Tunguska Event

The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred not far from the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, at 0 hours 13 minutes 35 seconds Greenwich Mean Time (around 07:14 local time) on June 30, 1908 (June 17 in the Julian calendar, in use locally at the time).
There was little scientific curiosity about the impact at the time, possibly due to the isolation of the Tunguska region. If there were any early expeditions to the site, the records were likely to have been lost during the subsequent chaotic years — World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War.
The first recorded expedition arrived at the scene more than a decade after the event. In 1921, the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, visiting the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin as part of a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, deduced from local accounts that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteorite impact. He persuaded the Soviet government to fund an expedition to the Tunguska region, based on the prospect of meteoric iron that could be salvaged to aid Soviet industry. Kulik's party eventually undertook an expedition in 1927.
Upon arrival, Kulik made arrangements with the local Evenki hunters to guide his party to the impact site. Reaching the explosion site was an extremely arduous task. Upon reaching an area just south of the site, the superstitious Evenki hunters would go no further, fearing what they called the Valleymen. Kulik had to return to the nearby village, and his party was delayed for several days while they sought new guides.
The spectacle that confronted Kulik as he stood on a ridge overlooking the devastated area was overwhelming. To the explorers' surprise, no crater was to be found. There was instead around ground zero a vast zone (8 kilometers across) of trees scorched and devoid of branches, but standing upright. Those farther away had been partly scorched and knocked down in a direction away from the center. Kulik also recovered badly damaged wreckage from the center of the blast zone, making his team the first to recover Traveler technology, which would give the Soviet Union a head-start in harnessing the powerful artifice.
It is believed that the craft which crash-landed in the Tunguska region was the vanguard ship which carried several powerful Antediluvians, including Aeon, Walker, and the Phoenix. It is unclear as to whether or not their retinues were aboard that craft as well, or whether they re-assembled their power-base after the arrival of more Travelers later on.
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