Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh. This episode is a little bit of a history mystery. It's also got a good bit of scientific work to counter that mystery. But there's still that little slip her that remains of uncertainty that keeps people guessing Slash. I think interested and also just hopeful that it will turn out to be something crazy. Right. Yeah, we are talking today about something that I think a lot of people know a little bit about. Uh. We'll talk about why at the end. In terms of popular culture, which is the Tunguska event. It's a strange phenomenon that happened in and there is good news because while this was I think you could categorize it as a catastrophic event, it is not really a sad topic. Fortunately, as we'll discuss the moment. It happened in a place where people did not really get hurt. There's one maybe unsubstantiated animals were harmed, but probably not people. Yes, Uh, and I think probably what happened to the animals happened so quickly there was not really suffering. Uh. It is a fascinating look at the ways in which our planet can surprise and mystify us and offer up questions that we still can't answer, even after more than a hundred years of trying to figure them out. Yeah. I think this is one that somebody recently was like, I'm surprised you haven't talked about this. I am surprised we haven't either, Like, I think I had it in my head for a while, because it's always something I'm like, oh, yeah, that is interesting. Surely the previous hosts have done it, and even though we have been here for a while, I would not put any bets on my ability to conjure what has and hasn't been covered by previous hosts. I also am never surprised because it's the world is just so huge, yes, yea. So on n at approximately seven am, the guy over Siberia lit up with what was described by witnesses as a massive fireball or the sky engulfed in fire. And then there was a bang and a crash and a series of smaller thunking noises like objects falling from the sky. Yeah. But I want to make clear that while it's described that way. We'll we'll get to the lack of those objects as we discuss UH. The area around what is known as the Middle Tunguska River in Siberia is not densely populated, and it was even less so in nineteen o eight, which was a good thing. Had there been more people in the area when the largest explosion known to man and it still holds that title took place, it would likely have resulted in a massive loss of human life. I read one thing last night that said something like, if this had happened over London, like the whole world would have really felt like a much bigger impact because it's almost impossible to calculate how devastating it would have been. Um. There were some deaths, which was primarily herds of reindeer. Uh. There was one human who was allegedly flung against a tree and died. That account is not substantiated. When this blast, which came as a complete surprise, happened, it was felt across long distances. Windows broke in homes that were as far away as thirty five miles or sixty kilometers from the explosion, and estimated two thousand square kilometers of forest were destroyed. Places as far away as Great Britain felt the earth shaking, and in places where people didn't perceive a rumbling seismographs still picked up a wave of activity that actually circled the globe. It registered a second time in Germany YEA. Some accounts will say it circled the globe multiple times, but uh the second time specifically is mentioned in one of the researchers the early researchers report. So the estimated power of this mystery explosion is really hard to comprehend, and apparently it is just as hard to estimate. It is often compared to the power of atomic bombs, but with sources claiming it as anywhere from a hundred and eighty five times more powerful than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima to one thousand times more powerful. I witness accounts are almost difficult to believe. They sound were like the sorts of things that you would read about in an apocalyptic novel. There were claims that a low to the earth flying star flew across the sky and that a pillar of fire trailed it. One witness said quote the sky split into and fire appeared high and wide over the forest. The split in the sky grew larger and the entire northern side was covered with fire. A man who had been sitting on his porch forty miles away from the epicenter of the event described the sensation that his shirt had caught fire. Yes, so there's a lot of heat, noise, visual fire. Fortunately, So just for clarity, because we mentioned earlier that this did not really claim a lot of human lives, and it was in a fairly sparsely populated area. The major primary part of it, we'll talk about this in a moment, happened over a forest that was completely undeveloped, and so these eyewitnesses were in homes and areas that were outside of that forest. So that is why there are eyewitness accounts, but not a lot of death and destruction in terms of human life. There was a massive and I mean massive blast wave of wind that followed the explosion that resulted in reports that horses, even hundreds of kilometers away were unable to remain standing. Humans and fences were simply blown around. But this blast wave is also credited with extinguishing the fire that came with the explosion. And maybe the most odd were the accounts of things that happened in far distant places following the blast and Great Britain, it was reported that the sky remained bright into the night, so much so that people could easily read outdoors and play cricket in the dead of night. That same illumination covered the rest of Europe in parts of Asia as well. Yeah, and it went on for several days, which seems like a completely strange and weird apocalyptic event. But even though this startling thing had happened in the Tunguska area, no one from the scientific community really went to check it out. One would think that curious scientists and researchers would flock to a location where such an unusual event had taken place, But again, this took place in central Siberia, an area notorious for having a harsh climate, making travel challenging. The Middle Tunguska River area has impassively difficult winters, and it can get really swampy in its warmer season, which offers a whole separate set of challenges. In the early nineteen twenties, mineralogist Leonid Kulik, who was the St. Petersburg Museum's chief curator of their meteorite collection, had become deeply interested in this strange event, and he spent the next several years trying to get the government to agree to a research trip. Finally, in ninety seven, nearly two decades after this strange explosion at Tunguska, while the Soviet Union was in power at this point, because you remember, there had been a big power shift in the area, Kulick and his team finally traveled into the area to investigate, and even after two decades, the damage was both extensive and very obvious. As Kulik and his men approached the location where this explosion was reported to have taken place, they saw that the trees had been completely flattened. Leaning outward from the center of the blast, the section of flattened forest was thirty one miles or fifty kilometers wide, although it was not a perfect circle, but more of an elongated shape that Kulik would later describe as eccentric radial. Yes, sometimes you'll see it described as almost like a kind of a deformed butterfly shape as well. But Kulik did not find the crater that he expected at the center of all of that destruction. Instead, the trees there in what would be the epicenter or stripped bare of foliage and arc. But they stood upright. They're broken trunks, still rising straight into the air. He also anticipated finding remnants of a meteorite, but none were recovered by his team. Theorized the lack of a crater and meteoric rock can be attributed to the soft, mucky earth in the area, and that whatever had hit it had sunk into the mucky ground. He wrote about this theory and a report published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In addition to the explosion itself, there was an aftermath of particular debris, which Kulik described in the paper quote huge masses of the finest substance sprayed by the meteorite in its flight through the atmosphere and raised by the explosion in the Earth's crust. Due to the cosmic speed of the impact of the meteorite caused a heavy blanket of dust in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and the formation at a height from eighty three to eight five kilometers of silvery clouds, light clouds and dust screens on the sea ling and in the lower layers of the stratosphere. Thus were produced those remarkable phenomena called night dawns, which were of incomparable beauty. These were observed on the day of the fall, from the place of its occurrence as far as Spain and from Fenno, Scandia to the Black Sea. We're going to rewind a little bit to talk about some work that Kulik actually did to try to get information before that trip, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Right before the break, we read a little bit from Kulik's report on all of this, and some of what he wrote about actually had been published before. He had mounted an expedition in nineteen twenty one that gathered accounts of the event, but it didn't actually make it to the site. Uh. That was how Leon and Kulik had first really gotten a sense of what had happened at Tunguska. He kind of again, it's very impassable, difficult to get to and I will point out when more time and undeveloped forests, so it's not take a place where there are roads and it's just hard to get over them. There wasn't any way to get to places. It's not going to have people passing by and seeing what happened. Right. Uh. And certainly there's no infrastructure there for him to just put it all on the jeep and go. But most scientists just did not take those accounts seriously. We talked about all the time how eyewitness accounts aren't always trustworthy. These were gathered some years after the event, so there's already that passage of time that that makes already potentially fallible memory even more fuzzy. Uh. And it just it wasn't coming from scientists, it was coming from locals. But because Kulik was also able to get ahold of seismic wave data that confirmed that something certainly had happened in Siberia in nineteen o eight, this event started to garner more serious scientific interest. Culick's writing on the subject of the event was not the result of just one visit. He went again in eight with an assistant he refers to as a cinema operator, meaning a cameraman. The images captured on the trip were so stark and startling that they led to another expedition in Yeah, if you we will use one of those images as our show art. But if you just look around on the internet for like a tiny amount of time, you will see them they're astonishing. They really do look just completely alien and bizarre. On the trip, Kulik was joined by a geobotanist named Lvi Shumiliva and another scientist named E. L. Crin Off, and they also had a group of workmen that traveled with them over the course of a year and a half. The numbers of of work when they had at any given time varied a little bit um, but their mission was basically to thoroughly study the area and its climate and document everything was really detailed notes. Over the course of the journey, the research team investigated points of interests that might have proven pertinent to the nineteen o eight event. There are a lot of side trips to look at intensions in the earth and see if those might be where debris fell, and they also carefully tracked the shifting seasons to analyze if climate conditions may have contributed. Kula wrote his conclusion as to what exactly had taken place, quote, we know that on June behind the Podkamanya Tung, an enormous iron meteorite fell. We may imagine that this body broke into pieces, first in the air and then into the earth crust, which it penetrated in a number of discrete fragments, and that they're in the crust. These fragments burst into still smaller pieces under the action of the escaping incandescent gases which were produced at the time. Yes, so he believed that this meteorite had exploded in midair, which is why there were no there was no crater, and that the pieces that then slammed into the earth and went underground also exploded some more, and that that basically broke them up to the point that it was difficult. But he did believe that you could potentially find large pieces of nicolae is iron down in the earth under the central point of the explosion, and he thought those would be buried less than eighty two ft that's about twenty five down. So kulis trips to central Siberia provided previously unknown details about the Tangoska event to the world outside of the immediate area, but also opened up this whole Pandora's box of questions about what really happened there and why there was no impact crater. Series about Tunguska range from scientifically supported and plausible to downright kukie. So we're going to start off with some of the more outlandish ones and work our way up to the harder science explanations. I like how every history mystery ranges from right too. Oh it was mold. How you started on like the most bananas one and I started on the most straightforward one. So uranium was discovered in seventeen eighty nine, and at the end of the nineteenth century, experiments and nuclear energy were really beginning in Earnest Ressus St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences started Earnest work in radioactive materials the year after the Tangusca explosion. But there have been conspiracy theories that have suggested that nuclear energy and specifically weapons further along in the globe than the global public new in night, and that some sort of nuclear explosion caused this craterless Tangusca event. Yeah, that's one of those great uh perfect storm theories of like, of course there's no evidence it was all covered up and uh they didn't know what they were doing yet because it was all done in secret. Uh, there's really no there was no radioactive uh material or measurement taken that would suggest that that was the case. What again, is a history mystery without the involvement of aliens as an explanation for strange events. There have been a number of hoaxes where people claim to have evidence of aliens landing to Aungusca, and sometimes the alien explanation and the nuclear explosion explanation are conflated. They formed sort of a fun ven diagram, uh and it becomes about a spaceship's nuclear power source malfunctioning and exploding. But again, no radioactivity was measured to support any of these, so probably both. Our favorite theory, even if we don't believe it at all, is that this whole thing was the result of Nicola Tesla losing control of a wireless power transmitter he had been working on, which could also serve as a death ray. This theory is based on the idea that Tesla may have been attempting to contact explore Robert Peary as he camped on Ellesmere Island preparing to attempt to reach the North Pole. Also, there's just a lot of talk about Tesla developing a death ray. Also. Yeah, and even some of Tesla's writing is a little uh nutty enough that people can kind of pick and cherry pick it a little bit to support these kinds of ideas. It's not a death ray. I mean, I don't want to shut anybody's dreams down, but I feel confident saying this was not Nicola Tesla shooting a death ray. Now, but even as all manner of fanciful explanations have surfaced and even taken on lives of their own, scientists have been working on this puzzle as well, and they have come up with some additional theories, some building on the ideas of Culic and others going in slightly different directions. Another expedition went to the Tunguska site for additional research, and this group found material that seems to support Kulik's hypothesis. They recovered nickel, heavy silicate and magnetite samples from the ground at the site, which backed up this whole meteorite theory. To create the kind of effect that happened at Tegusca, scientists have estimated that a meteorite would have had to be somewhere between a hundred and fifty and three hundred feet or between fifty and hundred meters in diameter. Yeah, and those samples were teeny teeny tiny, Like there's a reason just in case it's unclear where you're like, how come they found samples and he didn't returning less than a millimeter in size? They are itty bitty tiny. In a paper published Detailing and expedition to the site in nineteen sixty one, researcher KP. Florensky continued the meteorite hypothesis, but also knew that this needed still more study, writing quote, The investigation into the distribution of meteoric dust in the area of the fall permits us with a high degree of probability to speak of physically observed fragments from the Tunguska meteorite and the nature of their scattering. However, to transform the probability into full certainty, the distribution of this material must be the subject of study in conjunction with the general study of cosmic dust and its propagation. In ninety three, authors A. A. Jackson the Fourth and MP. Ryan Jr. Published a paper and the Periodical Nature, putting forth the theory that the Tanuska event may have been the result of a tiny black hole hitting the earth writing quote. Since the black hole would leave no creator or a material residue, it explains the mystery of the tongus event. The following year, Nature published another paper written by William H. Beasley and Brian A. Tinsley the rather direct contradictory title of tongus event was not caused by a black hole. There are a few instances of back and forth with these theories, where the follow up written by somebody else's like no, no girl, that was not a thing, no honey um And as part of the takedown of that black hole theory, Beasley and Tensley right quote. The air blast could also have resulted from the impact of a small black hole with a diameter of the order of Angstrom's and an asteroidal mass. The black hole would however, have passed through the Earth in ten to fifteen minutes and caused a similar explosion at the point of exit. For what it's worth, Jackson and Ryan did point out in their own paper that the quote exit proves a check on the whole hypothesis, and they suggest us said that oceanographic and shipping records should be consulted for anything that might suggest disturbances in the proper exit point that would have happened in nineteen o eight. In the late nineteen seventies, things circle back around once again to the idea that an object from space had been the cause of the Tunguska event, and we're going to talk about some of that research right after we come back from another little sponsor break. In November ninety l Krazac published a paper in the Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of Czechoslovakia asserting that the cause of the Tunguska event had been a fragment of the comet Anka. Because comments are made primarily of ice and not rock, this idea explained why there would be no impact debris ever recovered from the site. It would have just evaporated in the atmosphere. In two thousand seven, Italian scientists put forth another reason why no impact creator had ever been discovered. It had filled with water and looked like any other lake the I can question Like Checho is, according to the Italian team, unrecorded before the Tunguska event, and it has an unusual funnel like shape to its bed that made the team think it could actually be an impact crater. There are a lot of detractors to this whole theory, pointing out that trees very near Lake Checko are mature and old enough that they would have been flattened by such an event, like the other trees in the area where Yeah, and then there's that thing where it's like it's in the middle of Siberia. So there's lots of stuff that wasn't mapped before them. Um, yeah, that is not a popular one. In samples from a layer of earth from Tunguska that would have been settled there in eight revealed microscopic rock fragments that had indeed originated in a meteorite. Even analysis doesn't entirely solve this mystery, though. For one, it's not certain that all the fragments that they found were actually from eight and for another, there are anybody fragments of meteorites solid for the planet, and there's stuff from space hitting the planet literally all the time. So even a positive I d of meteoric origin doesn't necessarily rule out other possibilities, but it is still by far the most substantiated explanation. Two more thoroughly work through the exact steps to explain the century old riddle of Tungusca. Scientists Natalia A. Artemieva and Valerie VI Shuvalov, in a paper published in looked at two other incidents for comparisons to TUNGUSCA one was the collision of comet shoemaker Levy nine with Jupiter, and then the February Chilly A Binsmedia which exploded over to Chilliabinsk, Russia and blew out windows over a two hundred square mile area. You may have seen footage of that on YouTube. It is terrifying. So their paper suggests that in the Tunguska event number one, a meteor zipped into earth atmosphere, chugging along somewhere between nine and ten miles per second. Number two year the incoming object was broken apart in the atmosphere, and number three the rock, which had to have been very brittle, broke into teeny tiny vapor like particles that flash burned in the atmosphere. That air bursts would have been like a massive bomb going off, creating an impact of force that slammed into the ground, leveled trees, and left that particulate matter in the atmosphere, which explains that strange silver sky event sort of reported in witness accounts, and that account we mentioned earlier about the sky in Britain being bright enough for a cricket match. It is believed that that strange nighttime light phenomenon was the result of sunlight reflecting off of scattered dust in the atmosphere, which could have come from Earth kicked up from the planet's surface, and from the meteorite breaking up into the finest of particles. This really goes back to Kulik's early work. So this is one of those history mysteries that continues to capture the attention of the scientific community as they strive to find really conclusive data that points with one certainty to the exact cause of the event. It's difficult because we have a sample set of exactly one. There has not been another event on this scale and in recorded time for researchers to compare it to. We we do know of other massive meteorites hitting the Earth, but like once, we're okay, there's the the obvious craters right there, Nothing quite like this at this massive scale has happened. But incidentally, though, it is estimated that Earth takes a hit from an asteroid the size of the one that most likely hit Tunguska about every three hundred years, so we might have another data point soon. In the meantime, though, if you'd like to explore the Tunguska Event. From a more fictional perspective, you've got lots of options. Even though there are as plenty of scientific work focusing on explaining and understanding what happened in Siberia, the remaining mystery is enough to fuel all kinds of fictional versions of the Tunguska Event. Yeah, that's probably how many people have heard of it. When I mentioned it to my husband, he brought up immediately, Oh, they talked about that on the X Files, and they did. It has also been mentioned on Dr Who, on Star Trek, It's mentioned in the movie Hellboy. I mean, there is a list a mile long of things that have used the Tunguska Event as a part of fiction. It even shows up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer at one point, although they get the details of it wrong, Like Willow mentions it and I think she says it happened in nineteen seventeen, which would have been the Bolshevik Revolution and not this um. But so it really is kind of pervasive. I think in in nerd circles it's almost like shorthand of like a fun kind of paranormally thing, but not really like most people recognize the science. But if you read the comic that told the prequel story of Transformers, Dark of the Mood, you know the real story of Tungusca, which is that it was caused by the Decepticon shockwave. That's what I'm gonna stick to. I've not seen that so, but I do know what a Transformer is and a Decepticon yeah, uh yeah, and again it you'd have to read the comic that like the supplemental material, it's not in the movie. The movie doesn't. I don't think the movie touches on it. I honestly don't know. I'm not having the hugest fan of the Transformers movies. Um, but I did see that comic because someone mentioned that it had this event in it. The abesome listener mail for us, I do, uh. And it is another one that is sort of about our windsor McKay episodes, but it mentions the thing I didn't mention and probably should have. Uh. It is our listener Courtney, and Courtney writes, Hi, I just started listening to part two of the windsor McKay episode and had to pause to write you this note. When I heard you mentioned little Nemo, I had a vague but very fond memory of an animated movie from my childhood called Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland that was a big non Disney favorite of my brothers and I for a few years. The movie came out in nine, but I remember watching it on repeat when I was probably in the six to eight age range. It turns out it was based on Windsor McKay's comic strip. Uh says, maybe you're about to talk about it in the episode, so I'm sorry if by being repetitive, but I was so struck at hearing this blast from the past UH that she wanted to go ahead and write in I did not talk about it on that episode because it is based on it, but it's not. It's made by completely different people. I also will confess I have never watched it, which is no shade to it. It's just never been one of those things that hit my television screen. But it does exist. So I'm glad she mentioned it because that could be a point of confusion if people are looking for windsor McKay things that is made by other people that were Uh inspired by windsor McKay, including I think Chris Columbus worked on it, which has gone who's gone on to work on everything, including he's one of the producers on the earliest Harry Potter movies and basically, if you look at his IMDb page, he's touched a lot of things you've probably watched. But yeah, that is not related to windsor McKay directly, but inspired by him. So thank you for mentioning that, Courtney, because that would have been a good thing to mention in the episode. If you would like to email us, you can do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com. You can also find us across the spectrum of social media as Missed in History and Missed in History dot com is our website address where you can come and visit us and see every episode of the show that has ever existed. We also have show notes for any of the shows that Tracy and I have worked on together. So come and visit us at missed in History dot com and we can all jaunt through history together. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetop works dot com.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh. This episode is a little bit of a history mystery. It's also got a good bit of scientific work to counter that mystery. But there's still that little slip her that remains of uncertainty that keeps people guessing Slash. I think interested and also just hopeful that it will turn out to be something crazy. Right. Yeah, we are talking today about something that I think a lot of people know a little bit about. Uh. We'll talk about why at the end. In terms of popular culture, which is the Tunguska event. It's a strange phenomenon that happened in and there is good news because while this was I think you could categorize it as a catastrophic event, it is not really a sad topic. Fortunately, as we'll discuss the moment. It happened in a place where people did not really get hurt. There's one maybe unsubstantiated animals were harmed, but probably not people. Yes, Uh, and I think probably what happened to the animals happened so quickly there was not really suffering. Uh. It is a fascinating look at the ways in which our planet can surprise and mystify us and offer up questions that we still can't answer, even after more than a hundred years of trying to figure them out. Yeah. I think this is one that somebody recently was like, I'm surprised you haven't talked about this. I am surprised we haven't either, Like, I think I had it in my head for a while, because it's always something I'm like, oh, yeah, that is interesting. Surely the previous hosts have done it, and even though we have been here for a while, I would not put any bets on my ability to conjure what has and hasn't been covered by previous hosts. I also am never surprised because it's the world is just so huge, yes, yea. So on n at approximately seven am, the guy over Siberia lit up with what was described by witnesses as a massive fireball or the sky engulfed in fire. And then there was a bang and a crash and a series of smaller thunking noises like objects falling from the sky. Yeah. But I want to make clear that while it's described that way. We'll we'll get to the lack of those objects as we discuss UH. The area around what is known as the Middle Tunguska River in Siberia is not densely populated, and it was even less so in nineteen o eight, which was a good thing. Had there been more people in the area when the largest explosion known to man and it still holds that title took place, it would likely have resulted in a massive loss of human life. I read one thing last night that said something like, if this had happened over London, like the whole world would have really felt like a much bigger impact because it's almost impossible to calculate how devastating it would have been. Um. There were some deaths, which was primarily herds of reindeer. Uh. There was one human who was allegedly flung against a tree and died. That account is not substantiated. When this blast, which came as a complete surprise, happened, it was felt across long distances. Windows broke in homes that were as far away as thirty five miles or sixty kilometers from the explosion, and estimated two thousand square kilometers of forest were destroyed. Places as far away as Great Britain felt the earth shaking, and in places where people didn't perceive a rumbling seismographs still picked up a wave of activity that actually circled the globe. It registered a second time in Germany YEA. Some accounts will say it circled the globe multiple times, but uh the second time specifically is mentioned in one of the researchers the early researchers report. So the estimated power of this mystery explosion is really hard to comprehend, and apparently it is just as hard to estimate. It is often compared to the power of atomic bombs, but with sources claiming it as anywhere from a hundred and eighty five times more powerful than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima to one thousand times more powerful. I witness accounts are almost difficult to believe. They sound were like the sorts of things that you would read about in an apocalyptic novel. There were claims that a low to the earth flying star flew across the sky and that a pillar of fire trailed it. One witness said quote the sky split into and fire appeared high and wide over the forest. The split in the sky grew larger and the entire northern side was covered with fire. A man who had been sitting on his porch forty miles away from the epicenter of the event described the sensation that his shirt had caught fire. Yes, so there's a lot of heat, noise, visual fire. Fortunately, So just for clarity, because we mentioned earlier that this did not really claim a lot of human lives, and it was in a fairly sparsely populated area. The major primary part of it, we'll talk about this in a moment, happened over a forest that was completely undeveloped, and so these eyewitnesses were in homes and areas that were outside of that forest. So that is why there are eyewitness accounts, but not a lot of death and destruction in terms of human life. There was a massive and I mean massive blast wave of wind that followed the explosion that resulted in reports that horses, even hundreds of kilometers away were unable to remain standing. Humans and fences were simply blown around. But this blast wave is also credited with extinguishing the fire that came with the explosion. And maybe the most odd were the accounts of things that happened in far distant places following the blast and Great Britain, it was reported that the sky remained bright into the night, so much so that people could easily read outdoors and play cricket in the dead of night. That same illumination covered the rest of Europe in parts of Asia as well. Yeah, and it went on for several days, which seems like a completely strange and weird apocalyptic event. But even though this startling thing had happened in the Tunguska area, no one from the scientific community really went to check it out. One would think that curious scientists and researchers would flock to a location where such an unusual event had taken place, But again, this took place in central Siberia, an area notorious for having a harsh climate, making travel challenging. The Middle Tunguska River area has impassively difficult winters, and it can get really swampy in its warmer season, which offers a whole separate set of challenges. In the early nineteen twenties, mineralogist Leonid Kulik, who was the St. Petersburg Museum's chief curator of their meteorite collection, had become deeply interested in this strange event, and he spent the next several years trying to get the government to agree to a research trip. Finally, in ninety seven, nearly two decades after this strange explosion at Tunguska, while the Soviet Union was in power at this point, because you remember, there had been a big power shift in the area, Kulick and his team finally traveled into the area to investigate, and even after two decades, the damage was both extensive and very obvious. As Kulik and his men approached the location where this explosion was reported to have taken place, they saw that the trees had been completely flattened. Leaning outward from the center of the blast, the section of flattened forest was thirty one miles or fifty kilometers wide, although it was not a perfect circle, but more of an elongated shape that Kulik would later describe as eccentric radial. Yes, sometimes you'll see it described as almost like a kind of a deformed butterfly shape as well. But Kulik did not find the crater that he expected at the center of all of that destruction. Instead, the trees there in what would be the epicenter or stripped bare of foliage and arc. But they stood upright. They're broken trunks, still rising straight into the air. He also anticipated finding remnants of a meteorite, but none were recovered by his team. Theorized the lack of a crater and meteoric rock can be attributed to the soft, mucky earth in the area, and that whatever had hit it had sunk into the mucky ground. He wrote about this theory and a report published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In addition to the explosion itself, there was an aftermath of particular debris, which Kulik described in the paper quote huge masses of the finest substance sprayed by the meteorite in its flight through the atmosphere and raised by the explosion in the Earth's crust. Due to the cosmic speed of the impact of the meteorite caused a heavy blanket of dust in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and the formation at a height from eighty three to eight five kilometers of silvery clouds, light clouds and dust screens on the sea ling and in the lower layers of the stratosphere. Thus were produced those remarkable phenomena called night dawns, which were of incomparable beauty. These were observed on the day of the fall, from the place of its occurrence as far as Spain and from Fenno, Scandia to the Black Sea. We're going to rewind a little bit to talk about some work that Kulik actually did to try to get information before that trip, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Right before the break, we read a little bit from Kulik's report on all of this, and some of what he wrote about actually had been published before. He had mounted an expedition in nineteen twenty one that gathered accounts of the event, but it didn't actually make it to the site. Uh. That was how Leon and Kulik had first really gotten a sense of what had happened at Tunguska. He kind of again, it's very impassable, difficult to get to and I will point out when more time and undeveloped forests, so it's not take a place where there are roads and it's just hard to get over them. There wasn't any way to get to places. It's not going to have people passing by and seeing what happened. Right. Uh. And certainly there's no infrastructure there for him to just put it all on the jeep and go. But most scientists just did not take those accounts seriously. We talked about all the time how eyewitness accounts aren't always trustworthy. These were gathered some years after the event, so there's already that passage of time that that makes already potentially fallible memory even more fuzzy. Uh. And it just it wasn't coming from scientists, it was coming from locals. But because Kulik was also able to get ahold of seismic wave data that confirmed that something certainly had happened in Siberia in nineteen o eight, this event started to garner more serious scientific interest. Culick's writing on the subject of the event was not the result of just one visit. He went again in eight with an assistant he refers to as a cinema operator, meaning a cameraman. The images captured on the trip were so stark and startling that they led to another expedition in Yeah, if you we will use one of those images as our show art. But if you just look around on the internet for like a tiny amount of time, you will see them they're astonishing. They really do look just completely alien and bizarre. On the trip, Kulik was joined by a geobotanist named Lvi Shumiliva and another scientist named E. L. Crin Off, and they also had a group of workmen that traveled with them over the course of a year and a half. The numbers of of work when they had at any given time varied a little bit um, but their mission was basically to thoroughly study the area and its climate and document everything was really detailed notes. Over the course of the journey, the research team investigated points of interests that might have proven pertinent to the nineteen o eight event. There are a lot of side trips to look at intensions in the earth and see if those might be where debris fell, and they also carefully tracked the shifting seasons to analyze if climate conditions may have contributed. Kula wrote his conclusion as to what exactly had taken place, quote, we know that on June behind the Podkamanya Tung, an enormous iron meteorite fell. We may imagine that this body broke into pieces, first in the air and then into the earth crust, which it penetrated in a number of discrete fragments, and that they're in the crust. These fragments burst into still smaller pieces under the action of the escaping incandescent gases which were produced at the time. Yes, so he believed that this meteorite had exploded in midair, which is why there were no there was no crater, and that the pieces that then slammed into the earth and went underground also exploded some more, and that that basically broke them up to the point that it was difficult. But he did believe that you could potentially find large pieces of nicolae is iron down in the earth under the central point of the explosion, and he thought those would be buried less than eighty two ft that's about twenty five down. So kulis trips to central Siberia provided previously unknown details about the Tangoska event to the world outside of the immediate area, but also opened up this whole Pandora's box of questions about what really happened there and why there was no impact crater. Series about Tunguska range from scientifically supported and plausible to downright kukie. So we're going to start off with some of the more outlandish ones and work our way up to the harder science explanations. I like how every history mystery ranges from right too. Oh it was mold. How you started on like the most bananas one and I started on the most straightforward one. So uranium was discovered in seventeen eighty nine, and at the end of the nineteenth century, experiments and nuclear energy were really beginning in Earnest Ressus St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences started Earnest work in radioactive materials the year after the Tangusca explosion. But there have been conspiracy theories that have suggested that nuclear energy and specifically weapons further along in the globe than the global public new in night, and that some sort of nuclear explosion caused this craterless Tangusca event. Yeah, that's one of those great uh perfect storm theories of like, of course there's no evidence it was all covered up and uh they didn't know what they were doing yet because it was all done in secret. Uh, there's really no there was no radioactive uh material or measurement taken that would suggest that that was the case. What again, is a history mystery without the involvement of aliens as an explanation for strange events. There have been a number of hoaxes where people claim to have evidence of aliens landing to Aungusca, and sometimes the alien explanation and the nuclear explosion explanation are conflated. They formed sort of a fun ven diagram, uh and it becomes about a spaceship's nuclear power source malfunctioning and exploding. But again, no radioactivity was measured to support any of these, so probably both. Our favorite theory, even if we don't believe it at all, is that this whole thing was the result of Nicola Tesla losing control of a wireless power transmitter he had been working on, which could also serve as a death ray. This theory is based on the idea that Tesla may have been attempting to contact explore Robert Peary as he camped on Ellesmere Island preparing to attempt to reach the North Pole. Also, there's just a lot of talk about Tesla developing a death ray. Also. Yeah, and even some of Tesla's writing is a little uh nutty enough that people can kind of pick and cherry pick it a little bit to support these kinds of ideas. It's not a death ray. I mean, I don't want to shut anybody's dreams down, but I feel confident saying this was not Nicola Tesla shooting a death ray. Now, but even as all manner of fanciful explanations have surfaced and even taken on lives of their own, scientists have been working on this puzzle as well, and they have come up with some additional theories, some building on the ideas of Culic and others going in slightly different directions. Another expedition went to the Tunguska site for additional research, and this group found material that seems to support Kulik's hypothesis. They recovered nickel, heavy silicate and magnetite samples from the ground at the site, which backed up this whole meteorite theory. To create the kind of effect that happened at Tegusca, scientists have estimated that a meteorite would have had to be somewhere between a hundred and fifty and three hundred feet or between fifty and hundred meters in diameter. Yeah, and those samples were teeny teeny tiny, Like there's a reason just in case it's unclear where you're like, how come they found samples and he didn't returning less than a millimeter in size? They are itty bitty tiny. In a paper published Detailing and expedition to the site in nineteen sixty one, researcher KP. Florensky continued the meteorite hypothesis, but also knew that this needed still more study, writing quote, The investigation into the distribution of meteoric dust in the area of the fall permits us with a high degree of probability to speak of physically observed fragments from the Tunguska meteorite and the nature of their scattering. However, to transform the probability into full certainty, the distribution of this material must be the subject of study in conjunction with the general study of cosmic dust and its propagation. In ninety three, authors A. A. Jackson the Fourth and MP. Ryan Jr. Published a paper and the Periodical Nature, putting forth the theory that the Tanuska event may have been the result of a tiny black hole hitting the earth writing quote. Since the black hole would leave no creator or a material residue, it explains the mystery of the tongus event. The following year, Nature published another paper written by William H. Beasley and Brian A. Tinsley the rather direct contradictory title of tongus event was not caused by a black hole. There are a few instances of back and forth with these theories, where the follow up written by somebody else's like no, no girl, that was not a thing, no honey um And as part of the takedown of that black hole theory, Beasley and Tensley right quote. The air blast could also have resulted from the impact of a small black hole with a diameter of the order of Angstrom's and an asteroidal mass. The black hole would however, have passed through the Earth in ten to fifteen minutes and caused a similar explosion at the point of exit. For what it's worth, Jackson and Ryan did point out in their own paper that the quote exit proves a check on the whole hypothesis, and they suggest us said that oceanographic and shipping records should be consulted for anything that might suggest disturbances in the proper exit point that would have happened in nineteen o eight. In the late nineteen seventies, things circle back around once again to the idea that an object from space had been the cause of the Tunguska event, and we're going to talk about some of that research right after we come back from another little sponsor break. In November ninety l Krazac published a paper in the Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of Czechoslovakia asserting that the cause of the Tunguska event had been a fragment of the comet Anka. Because comments are made primarily of ice and not rock, this idea explained why there would be no impact debris ever recovered from the site. It would have just evaporated in the atmosphere. In two thousand seven, Italian scientists put forth another reason why no impact creator had ever been discovered. It had filled with water and looked like any other lake the I can question Like Checho is, according to the Italian team, unrecorded before the Tunguska event, and it has an unusual funnel like shape to its bed that made the team think it could actually be an impact crater. There are a lot of detractors to this whole theory, pointing out that trees very near Lake Checko are mature and old enough that they would have been flattened by such an event, like the other trees in the area where Yeah, and then there's that thing where it's like it's in the middle of Siberia. So there's lots of stuff that wasn't mapped before them. Um, yeah, that is not a popular one. In samples from a layer of earth from Tunguska that would have been settled there in eight revealed microscopic rock fragments that had indeed originated in a meteorite. Even analysis doesn't entirely solve this mystery, though. For one, it's not certain that all the fragments that they found were actually from eight and for another, there are anybody fragments of meteorites solid for the planet, and there's stuff from space hitting the planet literally all the time. So even a positive I d of meteoric origin doesn't necessarily rule out other possibilities, but it is still by far the most substantiated explanation. Two more thoroughly work through the exact steps to explain the century old riddle of Tungusca. Scientists Natalia A. Artemieva and Valerie VI Shuvalov, in a paper published in looked at two other incidents for comparisons to TUNGUSCA one was the collision of comet shoemaker Levy nine with Jupiter, and then the February Chilly A Binsmedia which exploded over to Chilliabinsk, Russia and blew out windows over a two hundred square mile area. You may have seen footage of that on YouTube. It is terrifying. So their paper suggests that in the Tunguska event number one, a meteor zipped into earth atmosphere, chugging along somewhere between nine and ten miles per second. Number two year the incoming object was broken apart in the atmosphere, and number three the rock, which had to have been very brittle, broke into teeny tiny vapor like particles that flash burned in the atmosphere. That air bursts would have been like a massive bomb going off, creating an impact of force that slammed into the ground, leveled trees, and left that particulate matter in the atmosphere, which explains that strange silver sky event sort of reported in witness accounts, and that account we mentioned earlier about the sky in Britain being bright enough for a cricket match. It is believed that that strange nighttime light phenomenon was the result of sunlight reflecting off of scattered dust in the atmosphere, which could have come from Earth kicked up from the planet's surface, and from the meteorite breaking up into the finest of particles. This really goes back to Kulik's early work. So this is one of those history mysteries that continues to capture the attention of the scientific community as they strive to find really conclusive data that points with one certainty to the exact cause of the event. It's difficult because we have a sample set of exactly one. There has not been another event on this scale and in recorded time for researchers to compare it to. We we do know of other massive meteorites hitting the Earth, but like once, we're okay, there's the the obvious craters right there, Nothing quite like this at this massive scale has happened. But incidentally, though, it is estimated that Earth takes a hit from an asteroid the size of the one that most likely hit Tunguska about every three hundred years, so we might have another data point soon. In the meantime, though, if you'd like to explore the Tunguska Event. From a more fictional perspective, you've got lots of options. Even though there are as plenty of scientific work focusing on explaining and understanding what happened in Siberia, the remaining mystery is enough to fuel all kinds of fictional versions of the Tunguska Event. Yeah, that's probably how many people have heard of it. When I mentioned it to my husband, he brought up immediately, Oh, they talked about that on the X Files, and they did. It has also been mentioned on Dr Who, on Star Trek, It's mentioned in the movie Hellboy. I mean, there is a list a mile long of things that have used the Tunguska Event as a part of fiction. It even shows up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer at one point, although they get the details of it wrong, Like Willow mentions it and I think she says it happened in nineteen seventeen, which would have been the Bolshevik Revolution and not this um. But so it really is kind of pervasive. I think in in nerd circles it's almost like shorthand of like a fun kind of paranormally thing, but not really like most people recognize the science. But if you read the comic that told the prequel story of Transformers, Dark of the Mood, you know the real story of Tungusca, which is that it was caused by the Decepticon shockwave. That's what I'm gonna stick to. I've not seen that so, but I do know what a Transformer is and a Decepticon yeah, uh yeah, and again it you'd have to read the comic that like the supplemental material, it's not in the movie. The movie doesn't. I don't think the movie touches on it. I honestly don't know. I'm not having the hugest fan of the Transformers movies. Um, but I did see that comic because someone mentioned that it had this event in it. The abesome listener mail for us, I do, uh. And it is another one that is sort of about our windsor McKay episodes, but it mentions the thing I didn't mention and probably should have. Uh. It is our listener Courtney, and Courtney writes, Hi, I just started listening to part two of the windsor McKay episode and had to pause to write you this note. When I heard you mentioned little Nemo, I had a vague but very fond memory of an animated movie from my childhood called Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland that was a big non Disney favorite of my brothers and I for a few years. The movie came out in nine, but I remember watching it on repeat when I was probably in the six to eight age range. It turns out it was based on Windsor McKay's comic strip. Uh says, maybe you're about to talk about it in the episode, so I'm sorry if by being repetitive, but I was so struck at hearing this blast from the past UH that she wanted to go ahead and write in I did not talk about it on that episode because it is based on it, but it's not. It's made by completely different people. I also will confess I have never watched it, which is no shade to it. It's just never been one of those things that hit my television screen. But it does exist. So I'm glad she mentioned it because that could be a point of confusion if people are looking for windsor McKay things that is made by other people that were Uh inspired by windsor McKay, including I think Chris Columbus worked on it, which has gone who's gone on to work on everything, including he's one of the producers on the earliest Harry Potter movies and basically, if you look at his IMDb page, he's touched a lot of things you've probably watched. But yeah, that is not related to windsor McKay directly, but inspired by him. So thank you for mentioning that, Courtney, because that would have been a good thing to mention in the episode. If you would like to email us, you can do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com. You can also find us across the spectrum of social media as Missed in History and Missed in History dot com is our website address where you can come and visit us and see every episode of the show that has ever existed. We also have show notes for any of the shows that Tracy and I have worked on together. So come and visit us at missed in History dot com and we can all jaunt through history together. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetop works dot com.