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BANG IN RECORDED HISTORY?
Shorrly after 7 A.M. on June 30, 1908,
early
rising
fanners,
herdsmen,
and
trappers
in
the
sparsely
settled
vastness of the central Siberia Plateau
watched
in awe as a cylindrical object,
glowing with an intense
bluish -white
light
and
trailing
a
fiery
tail,
rated
across
a
clear
blue
sky
toward
the
northern horizon. At 7:17* over a des-
olate
region
of bogs and
low,
pine-
covered
hills
traversed
by
the Stony
Tunguska
River,
it
disappeared;
rip
stantly,
a
“pillar
of
fire*’ leaped
sky-
ward, so high
it was seen hundreds of
miles away; the earth shuddered under
the irnpacr of
a
titanic explosion,
tin
air was wracked by thunderous tUp*,
and
a superheated wind
rushed
tuo.
ward, setting parts of the taiga on Mr
At a trading post forty miles from the
blast, a man
silting on the steps of
\\n
house saw the blinding Hash mid
»'-*<
ered his eyes; he felt scorched, at ii'du
shirt on his back were burning, *
» Mi"'
next moment he was hurled
ire**:; Uk:
steps by a shock wave and knot* id*.**
conscious. Four hundred milt?
<
*
south
the ground
heaved un -
tracks
of
the
rccenrly
coi'-t
;
Trans-Siberian Railway, threau
*
*
derail
an
express.
And
ab*’>
t
* il
Tunguska
region
a
mass
ol
=
k
clouds, piling up to a height ol ^
- b*
miles, dumped a shower of “hi*
\
on
the
<uuiut y side — dirt mid
sucked
up
by
the
explosion
rumblings
like heavy
artillery
hi*
verberated throughout central
Since seismographs and barograph*
everywhere had
recorded
thr r>r-
the entire world knew' .that swin
extraordinary had occurred
in iW
ber <n wilderness. Butjwhar? 5*
I
conjectured
(hat
a.
giant
nu n
\
•
must have
fallen, exploding funs
ih
inrense heat
its impad generau d
« K
hitting the ground, suen a body
theoretically, have blown out
*
f
crater like the one in |Arizonf»,
quarters of n mile square, left In
#
t<r
teorite
that
fell
fifty jthousaml
j-« o *
ago, but
the
Siberiaij
"impaii
*iu
turned out to be a dismal swamp, * n\\
no
trace
of
a meteorite
to
be kWh
Nevertheless, for want of a better ex-
planation,
scientists
continued
to
ascribe the cataclysm
to
a meteorite,
and Leonid Kulik, a mineralogist who
headed
government-sponsored
ex-
peditions to the Tunguska in the early
1920s and again in 1938-39, searched
for evidence to support this view.
Although
this search proved
fruit-
less, Kulik uncovered
a wealth of in-
formation about
the
blast. Near
the
swamp into which
the meteorite had
supposedly
plummeted,
scorched
trees, striped of branches,
still stood,
but around this weird "telegraph-pole"
forest, except where intervening hills
had
shielded them, every
tree within
hfiy
miles
had
been
blown
flat,
its
*oink pointing away from the sw^amp.
Morn this — and from his failure to find
i von a small impact crater— Kulik con-
* hided
that
the meteorite
had never
0 ached the ground but had exploded
iv-.’O or three miles up in the
air. The
itsrmony of local herdsmen
yielded
ither curious
details:
the
blast s
in-
u-nse heat had melted the permafrost,
* using
water
trapped
underground
•fur tens of thousands of years to gush
.
£ n th in fountains, and those reindeer
d:rit had not been killed had developed
^mysterious blisters and scabs on their
1 ides. Stranger still, examination of the
>«es
that
had
been
germinating
in
v H)8
revealed
that
they
had
then
*
: own at several times the normal rate.
During World War
II
Kulik
w
ras
spurred by the Germans and died a
prisoner. The riddle he had worked to
*:»lve was forgotten. In August
1945,
however,
certain
Russian
scientists
*ere abruptly reminded of
it by the
i om -bombings
of
Hiroshima
and
* ^igasaki, events which seemed uncan-
ny familiar
in both
their manifesta-
tions (the
fireball, the searing thermal
« u rrent,
the
towering
"mushroom"
loud) and
their effects (the
instanta-
rous and
near-total destruction, the
f idiation burns on living flesh, the ac-
celerated growth
of new
plant
life,
i ven the "telegraph-pole" appearance
of scorched and branchless trees stand-
ing below the point at which an atom
bomb was detonated).
Could the Siberian blast have been
atomic?
In
1958 a Russian engineer-
turned-writer, Aleksander
Kazantsev,
published
a
story-article pinning
that
disasrer on
Martians
killed on
their
w'ay to Earth by cosmic rays or meteor-
ite bombardment; their ship, wdth no
one at the controls, hurtles into our at-
mosphere
at
unreduced
speed
and
burns up from
friction,
triggering
a
chain
reaction
in
its atomic
fuel
that
sets off the
explosion. Few informed
readers by then
still accepted the me-
teorite theory, and some, particularly
younger men and women, found
Ka-
zantsev's
hypothesis
persuasive,
but
others rejected
it in favor of an earlier
alternate
explanation,
according
to
which the head of a comet had pene-
trated the atmosphere at such high ve-
locity that the heat thus generated had
caused the comet to blow up. (Skeptics
pointed
out, however,
that
a comet
could
hardly have approached
Earth
without being seen.)
>
Two further
t >
• relations involving
natural
causes
Keen
advanced.
The
first
is rlmr * imv
black hole" -a
chunk of main
i
* oh m
to minuscule
dimensions ami w* th tuc that its grav-
ity sucks up
t vi
it light
hit Siberia and
passed
in
ah
llunam
through
Earth,
emerging
in
1 1 if N
* m h
Atlantic. The
second
asvriM
<'**
»
"anti-rock
of
antimatter
pimm.rd
into
the
atmos-
phere and iKpiudid on contact
wfith
atoms of ordinal f m/mer, producing a
fireball
of gamma
rays.
While
this
would
account
for
the
absence
of
residual material
ike
site,
it
is not,
most experts s*y,
patible with ob-
servable
j ill v ll* 8 1
t
**»
* ts of the
blast.
In
the
mil,
vr
not know
what
caused
tin
in
Siberia. We
may
never
\
*
Ibi
today,
fewer
scientists than
sM
**
i
Mine in the past
. would br
•
'
receive a mes-
sage beamed tivni
*
^ e corner of the
universe
impiinm*
i
U)
the
fate
of
certain
spate
v*-|
who vanished
on out plane t
in v
we call the year
1908.
r&mfcw-