look at what was recorded
at the time and the subsequent expeditionsand studies.
So immediately after the event, unusual
atmospheric effects were observedacross Europe and Asia.
(06:35):
Night skies glowed so brightlythat the famous story about this event
is that people in Europe claimedthey could read Midnight
Observatory, specificallythe Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
and Mount Wilson in California,which had only been operating about a year
at this time, recorded a decreasein atmospheric transparency,
(06:57):
which is likely due to high altitude dustor ice particles.
These bright nights were latercited as evidence that the Tunguska object
might have been a comet, releasing copious
ice vapor into the upper atmosphere.
Between 1908 and 1920.
The event, often called the Great SiberianMeteor and newspapers of the time,
(07:20):
remained mysterious due to the remotenessand political turmoil in Russia.
No scientific expedition reachedthe blast site for almost 19 years.
However, the basic occurrence,a violent explosion
from the sky in Siberiahad been known in academic circles.
Early speculation in these yearsranges from a meteorite
(07:42):
or comet impact to a volcanic explosion.
But there wasn't a consensus like there is
now, since no one hadgone to the site to study it.
And that changed in 1921.
Soviet mineralogist Leonid Kulik,curator of the Saint Petersburg Museum's
(08:03):
meteorite collection, had heard reportsof this possible meteorite fall.
Kulik persuadedthe Soviet Academy of Sciences
to sponsor an expeditionto find and recover meteorite material.
Culex 1921 trip to the regionwas unable to reach ground zero.
The terrain is very swamp like.
(08:24):
It's hard to navigate through.
But he interviewed localswho vividly recalled
the flashes and rumbles of June30th, 1908,
and these accounts strengthened his beliefthat a large meteorite struck
and that tons of meteorite material
and iron await discovery in Siberia.
(08:45):
And this trip is when a lot of officialwitness accounts were first collected.
Kulik finally reached Tunguska,ground zero, in the spring of 1927.
He was astonished by what he found
an epicenter with no impact crater
but a vast zone of destruction.
He estimated 80 million trees had beenflattened radially, all lying with tops
(09:08):
pointing away from a central pointand near the epicenter.
He observed the telegraph pole forest,as he called it.
Trunks of large trees,stripped of branches in part but left
standing completely upright, presumablydirectly below the aerial blast.
Scorch marks
in charred tree stumps indicatedintense heat.
(09:30):
Yet no evidence of a typical meteoriteimpact was found.
Kulik initially suspectedthe meteors remains might be buried
in the swampy ground,and he noted several circular peat bogs
and even drained one of them,only to find an old tree at the bottom,
proving that it was actually a natural bogand not a recent crater.
(09:50):
And he found no meteorite fragments.
I do believe and feel free to correct meif you know,
but this is when the first photographswere taken of the site,
nearly 20 years after it happened.
The next decades saw subsequentexpeditions.
Kulik himself returned
three more times and helped conductaerial photography in 1938.
(10:13):
Throughout, Kulik remained
convinced that a large meteorite explodedor hit the ground,
and he searched unsuccessfullyfor a large iron mass or fragments.
By the late 1930s.
The working theory was shifting towardsan atmospheric explosion,
or airburst, as they're called,rather than an actual ground impact,
(10:33):
which explains the absence of a crateror sizable debris.
Between 1958 and 1961, Soviet scientistscontinued investigations.
These teams sampled soiland the peat layers.
They discoveredmicroscopic spheres of silicate globules.
It's hard to say embedded in the soiland in resin from trees
(10:53):
containing nickel and other elementsindicating extraterrestrial origin.
To be clear, when you hear thatphrase extraterrestrial origin,
if you're like me, you immediatelythink aliens.
This does not mean aliens.
That just means a cosmic airburst.
So a meteor or a comet.
And scientistsalso wanted to make sure that they were
claiming extraterrestrial origin,because that means it's not a volcano.
(11:17):
So allof this is to say, in layman's terms,
a giant spaceobject entered the atmosphere.
It's burning up as it's traveling,
and it explodes about three milesabove the ground
with a forcea thousand times the bomb at Hiroshima.
That all being said,more exotic theories emerged.
(11:39):
And it's time to dive into those.
And I'm going to start with a miniblack hole.
In 1973, two physicistfrom the University of Texas
at Jackson, the fourth, and Michael PRyan Jr, suggested a mini black hole
passed through Earth, entering in Tunguska
and allegedlyexiting somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
(12:03):
They proposed that a primordial blackhole of asteroid mass
could release ten megatons of energyas it zipped through the atmosphere.
While it was proposedby very smart science dudes,
this theory has some problems.
First,there is no widely accepted evidence
or theory that tiny black holeseven exist in the universe.
(12:25):
Additionally,there are no records and no evidence
at all of the exit wound,
so to speak, and this black holetraveling through the Earth.
Lastly, I read a comment about this theorythat said that if
these mini black holes are realand they traveled through Earth,
it would actuallyhave torn the earth apart.
(12:48):
The next theory to discuss
and this will be my brother'sfavorite one, is a UFO crash.
Looking at the scale of this eventand the strange details
of fireballshurtling through the sky and exploding,
many people started to embrace an ideathat the explosion was caused
by a UFO crash, and alien ship
(13:08):
could have technology or fuel on board
that could cause a massive explosionof such a size.
Now, of course,people have a UFO theory to this.
Almost everything I come acrossas a UFO theory of some kind,
but this idea seems to originatenot in 1908,
(13:28):
but in the 1940s, sort of the heightof a flying saucer frenzy.
Specifically,the Russian science fiction writer
Alexander Casavant says 1946 short storyexplosion,
which brought the ideato the public at large.
This is an example of one of my favoritethings is when pop
(13:48):
culture influences history and science
and theories about very real things.
Sadly, there has been no other evidenceto back up a potential UFO
crash or explosion.
The next theory is anti-matter.
In the 1950s, scientists Philip J.
Wyatt and Willard Libby,amongst some other scientists, proposed
(14:11):
that the Tunguska event might have beencaused by an anti-matter meteor.
They even suggested thatthe unusually high levels of carbon
14 and tree rings might be linked toanti-matter annihilation.
This is when anti-matterwas just a concept, and before anyone
had any clue about how to even studyor check for its actual presence.
(14:34):
Now, I have never heard of the possibility
of an anti-matter meteoruntil I was researching this story.
Nor do I have my head quite around thethe basic understanding of what that is.
So to help me explain this, here'swhat Google Wikipedia has to say about it.
Anti-Matter comets and anti-mattermeteoroids are hypothetical comets and
(14:54):
meteoroids composed solely of anti-matterinstead of ordinary matter.
Although never actually observedand unlikely to exist anywhere
within the Milky Way, they have beenhypothesized to exist in their existence.
On the presumption that hypothesis iscorrect has been put forward as one
possible explanation for various observednatural phenomena over the years.
(15:17):
In terms of this theory, though,
technologyto scan for evidence of anti-matter
has been developedand background radiation levels
at Tunguskaare not in alignment with the theory.
Next, a weapon.
This theory still circulates,
(15:38):
and I say that having readso many articles
and post over the last few daysresearching the story of many people
that still very much believethat this happened because of a weapon.
Some think it was a Soviet nuclear weapon.
First, I'll quickly debunk that becausethe Soviet Union did not exist in 1908.
(16:00):
Second, nuclear and atomic bombswhere we weren't even close
to understanding what that even meant.
So if a government had a weaponthat created this kind of destruction
at Tunguska,
a history just would be very different.
But that's not the most interesting weapontheory.
My favorite isthat Tunguska was caused by a weapon
(16:21):
invented by NikolaTesla, aka the Tesla Death Ray.
At almost
the exact same time as this explosion,Nikola Tesla
was experimenting with the Tesla coiland wireless transmission.
Tesla theorizedthat the Earth itself would conduct
electricitywith what he called terrestrial waves.
(16:43):
And it's during these experiments thatsomething happened, or so the theory goes.
An accident,perhaps, that caused a massive release
of electrical power,causing the explosion above Tunguska.
Or a sibling to this theoryis that Tesla was building a weapon
specifically, and the press generallywas calling this the death ray.
(17:04):
And some reportstalked of a wireless torpedo
called the Tesla automaton.
I think I said that right.
The theory proposesthat Tunguska was a weapons test
and Tesla was experimentingwith wireless broadcasting.
This is very true.
And using radio waves for all sortsof technological theories and ideas.
(17:27):
In his later years,Tesla claimed that he created a weapon
that could shoot energyand hit planes over 200 miles away.
However,there are no witnesses to this weapon,
to a prototype, and zero evidence of itever being built,
let alone was itsomething that could actually
have had the strengthand force of the Tunguska event?
(17:50):
Even the way he described it,it wasn't even near that.
Despite this, there are many articles
and claims that Tesla had a death ray.
Not to repeat myself too much here,but all of these claims
and all of these stories,they're all fascinating.
They're all amazing.
They all have so many specifics thatyou cannot validate or confirm or back up,
but they're all fascinating, and so muchso that I should do
(18:13):
an episode of this showjust about this topic.
And as much as I don't believethat he built a death
ray, and I don't believeTunguska was because of Tesla.
I bet there's more to
this storythat is true with him working on weapons.
It just seems like something,
something in that worldhad to have been going on, you know?
(18:34):
Anyway, that's for another episode.
I'm going to end my theory sectionhere on the least exciting theory,
but it needs to be discussed becauseit was a main theory for a long time,
and that's that this could have beena natural gas eruption
or a volcanic like event,but there's been so many studies
now over the years that we really knowthat that is not the case.
(18:54):
All of the evidence pointsto a cosmic origin,
and the volcanic ideais just a very quick debunking
Tunguska.
Well, it is unique and it is the largestevent of this kind in recorded history.
It is not the only large scaleatmospheric explosion or impact event.
(19:16):
Other similarstrange incidents have occurred.
These events prove cosmic encounterswith Earth happened
that they're dangerousand that they will happen again.
So I'm going to turn tosome similar events throughout history
in March or April of 1490 and QueenYang China.
(19:36):
There are chronicles and reportsand some writing of the sky lighting up
and becoming very hot, and explosions
and stones falling like rain.
Some records say thattens of thousands of people were killed,
though official historiesomit the actual casualty figures.
(19:57):
This is believedto have been a meteor shower or series
of bolide explosions in the atmosphere.
The exact nature of this is obviouslyunconfirmed due to limited data
being from so long ago,but it definitely has
similar qualities to the story.
Going backeven further than that, in 1650 BCE,
(20:20):
tall l'homme,a Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley,
was allegedly destroyed by extreme
heat and a blast from the sky.
There are no written witness accounts,
but there is archeological evidence,and excavations allegedly show mud
brick walls sheared off, pottery surfacesmelted into glass, and human remains
(20:44):
fragmented as if exposed to incineratingtemperatures and shockwaves.
Nearby citiesalso collapsed right around the same time.
A cosmic airburst like to Gasca is theleading hypothesis, researchers propose.
A meteor exploded at low altitudeover the Jordan Valley.
(21:04):
A quick note on this event
this one does needa lot of ongoing research.
Apparently there was only one paperpublished claiming about this evidence,
and the scientific community is pushingback on it, saying the data is presented
correctly or collectedcorrectly or something like that.
So they want more research into the event,but it's still worth notating
(21:26):
because it does share,
at least on the surface, a lot ofsimilarities with the Tunguska event.
A catastrophic explosion
occurred on May 30th, 1626,
above Beijing,and reportedly killed 20,000 people.
According to the stories,the sky was clear
(21:49):
and then very suddenlythere was a loud roar and rumble,
and it gradually reached the southwestof the city, followed by dust clouds,
the shaking of houses like a shockwave,
and then a bright flash or explosion,
which contained a great light, followed
by another huge bang.
(22:11):
The stories say that about 1.5mi²was just completely
destroyed and flattened,and homes were torn apart
and trees were actually uprootedand thrown into the air.
If this event is true, and I do believethere is some truth to it,
it shows the amount of destructionthat can happen
(22:32):
from an event like thiswhen it's over a populated area.
Now, jumping back to
the 20th century and August of 1930,in the Amazon Basin in Brazil,
a likely meteor showeror airburst happened over the jungle.
Missionaries reported threeloud explosions
and seeing fireballs,and people were frightened.
(22:57):
There is littlecontemporary documentation,
but this was discovered in recordsdecades later.
No crater has been found.
However, tree damage and witness reportssuggest a small asteroid
broke apart in the atmosphereand exploded above ground.
In 2018,NASA obtained images over the Bering Sea,
(23:19):
where they saw a large meteoror fireball, as they call it,
and it exploded 16 miles above the sea.
The explosion, releasedwith the force of around
173 kilotons of energy,or more than ten times
the energy of the atomic bombblast over Hiroshima.
And lastly, of these historical accounts,I wanted to end on the one
(23:41):
that everybody should look up becausethere's a lot of video footage of it.
This is from February 15th in 2013.
I always pronouncethis name of the city wrong.
Chelyabinsk, Russia.
That's definitely not right. Apologies.
This happened in broad daylight,just like Tunguska.
A bright fireball just shooting
(24:02):
across the sky brighter than the sun.
And minutes later it exploded.
It shattered in a shockwave,shattered windows
in six cities,and it injured approximately 1500 people.
Eyewitnesses felt intense heat,
and they saw thishuge, long smoke trail in the sky.
(24:25):
There's no crater from this event.
Some small fragmentsdid fall as meteorites
and as much as this explosion was hugeand it's worth watching the videos
if you haven't seen it.
And it injured1500 people and caused destruction,
it was still a very scaled downversion of what
happened in Tunguska in 1908.
(24:49):
The Tunguska event
has capturedthe imagination of countless people,
and not just because of alternativetheories in pop culture,
but because it is a remarkable scientificdetective story.
Even since I first started learning aboutthis story back in the 90s, watching TV.
I feel like our understanding of itis just so much
(25:10):
farther along than when it was.
And to Gasca is still studiedacross all sorts of disciplines,
from astrophysicsand geology to archeology.
It is estimated an event of this
size, a cosmic event of this size, happensevery few millennia.
I've also read that it could happenevery 2 to 300 years, and that's scary.
This is actually a scary storybecause we don't have
(25:33):
control over an event like this happening,and if it happens over a place,
it's not remote.
It can do a lot of damageand kill a lot of people.
And in a way, it kind of helps me understand our humble place in the universe.
And that'll do it for this episode.
(25:54):
Thank you so much for listeningto A Study of Strange.
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Hit that subscribe button.Leave a rating and review.
It goes a long way to helping us out.
Until next time. Thank you and good night.
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