Summary
The Tunguska incident was a 12-megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate Russia on the morning of June 30, 1908, and was attributed to a meteor airburst.
The explosion flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the incident, which has been classified as an impact event, despite no crater being found. Witnesses reported seeing a fireball or a bluish light as bright as the sun in the sky, followed by a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire.
There are also theories surrounding the event that involve UAP intervention.
Russian scientist Yuri Lavbin claimed that aliens stopped the Tunguska meteorite to protect Earth from devastation. Lavbin claims he found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the massive explosion.
“Ten crystals have holes in them, placed so the stones can be united in a chain, and others have drawings on them. …We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals. We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”
In 2004, an expedition of Russian researchers claimed to have found evidence of an alien spaceship and "an extraterrestrial device,” yet never provided any further evidence.
Author Roy Gallant investigated the scene of the event for his book, "Meteorite Hunter: The Search for Siberian Meteorite Craters." Gallant told SPACE.com that scientists are gathering "accumulating evidence tending to support the notion that the exploding object was a comet nucleus. This is the collective opinion of most Russian investigators; although some say they cannot confidently rule out a stony asteroid.”
Benny Peiser, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK concurred the "general consensus"² among experts is that an exploding comet or asteroid was what was behind the incident.
Although many UAP advocates still argue that there may have been intelligent life involved, there’s little evidence to support that claim.
"Up to this day, not a single fragment of the Tunguska phenomenon, no cosmic substance has been found,” said Boris Mushailov, a professor at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow. “That's the main reason why there isn't any even fundamental understanding (of the phenomenon) yet.”
Incident Facts
-The energy of the explosion was estimated to have been equivalent to the explosive force a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
-The resulting seismic shockwave registered with sensitive barometers as far away as England.
-Scientists said the object was most likely a stony asteroid the size of a 25-story building that was traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles (54,000 km) per hour and exploded 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 km) above Earth’s surface.
-It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour, and during its descent, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself.
-Some locals believed the asteroid was really a visitation event from the god Ogdy, and he cursed the area by killing animals and causing mass devastation to the area.
-Soviet scientist Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik first investigated the remote site of the explosion from 1927- 1930 by the location on the ground directly below the explosion. Everything had been devastated and scorched, and very little was growing two decades after the event. Kulik also found splintered trees lying for some 15-30 km, which is 10-20 miles.
Legacy
The Tunguska incident is one of the largest impact events on Earth in recorded history, but larger impacts could have occurred in the prehistoric era. The event has been mentioned, fictionalized and recreated many times in popular culture, and has become an important discussion of asteroid impact avoidance within the scientific community.
The site became a hotspot for UAP enthusiasts that led to a Tunguska meteorite museum and alleged photographs of what are claimed to be parts of extraterrestrial craft discovered in the area.
On June 30, every year “ Asteroid Day” is celebrated to mark the anniversary of the Tunguska explosion that struck Siberia.⁵
Can this happen again? It did. A version of the Tunguska event eventually happened, but on a smaller scale. The event was 105 years after Tunguska –The Chelyabinsk meteor, 1,500 miles (2,400 km). On February 15, 2013, a similar although smaller airburst occurred over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia.
Historically, the incident remains the largest in recorded history, and even though there was no impact crater, which was attributed to a large part of the asteroid being consumed via the explosion, the damage and surface area were enough to be considered an impact.⁵
Concerns about asteroid strikes large enough to cause widespread devastation have spurned new programs to understand asteroids and how we may avoid a collision. Two separate missions will travel to the asteroid Didymos, which includes the Hera mission that is due to launch in 2024. The Hera mission will journey to Didymos to study DART’s impact. NASA’s DART mission launched November 23, 2021, and was the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid's motion in space through kinetic impact. These experiments were meant to see if you can make contact with an object in space and change its course.
