S05 Episode 15: It Came From Above

Considering the Moon's surface is only seven point four percent the size of the Earths, that gives you some indication of just how many comets, asteroids, and more often meteorites are likely to have collided with this planet since it was first formed over four point five billion years ago.

Back in October seventeen, astronomer Robert Werick of the University of Hawaii was stationed at the Haliakala Observatory on the summit of the Island of Maui's Haliakala Volcano when he spotted something unusual close to the Sun. The observatory utilizes a panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system known as the pan Star's one telescope to scan the Solar System for any dangerously large celestial bodies that stray a little

too close for comfort through it. On that extraordinary day in October, Werick observed a small trail of light moving away from the Sun, which he immediately assumed at first was simply a passing comet. However, when he checked back at the previous night's data, something was amiss. The object, which was moving at a speed of one hundred and ninety six thousand miles per hour, wasn't where it should

have been according to the data. Jumping onto the Werick contacted his friend Marco mcklly at the European Space Agency and explained his predicament. A few days later, with the help of the essay's optical ground station telescope in Tenerif, the pair began to watch the object more closely, and

the rest, as they say, is history. The object, first named Rama after the Arthur C. Clark novel Rendezvous with Rama, was later named a Muamua, a Hawaiian word that translates to English as the first messenger or scout from the distant past to reach out. Because what Werick had discovered was the first known object to ever have entered our Solar System from deep interstellar space. But that wasn't all with.

Though Muamua found to be accelerating away from the through some kind of non gravitational propulsion, astronomers first classified it as a comet, since, unlike an asteroid, a comet is comprised partly of frozen gas. The frozen gas helps to propel the object through space when it gets released by the heat of any star it happens to be passing, which in turn creates the comet's distinctive tail and coma, the fuzzy glow made of ice and dust that forms

around its nucleus when it's heated up. Only when the astronomers were able to get a closer look at a Muamua, they were surprised to find it didn't have a tail or a coma, resulting in it being reclassified as an asteroid. However, it didn't quite fit the characteristics of the average asteroid either, being oddly long and flat in shape, while its unusual trajectory and rate of acceleration was also difficult to reconcile

with this new classification. In the end, it was given an entirely new designation, with astronomers agreeing to call it simply an interstellar object. The following year, two Harvard University researchers shmoy Or Biali and Abraham Loebe made a startling suggestion. Could it be? They thought that the reason scientists were struggling to account for the object's peculiar behavior was because, unlike the celestial bodies they were seeking to compare it to,

this one was entirely artificial in nature. In other words, as they put it, maybe umu Amoah wasn't either a comet or an asteroid, but rather a fully operational probe deliberately sent to the vicinity of Earth by an alien civilization. It certainly makes you wonder about some of the many things that have fallen to Earth over the years. You're

listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McClane smith. Right at the far eastern fringes of Russia, in the Primorsky Kraie region, close to the Sea of Japan, lies the sparse mining

town of down A, Gorsk. Just like the name implies, which translates in English to far in the mountains, the town sits at the bottom of a narrow valley formed by the Rudnaya River, surrounded on all sides by sprawling forests of Korean pine and vast stretches of low lying pyramid shaped mountains, having first been established as a small mining settlement in eighteen ninety seven due to the rich

concentration of lead and zinc in the area. Today it is home to just under forty thousand people, many of whom serve the commercial mining industry, and it was there late one clear night in January nineteen eighty six that an object was seen moving across the sky at speed before smashing in the side of isfest Kovaya Mountain, a large peak that overshadows the town to the north, also known locally as Height six one one on account of

its height in meters. The object, described by witnesses as being a near perfect sphere with a reddish hue like burning steel, was said to have moved completely silently through the air as it veered toward the mountain, only for it to jerk up suddenly, then stop before dropping out of the sky. Two girls who saw it from the street described hearing a thud as it crashed into the mountain's dense forest covering then watched with alarm as a small fire blossom out of the darkness at the base

of a cliff on the mountain's southern side. As news of the event began to spread around the region, it eventually made its way to doctor Valerie Vardzilni from what was then known as the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences Far East Department of the Investigation Committee for Anomalous Aerial Phenomena. Five days later, Dvardzilney arrived in down A Gorsk to investigate.

Setting off on the morning of February third, vards Vilney's team headed up into the snow covered mountains with only a vague sense of where exactly the object had crashed. It wasn't long before one of the team spotted a large area of exposed rock and dirt surrounded by an otherwise thick carpet of snow, where something had clearly been burning. And Scattered throughout the area were multiple metallic looking fragments of something reported to have appeared artificial that had recently

smashed on the ground. Some of the fragments were said to resemble splintered pieces of silica, while others were little balls of a dull, silvery metal. Most peculiar of all were the pieces of some kind of bire netting comprised of tiny metallic fibers. On the edge of the site, they found a tree stump that had a potent chemical odor that appeared to be coated in varnish. It was only when they got closer that they saw the stump had in fact melted something that wasn't possible at less

than three thousand degrees celsius. A pile of light gray ash was also found in the middle of the site, which was bagged up along with the rest of the material. After taking numerous pictures of their discovery, Dward Zilney had all of it flown six thousand kilometers to the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences in Omsk for further analysis.

According to Paul Stonehill, who wrote about the incident along with fellow UFO researcher Philip Mantel in their twenty seventeen book Russia's Roswell Incident, what the scientists found left them completely baffled. Looking first at the metal spheres, they found them to be comprised of a combination of iron, manganese, nickel, chromium, tungsten, cobalt, silica dioxide, and molybdenum. Though not especially startling in and of itself, the combination of materials revealed the objects to

be an alloy that had most likely been manufactured. Next, they turned to the strange mesh like material. After placing it under the microscope, it was found to be comprised of a series of threads, each measuring at mere seventeen microns wide, that had been platted together, a micron being

equivalent to one thousandth of a millimeter. Within many of the threads, a single gold wire was found, said to have a concentration of one thousand, one hundred grams permetric ton, far higher than anything found in the region, where a concentration of only four grams per metric ton is considered enough to make gold deposits economically viable. Other materials said to have been found in the threads were silver, nickel,

alpha titanium, molybdenum, and marillium. According to Stonehill, when placed in a vacuum and melted, some of the elements are reported to have completely disappeared, leaving only molybdenum, which had

not been present in the chamber. At the beginning of the experiment, one scientist, doctor Kulikoff of the Academy of Sciences Chemistry Institute, is said to have described the nature of the mesh as being impossible to understand, with another, doctor Vizzotski, allegedly stating he was convinced the fibers had

not been manufactured on Earth. The strange pile of ash was also analyzed to be the remains of an unidentified animal that has thought to have been incinerated when the object crashed into the mountain, or, perhaps, as others have suggested, it was the remains of something that had been traveling

inside the object when it crashed. A few days after of a. Zilne's expedition, doctor Skovinsky of the Academy of Science's Institute of Geology and Geophysics led a follow up expedition to the apparent crash site on Height six one one.

According to UFO investigator Leonard Stringfield, Skovinsky's team made yet another startling discovery, a remarkable similarity between the composition of steel alloy and iron fragments found at the site and material found in Peat in the aftermath of one of Siberia and the world's most mysterious events involving the impact

of something falling to Earth from space. It was early in the morning of June thirtieth, nineteen o eight, when residents of a village in North Krolinski in central Siberia looked up to see a bright, bluish white cylindrical object falling from the sky. Together they watched it in awe as over the course of almost ten minutes, it fell

steadily closer and closer to the ground. Four hundred kilometers to the northwest, at a trading post in Vanavara, surrounded by huge swathes of forest, local farmer Semen Semenoff was sitting outside his house eating breakfast. Moments later, he looked up in horror when, high above the trees to the north, the sky appeared to rip in two, and a great fire emerged from within it. The rip in the sky grew larger until it seemed as though the entire northern

side of it was on fire. Just then, a great surge of heat tore through the air and a tremendous thump was hurt, after which the tear in the sky appeared to close up. This was followed by a second blast of hot air, lifting Semenov off his feet and throwing him back against the front of the house, knocking him out cold. Semenov came round to find his wife

anxiously looking over him. After quickly hauling him up from the floor, she just managed to get him inside when they were suddenly pummeled by a deafening sound, as if a whole barrage of cannons were firing down on them from above. As the ground then began to shake, the couple threw themselves to the floor, fearing an imminent hail of projectiles that never came. Moments later it was over.

Getting back to their feet, the couple stepped from their cabin in a daze, looking about at all the glass that had been completely blown from the windows, and at the peculiar streaks of flattened crops that had suddenly appeared in the fields around them. Some who also witnessed the extraordinary event are said to run into the streets in wild panic, believing the end of the world was upon them.

It is said that for days after, an eerie, purplish glow lingered in the sky, with many across western Siberia and even Europe observing it even as far as London in England. The glow was so bright the use of street lights was completely unnecessary for the next three days. In a Kutzk, eight hundred kilometers to the south at the town's observatory, observatory director dogged Arcady Voznisenski registered the violent event as an earthquake and placed its epicenter at

somewhere between the Nizniaya and Podkomenia Tunguska rivers. Though he may have been right about the epicenter, whatever it was that had taken place was no earthquake. In nineteen fourteen, Russia, Czar Nicholas the Second took Russia into the First World War. The conflict caught the already weakening Czarist regime on the back foot, and with deaths mounting and food shortages back home,

many of the people began to revolt. In March nineteen seventeen, with many in the army by then also turning on the ruling powers. A revolution had begun that quickly descended into civil war. Due to this political upheaval and the sheer remoteness of where the peculiar blast had occurred, an area that was also surrounded by miles of forest and swamplant. It wouldn't be until nineteen twenty one that an expedition was finally put together in the hope of establishing what

had actually taken place. The expedition was led by famed Russian mineralogist Lenoid Kulik. Though his team were unable to reach the blasts epicenter, after collating a number of eyewitness accounts, he was left in no doubt that a meteor had smashed into the region, believing they would find the impact crater somewhere nearby to prove it. It would be another six years, however, before the government to what was then the Soviet Union allowed him to return to the region.

Helped by hunters and trackers from the local Yvank tribe, Kulik's expedition was able to venture much further than they had before, and soon they came across a harrowing site. Hundreds of scorched and fallen trees flattened outwards, surrounding a central area comprised of more trees that, despite being blackened and completely stripped of branches, had somehow been left standing

like telegraph poles. As Kulik described it, Kulik knew instinctively they'd found the epicenter of the blast, only there was no crater to be seen anywhere. In its absence, Kulik maintained his original theory, suggesting that the swampy environment had been too soft for a crater to form in it. Kulik named the peculiar incident the Philiminovo meteorite. However, today

it is more widely known as the Tunguska event. Without an impact crater to back up the meteorite theory, however, scientists were left scratching their heads as to what exactly took place, and as more and more eyewitness accounts began to emerge, things only seemed to get murkier. While some described the object as being cylindrical, others claimed it was oval shaped. Some also claimed they'd seen the object not only changed trajectory during its fall, but also slowed down

prior to the explosion. Some saw it as a white, bluish thing that moved slowly east to west, others that it was reddish in color and moving at incredible speed from south to north. The many discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts has led some to speculate that the main fact

have been not one object involved, but two. Then, in the aftermath of the devastating nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in nineteen forty five, writer Alexander Katzantsev went as far as to suggest that the Tunguska blast was actually a UFO crash, or perhaps the detonation of some kind of interplanetary weapon. In an intriguing twist, geomagnetic recordings made at Urkut's observatory of the event were found to be similar to what you might find after

a nuclear blast. But perhaps even more startling was an idea proposed in nineteen seventy three that the event was the result of matter and antimatter colliding, a theoretically calamitous possibility which some belief could result in an explosion of

such magnitude. In the nineteen sixties, the size of the impacted area was estimated to have covered eight hundred and thirty square miles of forest and was shaped in an unusual pattern similar to a huge pair of butterfly wings, with somewhere in the region of eighty million trees having

been flattened. Today, most scientists believed the Tunguska event was caused by some form of cosmic body entering the atmosphere that disintegrated before impact, although some have suggested that whatever it was possibly came in at such a shallow angle that had veered back off into space. Either way, over a hundred years after the event, there remains no definitive

explanation for it. Back and down a Gorsk, things were getting even stranger with echoes of the Stragatsky Brothers story Roadside Picnic, in which a strange, anomalous zone is created on Earth in the wake of a mysterious visitation from an alien species. The area around the apparent crash site at height six one one also developed a peculiar reputation.

It was said that no insects populated the area in the wake of the crash, and that anyone who ventured there was quickly overwhelmed by a stifling sense of dread, causing their heart rate to increase and a near total loss of coordination or Mechanical and electronic equipment used there

was said to fail. Members of one expedition team who went there apparently reported that all their tortures failed to work the moment they arrived, only discovering later when they returned home, that many of the wires inside had been damaged.

When the results of the tests conducted on the strange material found at the site began to circulate, one journalist suggested there was nothing unusual about it at all, believing it was simply a top secret spy probe or space junk that had been manufactured in the USSR with regular materials that had long been known to exist. Others speculated

it actually belonged to the United States government. However, in nineteen ninety one, Colonel Jerry Felder of the USA's Space Command at Peterson Air Force Space in Colorado, irresponding to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the materials, stated that no large objects with ground paths were found to have crossed eastern USSR near down A Gorsk at the

time in question. One other explanation for the event was that the object was a fragment of the Space Shuttle Challenger that had exploded high up in the atmosphere only the day before. Despite the extraordinary coincidence, this theory has been dismissed since the Challenger shuttle disintegrated at forty six

thousand feet above the Atlantic. For any piece of it to have made it as far as down a Gorsk, over eleven thousand kilometers away, it is estimated it would have to have reached sixty five thousand feet in height.

After a series of subsequent UFO sightings in the region following the nineteen eighty six incident, in two thousand, Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that Russian Air Force generals were so alarmed by the growing number of sightings they invited UFO researchers to work with them in trying to establish what was going on. In twenty twelve, at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, an affiliate at the Smithsonian Institute, a number of mysterious items were put on display,

said to have been taken from the crash site. At height six one one inside a large glass case where a series of glassy looking metallic spheres and pieces of metal in vials. A description read. Three Soviet academic centers and eleven research institutes analyzed the objects from this UFO crash. The distance between atoms is different from ordinary iron radar cannot be reflected from the material elements in the material may disappear and new ones appear after heating. One piece

disappeared completely in front of four witnesses. The core of the material is composed of a substance with anti gravitational properties. Despite pieces of the material being examined at institutions from Vladivostok to Munich and Liage, their true provenance is a mystery that remains to this day unexplained. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now

do so via Patreon. To receive access to add free episodes, just go to patron dot com, forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up, or if you'd like to make a one time donation, you can go to Unexplained podcast dot com forward Slash Support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are greatly appreciated. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on

the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClane smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an

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