by Terrence Aym

Created on: November 14, 2009

On June 30, 1908 something exploded over the central Siberian forest near Stony Tunguska River in Russia. Countless herds of reindeer were incinerated and several rustic villages vanished from the face of the Earth. The concussion was so powerful its ferocity would not be approached for another 37 years, when the atom bomb was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan. Yet even the 'Fat Man" atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki was 1,000 times less powerful that the Tunguska Event. In fact, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated - the Soviet Union's "Tsar Bomba" barely equaled one-third of the energy released over Siberia that June day 101 years ago.

The destruction was frightening. If whatever it was had released its explosive force over Moscow or St. Petersburg instead of a lonely, sparsely inhabited rural region of the country, those major cities would have been obliterated.

More than 500,000 acres of pine forest - 80 million trees - were splintered and overturned in an area roughly covering 830 square miles. The concussive shock wave rolling across the countryside shattered windows 100 miles away was heard over a radius of 620 miles and registered as an earthquake on worldwide detectors. All this and it never even touched the ground.

Evidence painstakingly gathered by investigators over the decades indicates an airborne explosion occurred that had remarkable similarities to a modern-day thermonuclear blast.

Eugene Shoemaker, the astronomer that discovered the comet Shoemaker-Levy that plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere, has estimated that events such as the Tunguska explosion occur about once every three centuries.

Theories abound explaining the how and whys of the Tunguska Event, yet none have been definitely proven as the penultimate answer.

Mainstream theories on what caused the explosion

[1] A catastrophic meteoroid air burst

Could a large meteor or small asteroid have caused the explosion over Siberia? That was the theory bantered about for many decades after the incident. It dominated for decades and still has many supporters. Yet the primary problem with the meteor/asteroid theory is that no incontrovertible meteorite residue or particles have ever been found other than tiny spheroids that may have been meteoric in origin.

A Russian expedition undertaken during 1927 found no evidence of meteoric material. No impact crater was discovered. The scientific team that included geologists drilled almost 120 feet down but no pieces of meteoric material was found.

[2] An icy

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