Tunguska

It's hard to believe it's been 103 years since the Tunguska event. My grandparents lived through that era. Oh hell, my parents and grandparents were so old that my grandparents were all born in the 1800s. No kidding!

What was the Tunguska event? Something that puzzled scientists for a century and that has intrigued me since I was a child and first heard of it.

In 1908, was a flash event in Siberia in which forests were flattened completely and those 40 miles away from the event were thrown from their chairs and felt the fire of it. Eight hundred square miles were flattened.

Here's a witness's account:
Suddenly in the north sky… the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire… At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing. The earth trembled.

The massive explosion packed a wallop. The resulting seismic shockwave registered with sensitive barometers as far away as England. Dense clouds formed over the region at high altitudes which reflected sunlight from beyond the horizon. Night skies glowed, and reports came in that people who lived as far away as Asia could read newspapers outdoors as late as midnight. Locally, hundreds of reindeer, the livelihood of local herders, were killed, but there was no direct evidence that any person perished in the blast.

There have been amazing theories about Tunguska including the use of one of Tesla's mega-weapon inventions, an atomic bomb introduced by aliens, and the most popularly accepted one--an asteroid. It was nearly 20 years before scientists were allowed into the remote area to study the devastation. Moisture/ice debris from the comet's blast created strangely bright skies all the way to England where it seemed to glow strangely. The blast was heard 1000 miles away.

It's hard to comprehend that such an event occurred on the earth while man was walking about, but I suppose we can all be relieved it happened in Siberia of all places. Had it been the ocean or a major populated area, the earth and its population would be devastated.