Beyond the Veil Magazine

The Tunguska Event

Issue #7: July 1979

On the morning of 30 June 1908, something exploded above the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia. The blast flattened approximately 80 million trees across 830 square miles of remote taiga. The shockwave circled the Earth twice. For several nights afterwards, the skies over Europe and western Russia glowed brightly enough to read by.

Seventy years later, scientists still cannot agree on what caused the Tunguska Event.

The Explosion

Witnesses across a vast area reported extraordinary phenomena that summer morning. In the trading post of Vanavara, 40 miles from the epicentre, a trader named Semyon Semenov was sitting on his porch when the sky seemed to split apart. “The sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest,” he later testified. “The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire.”

The heat was intense. Semenov felt his shirt burning on his back. He was thrown from his porch by the shockwave that followed seconds later, briefly losing consciousness.

Further from the blast, the Evenki people (nomadic reindeer herders) reported tents and people being thrown through the air. Reindeer stampeded. Dogs howled. A wave of searing heat swept across the landscape, followed by a thunderous roar and a shockwave that knocked people off their feet.

Seismographs across Europe recorded the disturbance. Barometric instruments in England detected the atmospheric wave. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Washington noted atmospheric disturbances consistent with a massive explosion.

Yet no crater was found. No fragments were recovered. Whatever had struck Siberia had vanished as completely as it had arrived.

The Delayed Investigation

Russia’s remoteness and political turmoil (revolution, civil war, and upheaval) meant that no scientific expedition reached Tunguska until 1927, nearly two decades after the event. Leonid Kulik, a Soviet mineralogist, led the first investigation.

What he found was extraordinary. The forest lay flattened in a radial pattern extending for miles, with trees pointing away from a central area. Yet at the very centre, trees remained standing, stripped of their branches, scorched, but upright. This pattern was consistent with an airburst: an explosion occurring above the ground rather than upon impact.

Kulik searched for meteorite fragments for years. He found none. He drained swamps, dug trenches, and analysed soil samples. Nothing. Whatever had exploded over Tunguska had left no physical remnant.

Competing Theories

The conventional explanation holds that a small comet or asteroid, between 60 and 190 metres in diameter, entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded at an altitude of approximately 5 to 10 kilometres. The object was composed of ice and dust (if a comet) or friable rock (if an asteroid), which disintegrated completely in the explosion, leaving no fragments to find.

This explanation accounts for most observed facts but remains somewhat unsatisfying. No comparable event has been recorded in human history, making confirmation impossible.

Alternative theories abound:

Antimatter: In 1965, scientists Cowan, Atluri, and Libby proposed that Tunguska was struck by a piece of antimatter, which annihilated upon contact with ordinary matter, leaving no debris. Critics note that antimatter annihilation should produce specific types of radiation that were not detected.

Black Hole: In 1973, Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan suggested that a microscopic black hole passed through the Earth. This theory predicts an exit event somewhere in the North Atlantic, which has never been found.

Alien Spacecraft: Inevitably, some have proposed that an extraterrestrial vehicle, experiencing mechanical difficulties, exploded over Siberia. Soviet engineer Alexander Kazantsev popularised this theory in a 1946 science fiction story, and it has retained adherents since.

Tesla’s Experiment: Nikola Tesla was, in 1908, conducting experiments at his Wardenclyffe Tower facility in New York. Some have suggested that a directed-energy weapon experiment caused the Tunguska explosion. No evidence supports this claim.

Recent Research

Soviet expeditions have continued to investigate Tunguska throughout the decades since. In the 1960s, researchers found microscopic silicate and magnetite spheres in soil samples from the area, possible debris from a stony asteroid. However, similar spheres are found in soil worldwide and may simply represent ordinary cosmic dust accumulation.

The search for definitive evidence continues. Each expedition hopes to find the fragment, the crater, or the chemical signature that will finally explain what struck Siberia on that June morning seventy years ago.

The Unanswered Questions

The Tunguska Event remains troubling because it demonstrates how vulnerable Earth is to cosmic impact. If the object had arrived four hours and forty-seven minutes later, the rotation of the Earth would have placed St. Petersburg directly beneath the explosion. The imperial capital would have been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands killed.

We know something struck Siberia in 1908. We know the explosion was equivalent to 10 to 15 megatons of TNT, a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. We know it flattened a forest and lit the night sky across a continent.

What we do not know is what it was.

The Tunguska Event stands as a reminder that the universe contains mysteries we have not yet solved, and forces we have not yet learned to predict.

Readers with expertise in meteorology, astronomy, or related fields who may have information about the Tunguska Event are invited to contact our research department.