The Blast That Shook the World: Meteor, Comet, or Mystery?

In 1908, something exploded over Siberia with the force of a nuclear bomb, 80 million

trees were flattened in seconds. Witnesses saw a blazing object tear across the sky, then felt a shockwave that shattered windows a hundred miles away. Some say it was a meteor or maybe a comet that blew up in the sky. Mars has suggested something far stranger, antimatter, maybe even a crippled alien spacecraft.

But there was no sign of what it was, no crater, no evidence.

“So what actually exploded above the Tunguska River?”

In this episode, I'll break down every major theory, from icy space rocks to interstellar

visitors and ask what really lit up the Siberian sky that morning.

I'm Dr. Herny Bat and this is Hidden History, a Rewine Original Powered by Pave Studios. On the show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained and examining all the different theories from science to supernatural and everything in between. Our vericivalizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena,

I'm looking at it all, and I want you to join me. Today, I'm talking about the Tunguska event of 1908 when a mysterious explosion flattened trees in Central Siberia for miles in every direction.

“It was one of the largest explosions ever on earth, and no one knows what caused it.”

Many experts were quick to claim this was surely a meteor explosion, some even bet their lives on it, but in the over 100 years since, plenty of others still have lots of questions. On the morning of June 30, 1908, a Russian farmer named Semyon Semyonov was sitting on his front porch and joined his breakfast. It was a typical quiet morning in the tiny trading post of Vanovara.

So deep in Central Siberia, it was a kind of place where nothing really happened, but that morning Vanovara was about to become the epicenter of one of the world's biggest mysteries. As Semyon enjoyed the fresh morning air, the sky suddenly erupted in a flash of orange and red, a massive fireball bloomed over the horizon, filling his view.

A moment later, Semyon felt a wave of heat that was so intense, he felt like he was burning the shirt right off his back, then just as suddenly, everything went black, and then came the explosion. The force of it threw Semyon from his porch and knocked him unconscious. It was so jarring, it shook the foundation of his house and shattered his windows.

The blast tore through Vanovara, ripping through the surrounding woods. It traveled through Siberia, breaking glass in another town, 125 miles away. People could hear the sound of it, 500 miles away, and as effects went even further than that. After the explosion, a magnetic storm formed in the atmosphere, creating a mesmerizing light

show that was seen thousands of miles away in England, nobody really knew what to make of it. Observatories around the world recorded some kind of seismic event, but the exact nature of it wasn't clear, and getting answers wouldn't be easy.

“Remember, this explosion happened in the middle of Siberia, about 2,200 miles away from”

Moscow. In the area near the Stony Tunguska river, almost nobody lived there, so there are barely any witnesses, and thankfully just a handful of casualties. But the few people who saw it firsthand liked Semyon Semyonov, weren't thinking about trying to spread the word about what happened.

Sure, it was strange and terrifying, but life went on as usual.

The first known article about the explosion didn't show up until July 12, almost two weeks

later. Published in a newspaper whose name translates to Siberian life, he talked about a train that stopped, so his passengers could go look at a red-hot meteorite that crashed into the ground. Now, that didn't actually happen, but regardless, the story didn't get much traction.

Part of that was because of the remoteness, and the people of Russia had bigger things

The country was still ruled by Zard Nicholas II, who's facing a lot of opposition for the lower classes.

“He had agreed to give up some power and create democratically elected parliament, but”

still wasn't enough. There was a lot of discontent brewing, and with all the political turmoil over the next few years, the story faded away, especially once World War I broke out in 1914. Then Nicholas was overthrown in 1917, and the Communist Soviet Union was eventually formed.

So, you can understand how nobody was exactly worried about investigating some random

explosion in the heart of Siberia, no matter how big it was, at least not at first.

Covering from war and revolution wasn't easy, though, or cheap. That kind of rebuilding took a lot of money, which the New Government didn't have, but they had some ideas for where to get it. In the early 1900s, some American companies had tried to excavate a crater in Arizona, where a giant meteorite was buried deep underground.

“And just a quick note here, they're actually called a meteor when they're in space, and”

a meteorite once they hit the ground. Anyway, these companies wanted to extract valuable elements like platinum and aridium that were inside the meteorite. In the end, it was buried too deep, and the metal was too dense to get anything a value from it.

But if it had worked, it would have made them a fortune.

So the Russian government thought that it was worth it to look for a meteorite of their own in the wide expanses of Siberia. And they knew the perfect guy for the job. Enter a scientist named Leonid Kulik, born in 1883, he was one of the leading minds in the study of meteorites, and he was an experienced outdoorsman who'd be comfortable in the

wilds of Siberia.

“He was also a loyal communist who'd be motivated to help his country.”

So the government recruited Kulik to lead the mission, and in March of 1921, he found a promising lead when he chanced upon the article from Siberian life. The one that mentioned the train passengers who had stopped to look at a burning meteorite. The article said the object had landed near the town of Consk, about 375 miles south west of where the explosion had really happened.

Of course, Kulik had no way of knowing that, but he did know that this felt like a real lead, and Consk seemed as good of a place to start as any. So as September of 1921, he and his team headed out on the Transciberian Railroad. But instead of discovering riches, they only dug up more questions, ones that have yet to be definitively answered today.

After a long journey, Leonid Kulik and his team of 20 or so people arrived in Consk sometime around September or October of 1921. It didn't take them long to figure out that the train story was completely made up. At least in terms of a burning meteorite landing right next to the trucks. But the explosion itself, that was real.

They were just looking in the wrong place. Turns out a blast like that was hard to forget. A Kulik's team was able to piece together enough I witnessed accounts to figure out that the epicenter was likely hundreds of miles away in the basin of the Stony Tunguska River. This was a case of good news, bad news.

Sure they knew where to go, but getting there with all the equipment they needed would be next to impossible. This was the middle of the Siberian wilderness. In the 1920s, there weren't any trains barely any rows even. That could take a team of scientists into the heart of the backcountry.

Even today, it's hard enough to make it to wear the Tunguska event occurred. It takes a helicopter or propeller plane ride and a few days of hiking, plus boat travel. Back then, making it through the dense forest and swampy lowlands was a multi-week trek with no guarantee you'd make it. Kulik thought it would be worth it though.

But this wasn't the sort of thing you could do without serious planning. So in October of 1921, he and his team hopped back on the train and returned home. Kulik took another six years for him to build his case, but with more eyewitness accounts

and trajectory analysis compiled by a fellow scientist, Kulik's wish was finally granted.

In 1927, a new expedition to seek out the meteor in the stony Tunguska region was approved. That February, Kulik and his assistant took the Trans-Siberian Railroad to a town of a hundred miles east of Konsk, and that was as far as the train could take them.

Horstron sled.

“They arrived on March 25th and Kulik didn't waste any time figuring out their next move.”

It was spring, and the journey would be physically impossible once the temperatures warmed up, and the ground turned from hard packs snow to an impenetrable bug. In Vanavara, Kulik was able to hire an indigenous Tungusik guide. With his help, Kulik was able to gather more intel from the villagers. He was especially fascinated by the story of Samyana Samyana, who said the heat he felt

from the explosion was so intense, they thought his shirt would burn right off his back.

Kulik had never heard of heat like that, resulting from a meteorite impact, but he assumed

that it was thanks to how big the object was. With the areas indigenous people had a different theory, a lot of them believed that the Siberian Thunder God, Oggd, had caused the explosion. In the form of iron feathered Thunderbirds with fiery eyes, Oggd had cursed the land by flattening the forest and killing entire herds of reindeer.

An interestingly enough, one eyewitness described the object as long and thin with a dark

“head, hardly what you'd expect a meteor to look like.”

According to the Tungus, anyone who entered the Curse area would surely be struck down by Oggd's lightning, but these stories didn't scare Kulik off. If anything, they just made him more eager to find an impact site. And on April 8th, 1927, Kulik, his assistant and their guide left on the next leg of their journey.

Knowing that the clock was ticking, Kulik was desperate for some sign that they were heading in the right direction.

After almost a week of exhausting bushwacking, they finally broke through the edge of the thick

Siberian pine forest. And what they saw was unbelievable. As far as the eye could see, the massive trees were charred and flattened. Millions of them. Kul and parallel their roots torn from the earth.

Whatever had caused this kind of destruction had been enormous. Now it was Kulik's job to find it. So even though their supplies were dwindling, the expedition pushed on. Kulik couldn't see an impact crater anywhere, but it was pretty sure he could find it. As they made their way through the flat and forest, he noticed that the tree shows signs

of being instantly burned from above. Look's theory was that as a meter straight through the sky, it created a super heated pocket of air that scores the trees among its path. And as they kept tracing that path, the worse the burns got. It was like a dystopian version of the yellow brick road.

Kulik figured that if they followed it far enough, they'd eventually make it to their emerald city. After following the trail for a few days, they eventually made it to the top of a ridge. There was still no sign of the crater. Kulik could see for six or seven miles, but it was all just the same, flattened forest.

He was ready to keep going, but his guys wouldn't go any further. They felt like they'd already risked the fire god's wrath by going this far, and they didn't want to make things any worse.

If I was there and I saw all those trees flat now like that, my first instinct, honestly,

and also knowing the area is that it's probably like a sinkhole or something like that. However, if I'm thinking 1920s, I would think it's something like a volcanic eruption or something like that. My first thing in general would not think, oh, it's something coming from outer space. It has to be something happening down here on earth.

But I think it's quite fascinating that even back then, people's first thought was, oh,

“it must be a meteorite, and that's what I think makes this really interesting, and also”

mysterious. So, I'm curious to see how they came to that conclusion so quickly. If you have same or similar thoughts, or if you have theories of your own, drop a comment below. Kulik knew it'd be suicide to go it alone, so he agreed to head back to Vaanavara, but

he wasn't giving up, on April 30th, 1927, he left Vaanavara again with new guys. With a spring thoughts setting in, going by land was getting harder, so this time they traveled by river. It still took 20 days to get back to where the blast had occurred, then another week after that, to get further than he'd gone before.

In early June, he finally made to what he believed was the epicenter of the blast, but the crater was nowhere to be found. Instead, the trees there were still standing. They'd been burned like the others, but somehow the explosion had knocked them over.

Clearly, they had been a huge explosion here, but if there was no impact crater, what had

caused it? I'm Shankar Vidantam here to tell you about a great mystery. That mystery is you. As the host of a podcast called Hidden Brain, I explore big questions about what it means to be human.

Questions like, where do our emotions come from?

“Why do so many of us feel overwhelmed by modern life?”

How can we better understand the people around us? Discover your hidden brain. Find us wherever you get to your podcast. When we knew Coolig made it to the epicenter of the Tungaska event explosion, he was sure

he'd find a massive impact crater in evidence of a meteorite strike.

Instead, the trees there were still standing, creating a ring around a peep bug, known as a southern swamp. But he wasn't ready to give up on his theory, because it looked like some kind of explosion had happened there. The bog was full of what he described as "picular flat holes" and quote.

Somewhere up to dozens of yards in diameter, Coolig wondered if the meteor had broken up and the resulting pieces had made smaller impacts instead. And there was evidence that the earth had been disturbed. Coolig wrote that the ground around the holes, quote, "heaved outward from the spot in giant waves, like waves in water," and quote.

Not only that, but the ground underneath the layers of moss was scorched and burned, just like the trees. So it definitely looked like something had hit the ground here. What was it though?

“And was it powerful enough to cause the kind of devastation that Coolig had witnessed?”

And fortunately, he didn't have the right equipment on hand to answer those questions. But at least now, he knew where to look. Over the next two years, Coolig came back to the southern swamp to gather more physical evidence. In the spring of 1928, he brought some tools to conduct a magnetic survey, but they weren't

all that sophisticated and they didn't pick up on anything major. And Coolig didn't have the right equipment to properly excavate any of the giant holes either. So he decided to try again in 1929. And this time, he stayed in the area for over a year and a half.

This time, he brought much better equipment, including powerful handrails, pumps, and everything

they'd need to excavate the holes and dig trenches. And they did manage to dig up one of the giant holes.

“But at the bottom, instead of finding a meteorite's shard, they found a tree stump still”

rooted into the ground. If a meteorite had crashed there, that stump would have been obliterated, which meant the hole was naturally formed after all. Coolig refused to give up, though. He kept excavating more holes even as it became increasingly obvious that they wouldn't

find any evidence of an impact crater there. And honestly, can you blame him? He had dedicated almost a decade to this mission, risking his life every time he went out to the Tungasca basin. So even after ending this latest expedition in the fall of 1930, Coolig wanted to keep

looking, and maybe he'd been searching in the wrong place. He thought he'd map the glass main perimeter and found the epicenter. But he had done it all on foot. What he really needed was an aerial survey to properly map everything out. However, he had lost a lot of goodwill by this point and didn't get his wish until 1938.

The photos confirmed that the southern swamp was the explosion's epicenter, just like he had suspected. And the blast butterfly shape pattern did seem to suggest the kind of energy that could only be released by a meteor strike. But still, there is absolutely zero evidence of any kind of impact.

So what could it be? While Coolig was bulldozing ahead with his meteor strike hypothesis, his colleagues around the world were trying to come up with alternate theories. Some of which were truly out of this world. As I witnessed testimony showed, something had come flying through the atmosphere on the

morning of June 30th, 1908. Most people, including Luned Coolig, assumed it was a meteor and had impacted somewhere in the southern swamp. But there were plenty of other theories. In the early 1930s, two astronomers, Dr. F.J. Wipple of London and IS, a stop of itch of Russia,

Now, this may seem like a minor detail, but there are a couple key differences between

a meteor and a comet. And they could explain why there wasn't an impact crater from the Tungasca event. The meteor is a piece of solid material, like a rock chipped off of an asteroid or naturally formed metal. With that kind of centralized mass, you can see why it would leave a massive hole in the

ground. Meanwhile, a comet is typically a clump of rock and ice that's held together by gravity, but isn't necessarily all one piece. So since comets are a lot less dense, it's more likely that it would explode mid-air and cause a kind of damage coolig witnessed.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. In all of recorded history, there's absolutely zero instances of a comet ever colliding with the Earth.

“And remember how after the explosion, there are those bright aurora-like magnetic storms in”

the sky. Well, there is no evidence of a comet causing light shows like that, even when they only pass fire planet, so we can cross the comet theory off, but there's one aspect of it worth considering. Specifically, that something exploded mid-air instead of impacting the ground.

The question is, what could it be? Well, a lot of other scientists thought the simplest explanation was best, that it actually was a meteor-like coolig thought. Something about shape and size was unique enough for it to cause that kind of damage as it disintegrated.

It made sense, but by then, the Soviet Union's government had other things to worry about.

Again, just like War had buried the news about the Tunguska event when it first happened,

“the outbreak of World War II made it impossible to look into that theory any further.”

Leonid Coolig had also signed up to fight, and tragically, he did it make it out alive. In his absence, even more people came forward with theories. One scientist suggested the explosion had been caused by a meteor skipping off a lower layer of the atmosphere rather than slamming into the earth. Another proposed idea that it wasn't a meteor or a comet, but an exotic lump of space

matter is sort of blob of space dust that have floated off course into the tiger. And when World War II ended in 1945, we got the most radical possibility yet. After atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one man wondered if these new, terrible technologies were the answer to what caused the Tunguska event. And if it seemed much more like science fiction, then science theft.

In August 1945, when the atomic bomb burst above Hiroshima, the World Soft first hand,

what a nuclear explosion could do.

“The bomb was detonated an altitude of 2,000 feet, exploded with the force of more than 15,000”

tons of TNT. The temperature at ground level reached several 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second. The bomb vaporized people have a mile away from ground zero. Brown statues melted, roof tiles fused together, and the exposed skin of people miles

away burned from the intense infrared energy unleashed. An estimated 80,000 people died instantly. Nothing with this sheer power had ever been seen on Earth. Nothing, that is, except for the Tunguska event. Alexander Kazan's death, a Russian scientist, was part of the team dispatched from the

Soviet Union to study the aftermath of the Hiroshima blast. While there, he could help but be reminded of the images he had seen of the Tunguska event, especially at that center. In Hiroshima, just a few hundred yards from the blast site stands of trees stood upright, charred and stripped bare, like the trees at the center of the Tunguska event site.

Everything seemed to line up, from the similar way buildings had been planned in both places and the black rain that followed both events. Kazan's death was convinced, the Tunguska event had been a nuclear explosion. Of course, there was a slight problem with this theory. Namely that the Tunguska event had happened in 1908, decades before the development of

the atomic bomb. In fact, it was three years even before the discovery of the atomic nucleus. So there was no way anyone could have developed that kind of technology back then.

Kazan's death theorized that the Tunguska event had been caused by the mid-air explosion of a nuclear-powered

“Martian spaceship sent to Earth to find fresh water.”

And the Stony Tunguska River Basin was about 650 miles from one of the largest reservoirs of fresh water on the planet Lake Baikal. A stone's throw away, cosmicly speaking. The idea of an alien spacecraft exploding may seem far-fetched, but there were undeniable similarities between the atomic blast over Hiroshima and the Tunguska event.

Besides the identical descriptions of heat and shock waves, black rain and a mushroom cloud,

there were also mounting evidence over the decades that the Tunguska explosion had been a radio-active event. Rain deer that had been in the blast radius were struck with strange scabs and blisters.

“Similar to cattle who had been affected by the atomic test in New Mexico.”

Genetic changes were noted in plants in the Tunguska region, and they grew much larger than their normal sizes. Not only that, but in 1959, an expedition to the Tunguska event site found that the radiation level there was one and a half to two times higher than it was 30 kilometers away. And the rings of trees in the region that dated back to 1908 contained far more radioactive seasium 137 than they should.

Seems unlikely, doesn't it?

Well here's a thing. Tunguska's technology improved and expeditions to the Tunguska event site continued. Small metallic globules were found in the swamp that seemed to support the theory that some kind of object had in fact exploded there. And based on ballistic measurements and eyewitness testimony, the object seemingly changed course in mid-air as it fell from the sky, as if it was being directed by a pilot.

There was no doubt that an event with a substantial radioactive footprint had occurred in the Tunguska basin. But before we latch onto this alien theory or the possibility that someone went back in time to test the atomic bomb in Siberia, let's stick within the realm of physics as we know it, even if it's highly speculative. Stick with me here. Maybe there's a reason the object that caused the Tunguska event left behind almost no physical evidence. And that reason is that it might not have been a physical object at all.

At least not in the sense that we typically know it. In the late 1920s, Nobel Prize winning physicists Paul Dirac proposed the existence of antimatter. As its name suggests, antimatter is the opposite of matter that we know it expect. There is a lot more to it, but the relevant point for this is that if a piece of antimatter were to collide with a piece of regular matter, there would theoretically be a massive release of energy as they completely obliterated each other.

Over the decades, this theory gained steam, was scientists declaring that even a small amount of antimatter would create a massive explosion that would also leave behind the radioactive traces found all over the Tunguska event site. And that's not the only out there possibility that could be explained by physics. If it wasn't antimatter, how about a black hole? Although the term wasn't coined until 1967, the concept was revolutionized by Robert Oppenheimer

in 1939 and was the inevitable end point of Einstein's theory of general relativity. A black hole is a total collapse of the space-time fabric. When a star reaches the end of its life, after it explodes into a supernova, it can then collapse into a black hole. As black hole research flourished, some scientists asked themselves, "Why wouldn't it be possible for black holes to be extremely small?"

“And what was stopping them from moving through space like a meteor or comet?”

Following this logic, in the 1970s, scientists from the University of Texas proposed that a miniature black hole had caused that Tunguska event as it passed through Earth. And fortunately for supporters of both the antimatter and black hole theories, the eyewitness testimony from the Tunguska event contradicted these ideas. Neither antimatter nor a miniature black hole would explain the giant fireball so many people saw.

The hundreds of miles of level 4s are undeniable, but without clear fiscal evidence pointing

“to a specific cause, every explanation of what exactly caused that massive blast remains on the”

table no matter how far-fetched. The Tunguska event and the efforts to explain it show just how adaptive and flexible the human mind can be. As new technologies, new science, and world events brought an idea of what is possible, we look for ways to fit those fresh discoveries into our worldview. And that is what is so amazing about us as a species.

We are always looking for answers.

If we think some new insight or new piece of information can help us make sense of our world, we use it. So, okay, it's implausible at best than actual nuclear weapon was detonated over Siberia in 1908.

“But making that connection gave us new ways to look at what remains as one of science's enduring”

mysteries. And not too long ago, we got a first-hand look at what could have really happened. On February 15, 2013, people near Chelyabinsk Russia felt the ground shake.

It shielded their eyes as they looked up at a fireball streaking through the mid-day sky.

Virtually every window shattered as an explosion ripped through the town, entering over 1,500 people with flying shards of glass. A man was thrown from his feet by the shockwave and others reported intense burns from the UV radiation. Sound familiar? Unlike the Tunguska event, the Chelyabinsk meteor was heavily documented.

So, there's no mystery surrounding this blast. Based on Dashcam, cell phone, security camera recordings, we know that a 19-meter wide space rock exploded in mid-air over Chelyabinsk, unleashing the same energy as 500 kilotons of TNT. In fact, the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion inspired a team of scientists to go back to the Southern

Swam and look one more time for physical evidence of the explosion. And in the layers of Pete Moss from 1908, they found microchars of materials whose elements likely came from a meteor. So as much fun as it would be to imagine an alien pilot wiping out after taking a hard left over Siberia, the evidence from the Chelyabinsk explosion along with the recently discovered

microchars of meteoric material seems clear. And Luned Kooik was just about right. The likelyest explanation is that a meteor many times larger than the one above Chelyabins exploded in mid-air over the great Southern Swam of the Stony Tunguska basin, just as his colleagues suggested. It would explain the scope of the damage, the radioactive energy released and all the accompanying effects. But it's still only a likely explanation. There is still so much to learn

about what happened on that day in 1908. So for now, my question is,

“if there's a giant explosion in Siberia, but no one is around to see it, will we ever know what caused it?”

So what would happen at the Tunguska event occur today? Sure, we have the Chelyabinsk meteor as an example, but it's not quite the same. Remember, the Tunguska meteor would have been way bigger. And when you compare the scope of the damage, there is just no comparison. So let's imagine if it went down just like it did in 1908 with the object capable of producing a nuclear level explosion. How would people react? Let's start with detection.

Now, nobody saw the Chelyabinsk meteor coming because it was relatively small and came from the same direction as the Sun. So the meteor was hidden by the glare. But something like the Tunguska object is a lot harder to miss. These days we have a lot of eyes in the sky, in the form of thousands of satellites and telescopes constantly searching deep into space. Many of these are tasked with the Neo or near-earth object monitoring. The track, catalog, and analyze the trajectories of countless

objects in space, assessing just how much of a threat, if any, they might be to life on earth.

Still, there are always unexpected visitors. In 2017, the Interstellar object of Muamua flew through

our solar system. It was the first ever known object to enter our solar system from outside of it. It was moving so fast that we only spotted it on its way out. Thankfully, its path didn't

three-eye Atlas has caused a social media sensation as people debate whether it's natural or

“artificial, a comet, or a spaceship. Again, it doesn't pose any danger to Earth. But what if it did?”

Based on the size of the Tungasca object, we know it would be capable of causing a ton of damage,

not an extinction level event, but imagine if it blew up over a city instead of in the middle of

“Siberia. Safe to say, I think there would be widespread panic. There would be frenzy calculations,”

all sorts of chaos, and honestly, it could change the course of history. Thankfully, we're not in

that kind of danger. Always, not for now. But the Tungasca event is a powerful reminder that,

“no matter how much technology we invent, nature, and all of its mysteries will always have the upper hand.”

Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Hidden History. I'm Dr. Hrini, but, join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. What did you think of the Tungasca event of 1908? Any burning theories of your own? Let me know in the comments and I might talk about it in a future episode. I'd be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate, review, and follow if you're listening on audio so we can keep building this community together.

Thanks so much and we'll see you next time.