Well, this will knock your socks off. Literally. What if I told you there was an explosion in nineteen oh eight that was over two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But it wasn't mad made. I'm Patty Steele. To this day, nobody knows what caused the Tunguska event. That's next on the backstory. The backstory is back. Okay. It's a beautiful, peaceful summer morning, June thirtieth, nineteen oh eight. We're in the remote Tunguska region of Siberia, where daytime tempts in the summer can actually reach into the eighties. But suddenly the tranquility is shattered by an event so powerful it flattens more than two thousand square kilometers of forest, some eighty million trees. But oddly, it doesn't leave a crater. This massive blast was a Tunguska explosion, estimated to be around two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. Can you imagine the shock for the few eye witnesses. It was a very remote area. They were mostly local tribal folks, as well as Russian settlers looking for a life away from the big cities. What did they see and hear? Well? They describe a vivid blue light, almost as bright as the sun, and then a massive fireball streaking across the sky. Next came multiple deafening explosions, and then a pillar of fire that turns the sky into a deep and frightening fiery red. Finally, a shock wave moves across the land that literally knocks people off their feet, shattering windows hundreds of miles away and even knocking over a train. Eventually, the pillar of fire was replaced by a billowing tower of smoke that seemed to reach all the way into space. And think about this. Reports from the time say those blasts were deafeningly loud hundreds of miles away, and the skies three thousand miles away in Europe where it was still night, as well as all over Asia, were glowing. There are even several photographs that were taken around midnight in Scotland and Sweden that looked like they were shot during the day. But what was it? A meteor, a comet, maybe a ufo. It took scientists almost twenty years to actually reach the remote explosion site in Siberia. In nineteen twenty seven, a researcher visited the center of the blast, and it was forty years after the blast that anybody was able to interview the few eye witnesses that were still left. What really blew scientists away was the story these people told of the sky lighting up a few nights before the big blast took place that actually goes against everything we know about impact explosions caused by comets or meteors. The leading theory is that an asteroid or a comet exploded in the Earth's atmosphere, known as an air burst, releasing energy equal to as much as fifteen megatons of TNT. But again, there was no impact crater found, so that's still just a theory. And the problem with that theory is that early exploration of the site turned up absolutely no debris linked to an asteroid. And there are other theories too. Some scientists thought that natural gas leaking from the Earth could have been ignited by a meteor causing that huge explosion. That seemed speculative at best. Now, when you go into the more kind of outlandish explanations, there are some folks who think that an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed at Tunguska, causing the explosion, but sadly for UFO enthusiasts, that is not backed by any scientific evidence. The small amount of collected years after the fact was impossible to test due to environmental contamination. And there's another fascinating theory that goes against all the laws of nature. It's the black hole hypothesis. Some think that a tiny black hole passed through Earth's atmosphere, causing the explosion, but again no concrete evidence. Most importantly, what did the people who witness this thing imagine? The fear you'd feel, no explanation, and almost no way to communicate with the rest of the world about what you'd seen. A lot of them thought it was a sign of the end for humanity, sort of like what dinosaurs experienced millions of years earlier. Now, interestingly, the Tunguska explosion had a lasting impact on the world. It influenced policy on the monitoring of space objects and actually began asteroid tracking programs. It also became a fixture in pop culture, inspiring books, movies, TV shows like episodes of of Doctor Who, in The X Files, and of course countless conspiracy theories. So here's the question. Have we figured it out yet? No way. Over a century later, the Tunguska explosion, or event as they call it, is one of the twentieth century's greatest unsolved mysteries. Was it a natural, cosmic event or something else. It's just one example that shows we're still at the dawn of our understanding of our universe. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.

Well, this will knock your socks off. Literally. What if I told you there was an explosion in nineteen oh eight that was over two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But it wasn't mad made. I'm Patty Steele. To this day, nobody knows what caused the Tunguska event. That's next on the backstory. The backstory is back. Okay. It's a beautiful, peaceful summer morning, June thirtieth, nineteen oh eight. We're in the remote Tunguska region of Siberia, where daytime tempts in the summer can actually reach into the eighties. But suddenly the tranquility is shattered by an event so powerful it flattens more than two thousand square kilometers of forest, some eighty million trees. But oddly, it doesn't leave a crater. This massive blast was a Tunguska explosion, estimated to be around two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. Can you imagine the shock for the few eye witnesses. It was a very remote area. They were mostly local tribal folks, as well as Russian settlers looking for a life away from the big cities. What did they see and hear? Well? They describe a vivid blue light, almost as bright as the sun, and then a massive fireball streaking across the sky. Next came multiple deafening explosions, and then a pillar of fire that turns the sky into a deep and frightening fiery red. Finally, a shock wave moves across the land that literally knocks people off their feet, shattering windows hundreds of miles away and even knocking over a train. Eventually, the pillar of fire was replaced by a billowing tower of smoke that seemed to reach all the way into space. And think about this. Reports from the time say those blasts were deafeningly loud hundreds of miles away, and the skies three thousand miles away in Europe where it was still night, as well as all over Asia, were glowing. There are even several photographs that were taken around midnight in Scotland and Sweden that looked like they were shot during the day. But what was it? A meteor, a comet, maybe a ufo. It took scientists almost twenty years to actually reach the remote explosion site in Siberia. In nineteen twenty seven, a researcher visited the center of the blast, and it was forty years after the blast that anybody was able to interview the few eye witnesses that were still left. What really blew scientists away was the story these people told of the sky lighting up a few nights before the big blast took place that actually goes against everything we know about impact explosions caused by comets or meteors. The leading theory is that an asteroid or a comet exploded in the Earth's atmosphere, known as an air burst, releasing energy equal to as much as fifteen megatons of TNT. But again, there was no impact crater found, so that's still just a theory. And the problem with that theory is that early exploration of the site turned up absolutely no debris linked to an asteroid. And there are other theories too. Some scientists thought that natural gas leaking from the Earth could have been ignited by a meteor causing that huge explosion. That seemed speculative at best. Now, when you go into the more kind of outlandish explanations, there are some folks who think that an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed at Tunguska, causing the explosion, but sadly for UFO enthusiasts, that is not backed by any scientific evidence. The small amount of collected years after the fact was impossible to test due to environmental contamination. And there's another fascinating theory that goes against all the laws of nature. It's the black hole hypothesis. Some think that a tiny black hole passed through Earth's atmosphere, causing the explosion, but again no concrete evidence. Most importantly, what did the people who witness this thing imagine? The fear you'd feel, no explanation, and almost no way to communicate with the rest of the world about what you'd seen. A lot of them thought it was a sign of the end for humanity, sort of like what dinosaurs experienced millions of years earlier. Now, interestingly, the Tunguska explosion had a lasting impact on the world. It influenced policy on the monitoring of space objects and actually began asteroid tracking programs. It also became a fixture in pop culture, inspiring books, movies, TV shows like episodes of of Doctor Who, in The X Files, and of course countless conspiracy theories. So here's the question. Have we figured it out yet? No way. Over a century later, the Tunguska explosion, or event as they call it, is one of the twentieth century's greatest unsolved mysteries. Was it a natural, cosmic event or something else. It's just one example that shows we're still at the dawn of our understanding of our universe. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.