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and ended. Russia entered the war, an unpopular one by the Russian people, who blamed the tsar for soldiers' deaths and heavy taxes. They also blamed the tsar and his family for being controlled by a mystic they considered evil. Rioting occurred and the tsar was forced to give up his throne. The tsar and his family were shot to death and a new government was established. Even the people of Russia had now forgotten about what had happened near the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia in June, 1908.

In 1921, a Russian scientist named Leonid Kulik, who had been given the job of finding and examining meteorites that had fallen within Russia, read an old newspaper story about the Tunguska explosion. He prepared for an expedition to visit Tunguska himself. It would take him six more years, and the assistance of the Tungus, to finally reach the site in 1927. To get there, he, and those with him, had to cross rivers and streams, cut through taiga and make their way through the "walls" of mosquitoes which inhabited the bogs and swaps that had to be crossed. Arriving at the edge of the Makirta River on April 13, 1927, he wrote, "The results of even a cursory examination exceed all tales of the eyewitnesses and my wildest expectations."

Even after nearly twenty years, a very long time to wait to study the scene of an accident or explosion, Kulik noted that the area of the forest which had been flattened by the explosion covered more than 40 miles and was in the shape of an oval. The trees had been uprooted and burned and their tops pointed away from the center of the oval, but the center did not contain a crater of any size. Instead, trees, which had been stripped of all branches, stood like poles at the center. And there was no piece of a meteorite.

Kulik determined where the center of the explosion happened and began to map the fallen trees. While doing this, he noticed that other, what appeared to him to be much older, ovals were in the same area. He assumed that these were old meteorite craters that had filled in over the ages. As his interest was in the Tunguska explosion of 1908, no questions were raised as to why so many craters were found at the same basic location.

An area called the Great Southern Swamp was seen by Kulik as being at the center of the explosion. He, and those who were to come after him, searched the swamp for pieces of meteorite, but found nothing. Kulik would eventually die as a prisoner of war during World War II after years of searching for

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