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This article contains verbatim references to dates from the obsolete Julian calendar. Be aware that dates might not agree with dates from the Gregorian calendar.

The Tunguska event was an explosion that occurred at , near the Podkamennaya (Under Rock) Tunguska River in what is now Evenkia, Siberia, at 7:17 a.m. on June 30, 1908.

The explosion was caused most probably by the airburst of a meteorite or comet 6 to 10 kilometers (4–6 mi) above the Earth's surface. The energy of the blast was later estimated to be between 10 and 15 megaton TNT. It felled an estimated 60 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi).

In recent history, the Tunguska event stands out as one of the rare large-scale demonstrations that a full doomsday event is a real possibility for the human race.

Description

At around 7:15 a.m., Tungus natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky. About 10 minutes later, there was a flash and a loud "knocking" sound similar to artillery fire that went in short bursts spaced increasingly wider apart. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported the sound source moving during each barrage, east to north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of miles away. The majority of reported eyewitnesses reported only the sounds and the tremors, and not the sighting of the explosion; to different eyewitnesses the sequence of events and their overall duration is also different.

The explosion registered on seismic stations across Eurasia, and produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected by the recently invented barographs in Britain. Over the next few weeks, night skies were aglow such that one could read in their light. In the United States, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory observed a decrease in atmospheric transparency that lasted for several months.

Select Eyewitness Reports

At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara trading post (65 kilometres or 40 miles north of the explosion), facing North. * I suddenly saw that directly to the North, over Onkoul's Tunguska road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest (as Semenov showed, about 50 degrees up - expedition note). The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire Northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered, and in the barn a part of the iron lock snapped.

  • Testimony of Chuchan of Shanyagir tribe, as recorded by I.M.Suslov in 1926.
We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, "can you hear all those birds flying overhead?" We were both in the hut, couldn't see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Me and Chekaren got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!
Me and Chekaren had some difficulty getting under from the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees.
We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled "Look up" and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder.
Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.

On the 17th of June, around 9 in the AM, we observed an unusual natural occurrence. In the N Karelinski village (200 verst N of Kirensk) the peasants saw to the North-West, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a "pipe", i.e. a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark cloud was observed in the general direction of the bright body. It was hot and dry. As the body neared the ground (forest), the bright body seemed to smudge, and then turned into a giant billow of black smoke, and a loud knocking (not thunder) was heard, as if large stones were falling, or artillery was fired. All buildings shook. At the same time the cloud began emitting flames of uncertain shapes. All villagers were stricken with panic and took to the streets, women cried, thinking it was the end of the world.
The author of these lines was meantime in the forest about 6 verst N of Kirensk, and heard to the NE some kind of artillery barrage, that repeated in intervals of 15 minutes at least 10 times. In Kirensk in a few buildings in the walls facing north-east window glass shook.

When the meteorite fell, strong tremors in the ground were observed, and near the Lovat village of the Kansk uezd two strong explosions were heard, as if from large-caliber artillery.

Kezhemskoe village. On the 17th an unusual atmospheric event was observed. At 7:43 the noise akin to a strong wind was heard. Immediately afterwards a horrific thump sounded, followed by an earthquake which literally shook the buildings, as if they were hit by a large log or a heavy rock. The first thump was followed by a second, and then a third. Then - the interval between the first and the third thumps were accompanied by an unusual underground rattle, similar to a railway upon which dozens of trains are traveling at the same time. Afterwards for 5 to 6 minutes an exact likeness of artillery fire was heard: 50 to 60 salvoes in short, equal intervals, which got progressively weaker. After 1.5 - 2 minutes after one of the "barrages" six more thumps were heard, like cannon firing, but individual, loud, and accompanied by tremors.
The sky, at the first sight, appeared to be clear. There was no wind and no clouds. However upon closer inspection to the North, i.e. where most of the thumps were heard, a kind of an ashen cloud was seen near the horizon which kept getting smaller and more transparent, and possibly by around 2-3 p.m. completely disappeared.

History

Surprisingly, there was little scientific curiosity about the impact at the time, possibly owing to the isolation of the Tunguska region. If there were any early expeditions to the site, the records were lost during the subsequent chaotic years — World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War.

The first expedition for which records have survived arrived at the scene more than a decade after the event. In 1921, the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, visiting the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin as part of a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, deduced from local accounts that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteorite impact. He persuaded the Soviet government to fund an expedition to the Tunguska region, based on the prospect of meteoritic iron that could be salvaged to aid Soviet industry. The iron would more than pay for the expedition alone.

Kulik's party reached the site in 1927. To their surprise, no crater was to be found. There was instead a region of scorched trees about 50 kilometres (30 mi) across. A few near ground zero were still strangely standing upright, their branches and bark stripped off. Those farther away had been knocked down in a direction away from the center.

During the next ten years, there were three more expeditions to the area. Kulik found a little "pothole" bog that he thought might be the crater but after a laborious exercise in draining the bog, he found there were old stumps on the bottom, ruling out the possibility that it was a crater. In 1938, Kulik managed to arrange for an aerial photographic survey of the area, which revealed that the event had knocked over trees in a huge butterfly-shaped pattern. Despite the large amount of devastation, there was no crater to be seen.

Expeditions sent to the area in the 1950s and 1960s found microscopic glass spheres in siftings of the soil. Chemical analysis showed that the spheres contained high proportions of nickel and iridium, which are found in high concentrations in meteorites, indicating that they were of extraterrestrial origin. Detailed systematic eyewitness reports began to be gathered as late as 1959, when interviews were conducted with many of the indigeneous people who had been within 100 kilometres (60 mi) of the explosion. Most of these accounts claimed that the local people had been covered with boils after the explosion, with whole families dying off. The medical scientists attached to the expedition concluded that there had been an epidemic of smallpox in the area at the time. Expeditions led by Gennady Plekhanov found no elevated levels of radiation, which might have been expected had the detonation been nuclear in nature.

Earth Impactor hypothesis

Meteoroid airburst

In scientific circles, the leading explanation for the explosion is the airburst of a meteoroid 6 to 10 kilometers (4–6 mi) above the Earth's surface.

Meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere from outer space every day, usually travelling at a speed of more than 10 kilometers per second (6 mi/s). Most are small but now and again a bigger one whistles in from space. The heat generated by compression of air in front of the body as it travels through the atmosphere is immense and most meteoroids burn up or explode before they reach the ground. Starting from the second half of the 20th century, close monitoring of the Earth's atmosphere has led to the discovery that such meteoroid airbursts occur rather frequently. A stony meteoroid of about 10 meters (30 ft) in diameter can produce an explosion of around 20 kilotons, similar to that of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and data released by the U.S. Air Force's Defense Support Program indicate that such explosions occur high in the upper atmosphere more than once a year. Tunguska-like megaton-range events are much more rare. Eugene Shoemaker estimated that such events occur about once every 300 years.

Blast patterns

The curious effect of the Tunguska explosion on the trees near ground zero was replicated during atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s. These effects are caused by the shock wave produced by large explosions. (The radioactivity emitted by nuclear blasts does not have any bearing on the phenomena in question.) The trees directly below the explosion are stripped as the blast wave moves vertically downward, while trees further away are felled because the blast wave is travelling closer to the horizontal when it reaches them.

Soviet experiments performed in the mid-1960s, with model forests (made of matches) and small explosive charges slid downward on wires, produced butterfly-shaped blast patterns strikingly similar to the pattern found at the Tunguska site. The experiments suggested that the object had approached at an angle of roughly 30 degrees from the ground and 115 degrees from north and had exploded in mid-air.

Asteroid or comet?

The composition of the Tunguska body remains a matter of controversy. In 1930, the British astronomer F.J.W. Whipple suggested that the Tunguska body was a small comet. A cometary meteorite, being composed primarily of ice and dust, could have been completely vaporized by the impact with the Earth's atmosphere, leaving no obvious traces. The comet hypothesis was further supported by the glowing skies (or "skyglows") observed across Europe for several evenings after the impact, apparently caused by dust that had been dispersed across the upper atmosphere. In addition, the analysis of samples from the area has shown it to be rich in cometary material.

In 1978, Slovak astronomer Ľubor Kresák suggested that the body was a piece of the short-period Comet Encke, which is responsible for the Beta Taurid meteor shower; the Tunguska event coincided with a peak in that shower. It is now known that bodies of this kind explode at frequent intervals tens to hundreds of kilometres above the ground. Military satellites have been observing these explosions for decades.

In 1983, astronomer Zdeněk Sekanina published a paper criticizing the comet hypothesis. He pointed out that a body composed of cometary material, travelling through the atmosphere along such a shallow trajectory, ought to have disintegrated, whereas the Tunguska body apparently remained intact into the lower atmosphere. Sekanina argued that the evidence pointed to a dense, rocky object, probably of asteroidal origin. This hypothesis was further boosted in 2001, when Farinella, Foschini, et al. released a study suggesting that the object had arrived from the direction of the asteroid belt.

Proponents of the comet hypothesis have suggested that the object was an extinct comet with a stony mantle that allowed it to penetrate the atmosphere.

The chief difficulty in the asteroid hypothesis is that a stony object should have produced a large crater where it struck the ground, but no such crater has been found. It has been hypothesized that the passage of the asteroid through the atmosphere caused pressures and temperatures to build up to a point where the asteroid abruptly disintegrated in a huge explosion. The destruction would have had to be so complete that no remnants of substantial size survived, and the material scattered into the upper atmosphere during the explosion would have caused the skyglows. Models published in 1993 suggested that the stony body would have been about 60 metres across, with physical properties somewhere between an ordinary chondrite and a carbonaceous chondrite.

Christopher Chyba and others have proposed a process whereby a stony meteorite could have exhibited the behavior of the Tunguska impactor. Their models show that when the forces opposing a body's descent become greater than the cohesive force holding it together, it blows apart, releasing nearly all its energy at once. The result is no crater, and damage distributed over a fairly wide radius, all of the damage being blast and thermal.

Unexplained phenomena

There are still some aspects that have not been convincingly explained. The site lies in the middle of an ancient volcanic eruption zone, and researchers once detected an emission of radon gas that lasted four hours. Attempts to apply carbon-14 dating have shown that the soil was enriched in radioactive carbon-14. The Russian geologist Vladimir Epifanov and German astrophysicist Wolfgang Kundt have suggested that the explosion was of methane gas emitted from the earth. Something similar seems to have occurred in 1994 near the village of Cando in Spain. Compare to Cando event. See 'New Scientist', 7 Sept. 2002, p. 14 [http://tejas.serc.iisc.ernet.in/~currsci/aug252001/399.pdf.

Speculative hypotheses

Scientific understanding of the behaviour of meteorites in the Earth's atmosphere was much sparser during the early decades of the 20th century. Due to this lack of knowledge, as well as a paucity of scientific data about Tunguska due to Soviet secretiveness during the Cold War, a great many other hypotheses for the Tunguska event have sprung up, with varying degrees of credibility. The hypotheses listed below are all rejected by modern science and by skeptics who generally see them as being gross violations of Occam's Razor.

Black hole

In 1973, Jackson and Ryan proposed that the Tunguska event was caused by a "small" (around 1020 to 1022 g) black hole passing through the Earth. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, there is no evidence for a second explosion occurring as the black hole exited the Earth and it has not gained wide acceptance. Furthermore, Stephen Hawking's subsequent hypothesis that black holes radiate energy indicates that such a small black hole would have evaporated away long before it could encounter the Earth.

Antimatter

In 1965, Cowan, Atluri, and Libby suggested that the Tunguska event was caused by the annihilation of a chunk of antimatter falling from space. However, as with the other hypotheses described in this section, this does not account for the mineral debris left in the area of the explosion. Furthermore, there is no astronomical evidence for the existence of such chunks of antimatter in our region of the universe. If such objects existed, they should be constantly producing energetic gamma rays due to annihilation against the interstellar medium, but such gamma rays have not been observed. Also, entering the Earth's orbit would cause the antimatter to come in contact with the atmosphere and annihilate even before collision with the ground.

Electromagnetism

Some hypotheses link the Tunguska event to the magnetic storms similar to those that occur after thermonuclear explosions in the stratosphere. For example, in 1984 V. K. Zhuravlev and A. N. Dmitriev proposed a "heliophysical" model based on "plasmoids" ejected from the Sun. Valeriy Buerakov has also developed an independent model of an electromagnetic "fireball".

UFOs

UFO aficionados have long claimed that the Tunguska event is the result of an exploding alien spaceship (thus allowing for antimatter to make it through the atmosphere, if some sort of containment technology failed) or an alien weapon going off to "save the Earth from an imminent threat". This hypothesis appears to originate from a science fiction story penned by Soviet engineer Alexander Kazantsev in 1946, in which a nuclear-powered Martian spaceship, seeking fresh water from Lake Baikal, blew up in mid-air. This story was inspired by Kazantsev's visit to Hiroshima in late 1945.

A 1951 novel, and a subsequent 1960 movie, seized upon the UFO concept.

Many events in Kazantsev's tale were subsequently confused with the actual occurrences at Tunguska. The nuclear-powered UFO hypothesis was adopted by TV drama critics Thomas Atkins and John Baxter in their book The Fire Came By (1976). The 1998 television series The Secret KGB UFO Files (Phenomenon: The Lost Archives), broadcast on Turner Network Television, referred to the Tunguska event as "the Russian Roswell" and claimed that crashed UFO debris had been recovered from the site. In 2004, a group of Russian scientists from the Tunguska Space Phenomenon Public State Fund claimed to have found the wreck of an alien spacecraft at the site *.

The proponents of the UFO hypothesis have never been able to provide any significant evidence for their claims. It should be noted that the Tunguska site is downrange from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and has been contaminated repeatedly by Russian space debris, most notably by the failed launch of the fifth Vostok test flight on December 22, 1960. The payload landed close to the Tunguska impact site, and a team of engineers was dispatched there to recover the capsule and its two canine passengers (which survived).

The Wardenclyffe Tower

It has also been suggested that the Tunguska explosion was the result of an experiment by Nikola Tesla at his Wardenclyffe Tower, performed during Robert Peary's second North Pole expedition.

Allegedly, he had sent a communication to Peary advising him to be on the alert for unusual auroral phenomena encountered as he attempted to reach the North Pole. However, Robert E. Peary's second North Pole expedition was conducted in 1905-1906 in Peary's 1907 book Nearest the Pole. His third and final expedition "set off from New York City...on July 6, 1908." In other words, Peary set sail from New York City six days after the Tunguska event.

Additionally, by 1908, most work at Wardenclyffe had already ended and the site was mostly abandoned. How a small energy input at Wardenclyffe could be responsible for a large energy output elsewhere, something that is essentially a physical impossibility, is not obvious.

Even if the facility was able to produce such an effect, the main contention suggests Tesla was not responsible for the Tunguska event because it occurred at about 7:17 a.m. local time. Given accounts (if they can be trusted) stating Tesla performed his experiments in the evening of June 30th and his facility was 12 hours behind Tunguska time, his Wardenclyffe experiment would have occurred 1 day after the Tunguska event---June 29th at 7:17 p.m Eastern time.

Tunguska event in fiction

  • A semi-serious version of the event is offered in Monday Begins on Saturday (1964) by Strugatsky brothers. In it, the explosion is caused by a spaceship of aliens from a different universe who move backwards in time relative to us. Consequently, it is of no use to search for the remains of the spaceship now, after the event, because these remains have only existed at the site before 1908.
  • A crossover novel featuring Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, entitled The Alien Factor, reveals that the Tunguska event was due to an antimatter-powered alien lifeboat crash-landing upon the Earth.
  • In the game Impossible Creatures, it is said that the Tunguska Event is caused by a test of a "Death-Ray" developed by Nikola Tesla and Erik Chanikov, killing Dr. Chanikov's wife and driving him into exile. At the start of the 15-mission campaign, a newspaper clipping is shown on a desk with the headline: "Dr. Chanikov's disappearance linked to Tunguska Event." There is also a map called Tunguska in the game, which is a wasteland scattered with coal (which can be gathered and used as fuel). Like all other maps, this map is an island in the South Pacific.
  • In a two-episode story arc of The X-Files ("Tunguska" and "Terma"), the Tunguska incident was purported to be caused by an asteroid impact. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) traveled with Alex Krycek (Nicholas Lea) to the site of the impact, where they discovered a military installation mining the rock and experimenting with the black oil found inside, which contained a microbial form of alien life capable of possessing a human body.
  • "Listening to Fear," a fifth-season episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" involves a meteor impact, thought to be the newest in a series dating back to the twelfth century. Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) notes that "the most recent meteoritic anomaly was the Tunguska blast in Russia in 1917," getting the date wrong by nine years and ascribing it to the infamous year of the Bolshevik Revolution.
  • In the director's cut of the 2004 film Hellboy, Grigori Rasputin purchases a stone key monolith which the Russians had hidden since it landed in Tunguska. Rasputin states that the Ogdru Jahad sent it as a way to assist him in bringing them to Earth.
  • In the late Predator comics, it is revealed that the Tunguska event was due to a Predator or Predator ship's self-destruct technology. It was either triggered by the Predators themselves, to conceal their sophisticated technology from humanity, or by either Russian or American officials to keep the technology from the others.
  • In a Marvel Comics trilogy of publications entitled Ultimate Nightmare (2004-2005), Ultimate Secret (2005), and Ultimate Extinction (2005), the Ultimate universe characters confront the mystery of the event, linking it to an alien encounter with the Ultimate version of Galactus. Ultimate Nightmare #1 errs in giving the year of the Event as 1904 (four years off), and depicting it as leaving a rather large impact crater (it left none). However, in the Ultimates universe, several other key events differ considerably from actual history, so it is conceivable that the nature of the Tunguska event is simply another difference from our universe.
  • Science fiction writer Stanisław Lem in his first novel Astronauts (1951) (film adaptation 1959 as First Spaceship on Venus), explains this event as the crash of an interplanetary reconnaissance vessel from a Venus civilization.
  • In the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) refers to the Tunguska Event in the line, "You have been a participant in the biggest interdimensional cross-rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909," which is off by one year.
  • The book Callahan's Key by Spider Robinson uses the connection between Tesla (made immortal in this fiction) and the Tunguska event. The 'death ray' has been stolen by the U.S. government and its use may destroy the known universe.
  • The humorous 1978 alternate history novel And Having Writ by Donald R. Bensen features four space travelers whose ship crashes to Earth at Tunguska. Needing to jumpstart Earth technology to rebuild their ship, they analyze world affairs and foresee the impending World War I, and travel the world attempting to provoke the war to get it out of the way as quickly as possible so that science can move on. In the course of their travels, they interact with such characters as Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, Thomas Edison (who is elected President of the United States), Henry Ford, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Grigori Rasputin.
  • The novel Singularity by Bill DeSmedt explores the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis — i.e., the possibility that the Tunguska Event was caused by a submicroscopic black hole still trapped beneath the Earth's surface.
  • The novel Earth by David Brin also features the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis.
  • The Tunguska event (and the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis) forms part of the backstory for the 1975 Larry Niven novelette The Borderland of Sol.
  • In the 1960 movie "First Spaceship on Venus", based on Stanisław Lem's novel, an expedition discovered a magnetic recording device at Tunguska, determined its origin as the planet Venus, and a newly-completed spacecraft was sent to Venus instead of Mars as originally planned. The expedition determined, from translation of the recording, that the aliens planned to occupy Earth, but they discovered that the people of Venus were abruptly rendered extinct by their incomprehensible machinery.
  • The novel Intervention, by Julian May, depicts a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the impact, which was caused by the destruction of an out-of-control alien craft. Apparently, if the crew had not activated the self-destruct program, the ship would have crashed into Moscow.
  • "Chekhov's Journey" by Ian Watson (1983), posits that the famous playwright Anton Chekhov knew of the 1908 Tunguska explosion back in 1890 which turned out to be caused by an out-of-control Soviet time-ship.
  • The novel, "Sandstorm," by James Rollins (2004), uses the circumstances of Tunguska event -- in this case, a meteor composed of anti-matter -- as evidence to suggest the cause of the explosion in the book's opening pages, and the set-up for the cataclysmic events of the book's climax.
  • The Star Trek novel Prime Directive depicts the Tunguska incident as the result of benevolent Vulcan interference in human history, in which an anthropological survey ship deflected a meteor (that would otherwise have struck Western Europe and destroyed much of civilization) into a largely uninhabited part of the planet.
  • In the fighting video game SNK vs Capcom: Chaos, one alien-like character called the Mars People has an ultimate attack which is named "Tungus Incident", where he (it?) sends UFOs crashing down on the enemy.
  • The 1995 Forgotten Futures RPG adventure The Fist of God, by Marcus Rowland, set in the word of Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories, assumes a human cause for the disaster.
  • The story "Storming the Cosmos", by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker (1985), depicts a Soviet recon mission to the site of the explosion, led by scientists responsible for rocket technology in 1959. Indeed they find a device which is referred to as "rocket-drive". It is then used too hastily in late 1960 in a rocket prototype, leading to the Nedelin disaster. The hypothesis that an UFO crash-landed or deliberately buried vital gadgets for the human race to find is thus linked to the space race of the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Alan Parsons' 2004 release entitled A Valid Path features a nine-minute epic entitled "Return to Tunguska" that, in his famous instrumental fashion, plays with some of the more other-worldly notions surrounding the event.
  • The Red Sparowes' 2006 Split EP with Gregor Samsa contained a song named 'I Saw The Sky In The North Open To The Ground And Fire Poured Out', and the record sleeve features other quotations from eyewitnesses to the Tunguska event
  • "The Call of Cthulhu" RPG explains this and similar phenomena as the result of Ancient Gods like Azathoth entering the earth´s reality.
  • The 2006 game Secret Files: Tunguska published by Deep Silver is based on the Tunguska event.

References

  • Lerman, J. C., Mook, W. G. & Vogel, J. C. Nature, 216, 990–1 (1967).
  • Cowan, C., Atluri, C. R. & Libby, W. F. Nature 206, 861–865 (1965).
  • Brown, J.C, and Hughes, D.W. Nature 268, 512 - 514 (1977)

Books on Tunguska

  • John Baxter and Thomas Atkins, The Fire Came By: The Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion, Macdonald and Jane's, London 1975
  • Rupert Furneaux, The Tungus Event, Nordon Publications, New York, 1977
  • Roy A. Gallant, The Day the Sky Split Apart: Investigating a Cosmic Mystery, Atheneum Books for Children, New York, 1995
  • E.L. Krinov, Giant Meteorites, trans. J.S. Romankiewicz (Part III: The Tunguska Meteorite), Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1966
  • Jack Stoneley, Cauldron of Hell: Tunguska, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1977
  • Surendra Verma, The Tunguska Fireball: Solving One of the Great Mysteries of the 20th Century, Icon Books, Cambridge, 2005

See also

External links

Impact events | Explosions | Fires | Siberia | 1908 disasters

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