I’m fascinated by this strange event. Very cool.
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) – It produced a blast hundreds of times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb, was seen hundreds of miles away and narrowly missed obliterating an entire city – but 100 years to the week after the mysterious explosion in Siberia, no one is any closer to understanding what caused it.
Millions of trees were destroyed by the Tunguska blast.
Despite countless investigations, the so-called Tunguska Event remains one of the 20th century’s greatest enigmas – seized upon by mystics, UFO enthusiasts and scientists as evidence of angry gods, extraterrestrial life or the impending threat of a cosmic collision.
But says Stanislav Krivyakov, who has spent the past 35 years investigating the Siberian blast, despite intense interest in the event – which has featured in several episodes of the X-Files – no conclusive evidence has been found to support any theory.
“There are many people who build their hypotheses based on scanty information,” he told CNN.
“But there are many aspects to the phenomenon that don’t fit any standards or analogies. In everything about it we find something complicated, problematic, vague. It’s truly out of the ordinary.”
Deepening the mystery was the delay in a full investigation into the event, which occurred as Russia was entering the years of upheaval that surrounded the communist revolution.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/04/tunguska.anniversary/index.html