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 estimated 80 million trees in an instant. People over 40 miles away were thrown to the ground 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 central point of destruction.
No one could find an impact crater or any obvious evidence of a meteorite. The initial theory for the explosion at Ground Zero trees stood upright but stripped of their branches and bark, which only deepened the mystery. What could unleash such a ferocious power now known as the Tunguska event? And after nearly 100 years of studies and simulations, the consensus is that this is the largest cosmic impact event in recorded history.
But for decades it defied explanation and sparked wild theories from antimatter and many black holes to a UFO crash or a weapon. Many still believed fringe theories, even in the face of robust scientific 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 explain any lingering questions. 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. it is a very popular topic and it has been for a long time, and that's typically what I steer clear of on this show. I like to find mysteries and tales that are less well known, but I've had a number of listeners suggest this to me, and it's a story that I've been fascinated with since I first learned about it.
Probably when I was a kid. So here is my take on the Tunguska event. And to make it a little more interesting, you'll want to listen to the whole episode because I'm going to share some other events that have happened throughout history that could be very similar to Tunguska, and are just as mysterious as this is a listener suggestion. If you have a suggestion for me to cover on a study of strange.
Send me an email Steve [email protected], or direct message me on Instagram where you'll find a study of strange. And yeah, I said direct message instead of DM because I'm an old man at heart. So anyway, let's get into it. On June 30th, 1908, around 7:15 a.m., in the skies above the Stoney Tunguska region of Siberia, indigenous Venki herders and Russian settlers witnessed a fireball streaking across the sky.
A witness in the village of Vana Vara, about 40 miles south, recalled the sky split into two and fire appeared high over the forest. I felt a great wave of heat, as if my shirt had caught fire. Then a deafening bang and wind that flung him from his chair. People tens of miles away were knocked off their feet and out of their beds by the shockwave, and the heat ignited parts of the forest and scorched trees. Fortunately, the area is sparsely populated.
It's very remote, so few human casualties were initially reported. Later research suggests that around 30 local people were in the affected zone, with many knocked unconscious and probably three deaths from the blast. Though exact fatalities remain unconfirmed. The first reported the explosion was in a small newspaper in the area on July 2nd, 1908, which quotes the peasant saw a body shining very brightly, 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 that low 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, which was covered with forest, at this point it seemed to be pulverized, and in its place a loud crash, not like thunder, but as if from the fall of large stones or from gunfire was heard.
All the buildings shook, and at the same time a forked tongue of flames broke through the cloud. All the inhabitants of the village ran out into the street in panic. The old women wept. Everyone thought the end of the world was approaching. Today it is understood that this was an enormous atmospheric airburst over central Siberia that flattened 2000km² of forest, or about 770 ish square miles.
It is regarded as the largest impact related event in recorded history, with an estimated energy of 10 to 15 megatons, which is about a thousand times the size of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The blast occurred 5 to 10km, or three miles above the ground. There was a bright fireball visible up to 500 miles away, and the shockwave was so enormous that it was picked up on sensors around the world because the explosion happened in a remote region near the Tunguska River.
The immediate knowledge and investigation was very limited. Only a small amount of actual witness reports were collected at the time, though more had been collected in the decades that followed as researchers and expeditions went into the region to collect information. I explained a little of the aftermath in 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 odd radial pattern of the flattened trees.
You'll easily see there's no impact crater, which itself caused and still causes people to question what 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 expeditions and studies. So immediately after the event, unusual atmospheric effects were observed across Europe and Asia.
Night skies glowed so brightly that the famous story about this event is that people in Europe claimed they could read Midnight Observatory, specifically the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Mount Wilson in California, which had only been operating about a year at this time, recorded a decrease in atmospheric transparency, which is likely due to high altitude dust or ice particles.
These bright nights were later cited 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 Siberian Meteor and newspapers of the time, remained mysterious due to the remoteness and political turmoil in Russia. No scientific expedition reached the blast site for almost 19 years.
However, the basic occurrence, a violent explosion from the sky in Siberia had been known in academic circles. Early speculation in these years ranges from a meteorite or comet impact to a volcanic explosion. But there wasn't a consensus like there is now, since no one had gone to the site to study it. And that changed in 1921. Soviet mineralogist Leonid Kulik, curator of the Saint Petersburg Museum's meteorite collection, had heard reports of this possible meteorite fall.
Kulik persuaded the Soviet Academy of Sciences to sponsor an expedition to find and recover meteorite material. Culex 1921 trip to the region was unable to reach ground zero. The terrain is very swamp like. It's hard to navigate through. But he interviewed locals who vividly recalled the flashes and rumbles of June 30th, 1908, and these accounts strengthened his belief that a large meteorite struck and that tons of meteorite material and iron await discovery in Siberia.
And this trip is when a lot of official witness 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 been flattened radially, all lying with tops pointing away from a central point and 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, presumably directly below the aerial blast. Scorch marks in charred tree stumps indicated intense heat. Yet no evidence of a typical meteorite impact was found.
Kulik initially suspected the 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 bog and not a recent crater. And he found no meteorite fragments. I do believe and feel free to correct me if you know, but this is when the first photographs were taken of the site, nearly 20 years after it happened. The next decades saw subsequent expeditions.
Kulik himself returned three more times and helped conduct aerial photography in 1938. Throughout, Kulik remained convinced that a large meteorite exploded or hit the ground, and he searched unsuccessfully for a large iron mass or fragments. By the late 1930s. The working theory was shifting towards an atmospheric explosion, or airburst, as they're called, rather than an actual ground impact, which explains the absence of a crater or sizable debris.
Between 1958 and 1961, Soviet scientists continued investigations. These teams sampled soil and the peat layers. They discovered microscopic spheres of silicate globules. It's hard to say embedded in the soil and in resin from trees containing nickel and other elements indicating extraterrestrial origin. To be clear, when you hear that phrase extraterrestrial origin, if you're like me, you immediately think aliens. This does not mean aliens. That just means a cosmic airburst.
So a meteor or a comet. And scientists also wanted to make sure that they were claiming extraterrestrial origin, because that means it's not a volcano. So all of this is to say, in layman's terms, a giant space object entered the atmosphere. It's burning up as it's traveling, and it explodes about three miles above the ground with a force a thousand times the bomb at Hiroshima. That all being said, more exotic theories emerged. And it's time to dive into those.
And I'm going to start with a mini black hole. In 1973, two physicist from the University of Texas at Jackson, the fourth, and Michael P Ryan Jr, suggested a mini black hole passed through Earth, entering in Tunguska and allegedly exiting somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. They proposed that a primordial black hole of asteroid mass could release ten megatons of energy as it zipped through the atmosphere. While it was proposed by very smart science dudes, this theory has some problems.
First, there is no widely accepted evidence or theory that tiny black holes even exist in the universe. Additionally, there are no records and no evidence at all of the exit wound, so to speak, and this black hole traveling through the Earth. Lastly, I read a comment about this theory that said that if these mini black holes are real and they traveled through Earth, it would actually have torn the earth apart. The next theory to discuss and this will be my brother's favorite one, is a UFO crash.
Looking at the scale of this event and the strange details of fireballs hurtling through the sky and exploding, many people started to embrace an idea that the explosion was caused by a UFO crash, and alien ship could have technology or fuel on board that could cause a massive explosion of such a size. Now, of course, people have a UFO theory to this.
Almost everything I come across as a UFO theory of some kind, but this idea seems to originate not in 1908, but in the 1940s, sort of the height of a flying saucer frenzy. Specifically, the Russian science fiction writer Alexander Casavant says 1946 short story explosion, which brought the idea to the public at large. This is an example of one of my favorite things is when pop culture influences history and science and theories about very real things.
Sadly, there has been no other evidence to 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 that the Tunguska event might have been caused by an anti-matter meteor. They even suggested that the unusually high levels of carbon 14 and tree rings might be linked to anti-matter annihilation.
This is when anti-matter was just a concept, and before anyone had any clue about how to even study or check for its actual presence. Now, I have never heard of the possibility of an anti-matter meteor until I was researching this story. Nor do I have my head quite around the the basic understanding of what that is. So to help me explain this, here's what Google Wikipedia has to say about it.
Anti-Matter comets and anti-matter meteoroids are hypothetical comets and meteoroids composed solely of anti-matter instead of ordinary matter. Although never actually observed and unlikely to exist anywhere within the Milky Way, they have been hypothesized to exist in their existence. On the presumption that hypothesis is correct has been put forward as one possible explanation for various observed natural phenomena over the years.
In terms of this theory, though, technology to scan for evidence of anti-matter has been developed and background radiation levels at Tunguska are not in alignment with the theory. Next, a weapon. This theory still circulates, and I say that having read so many articles and post over the last few days researching the story of many people that still very much believe that this happened because of a weapon. Some think it was a Soviet nuclear weapon.
First, I'll quickly debunk that because the Soviet Union did not exist in 1908. Second, nuclear and atomic bombs where we weren't even close to understanding what that even meant. So if a government had a weapon that created this kind of destruction at Tunguska, a history just would be very different. But that's not the most interesting weapon theory. My favorite is that Tunguska was caused by a weapon invented by Nikola Tesla, aka the Tesla Death Ray.
At almost the exact same time as this explosion, Nikola Tesla was experimenting with the Tesla coil and wireless transmission. Tesla theorized that the Earth itself would conduct electricity with what he called terrestrial waves. And it's during these experiments that something 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 theory is that Tesla was building a weapon specifically, and the press generally was calling this the death ray. And some reports talked of a wireless torpedo called the Tesla automaton. I think I said that right. The theory proposes that Tunguska was a weapons test and Tesla was experimenting with wireless broadcasting. This is very true. And using radio waves for all sorts of technological theories and ideas.
In his later years, Tesla claimed that he created a weapon that could shoot energy and hit planes over 200 miles away. However, there are no witnesses to this weapon, to a prototype, and zero evidence of it ever being built, let alone was it something that could actually have had the strength and force of the Tunguska event? 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 that you cannot validate or confirm or back up, but they're all fascinating, and so much so that I should do an episode of this show just about this topic. And as much as I don't believe that he built a death ray, and I don't believe Tunguska was because of Tesla.
I bet there's more to this story that is true with him working on weapons. It just seems like something, something in that world had to have been going on, you know? Anyway, that's for another episode.
I'm going to end my theory section here on the least exciting theory, but it needs to be discussed because it was a main theory for a long time, and that's that this could have been a natural gas eruption or a volcanic like event, but there's been so many studies now over the years that we really know that that is not the case. All of the evidence points to a cosmic origin, and the volcanic idea is just a very quick debunking Tunguska.
Well, it is unique and it is the largest event of this kind in recorded history. It is not the only large scale atmospheric explosion or impact event. Other similar strange incidents have occurred. These events prove cosmic encounters with Earth happened that they're dangerous and that they will happen again. So I'm going to turn to some similar events throughout history in March or April of 1490 and Queen Yang China.
There are chronicles and reports and some writing of the sky lighting up and becoming very hot, and explosions and stones falling like rain. Some records say that tens of thousands of people were killed, though official histories omit the actual casualty figures. This is believed to have been a meteor shower or series of bolide explosions in the atmosphere.
The exact nature of this is obviously unconfirmed due to limited data being from so long ago, but it definitely has similar qualities to the story. Going back even further than that, in 1650 BCE, 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 surfaces melted into glass, and human remains fragmented as if exposed to incinerating temperatures and shockwaves. Nearby cities also collapsed right around the same time. A cosmic airburst like to Gasca is the leading hypothesis, researchers propose. A meteor exploded at low altitude over the Jordan Valley.
A quick note on this event this one does need a lot of ongoing research. Apparently there was only one paper published claiming about this evidence, and the scientific community is pushing back on it, saying the data is presented correctly or collected correctly or something like that. So they want more research into the event, but it's still worth notating because it does share, at least on the surface, a lot of similarities 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 and then very suddenly there was a loud roar and rumble, and it gradually reached the southwest of 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.
The stories say that about 1.5mi² was just completely destroyed and flattened, and homes were torn apart and trees were actually uprooted and thrown into the air. If this event is true, and I do believe there is some truth to it, it shows the amount of destruction that can happen from an event like this when 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 shower or airburst happened over the jungle.
Missionaries reported three loud explosions and seeing fireballs, and people were frightened. There is little contemporary documentation, but this was discovered in records decades later. No crater has been found. However, tree damage and witness reports suggest a small asteroid broke apart in the atmosphere and exploded above ground. In 2018, NASA obtained images over the Bering Sea, where they saw a large meteor or fireball, as they call it, and it exploded 16 miles above the sea.
The explosion, released with the force of around 173 kilotons of energy, or more than ten times the energy of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima. And lastly, of these historical accounts, I wanted to end on the one that everybody should look up because there's a lot of video footage of it. This is from February 15th in 2013. I always pronounce this 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 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 this huge, long smoke trail in the sky. There's no crater from this event. Some small fragments did fall as meteorites and as much as this explosion was huge and it's worth watching the videos if you haven't seen it.
And it injured 1500 people and caused destruction, it was still a very scaled down version of what happened in Tunguska in 1908. The Tunguska event has captured the imagination of countless people, and not just because of alternative theories in pop culture, but because it is a remarkable scientific detective story. Even since I first started learning about this story back in the 90s, watching TV. I feel like our understanding of it is just so much farther along than when it was.
And to Gasca is still studied across all sorts of disciplines, from astrophysics and geology to archeology. It is estimated an event of this size, a cosmic event of this size, happens every few millennia. I've also read that it could happen every 2 to 300 years, and that's scary. This is actually a scary story because we don't have control over an event like this happening, and if it happens over a place, it's not remote. It can do a lot of damage and 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. Thank you so much for listening to 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.