by Lenna Gonya

Created on: August 15, 2010   Last Updated: August 16, 2010

It has been 102 years since an explosion, hundreds of times larger than that in Hiroshima hit an area in Siberia called Tunguska. And while there is still no clear explanation of the event on June 30th, 1908, there are no end of theories. Meteorite, asteroid, comet, alien spaceship, retribution from Agdy, the god of thunder, an underground explosion from gases, interaction with a black hole, and a death ray experiment gone awry, have all been suggested.

On that day in June, eyewitnesses testified that half of the sky suddenly became red, and then there was an explosion. The shock waves caused damage to the property of villagers in the area, and the wind from the explosion, was sufficient to knock people off their feet. A tall sphere of light was seen after the explosion and five loud explosions. Fortunately the epicenter was in an unpopulated area, and although hundreds of reindeer perished, no human fatalities were recorded.

Some witnesses recalled a cylindrical shaped object, bright red, that shot across the sky, changing direction twice at 45 degree angles.

The impact was felt as far as London, and the sky across Europe retained a strange pink glow throughout the night, and for days afterward, but no one but the small communities of natives were close to the area for the next decade. And, they avoided it, since some believed that their god of thunder was angry.

Russia’s political problems, WW I, and the revolution, pretty much put any investigation on hold, so it wasn’t until the 1920s that an expedition finally made it to the site. Leonid Kulik, a Russian, finally obtained funding for the expedition, fully expecting to find a crater. He didn’t find the crater, but he did find over 80 million trees which were blown down in perfectly arranged symmetry, around the epicenter. He not only found no crater, he found no meteorite debris.

Since then, there have been countless scientific studies of Tunguska, and the general consensus of opinion is that it was a meteor, but that, instead of making an impact, it exploded above the surface of the earth, causing the devastation beneath it.

Of course that doesn’t explain the presumed eyewitness accounts of the cylindrical object that changed direction, since meteors are neither cylindrical, nor do they have directional capability. This has led the alien theorists to believe that it was either an alien crash, or, that the spaceship intervened at the last moment by blowing up the incoming meteor, thus

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