Tunguska 1908, UFO Crash?

I always did think it was nothing more than a Meteorite, but after reading this and seeing the video, makes you wonder.

Given the remoteness of the area it was not until 1927 that an expedition was mounted to investigate the crash area. The expedition could not locate any bits of meteorite which puzzled them due the size that the meteorite would have to have been to create such a large explosion.

They found no crater, is this normal for any typical meteorite collision with earth?

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.

From here

Another puzzle for the expedition was the way the tress were felled in an outward motion and that in the centre an area of trees were still standing, although all their bark and branches have been destroyed.

Many of the witnesses to the original crash spoke of seeing and oval-shaped mass moving across the sky, as well as seeing the object change course, and of having a very low speed.

Video is here.

And article from here.







[edit on 15-1-2007 by Denied]

They found no crater, is this normal for any typical meteorite collision with earth?

It's consistent with an airborne breakup...with an effect similar to an airburst nuke... They did find the expected elements indicative of a meteorite at the site, mineral-wise, etc. The path change could just be due to different observers and their ability to discern such things.

They did find the expected elements indicative of a meteorite at the site, mineral-wise, etc.

The side argument to that is the following.

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, hinting that they were of extraterrestrial origin. But there are problems in assigning the particles to the Tunguska event, especially as Tunguska occurred in the ancient volcanic region with iridium abundance.

In 1946 Aleksander Kazantzev, a Russian engineer and science-fiction writer, wrote a story for "Vokrug Sveta" ("Around the World") magazine in which he hypothesized that a nuclear-powered Martian spaceship explodes over Siberia. He later embellished on this theme, wrting further accounts that drew on his post-WWII observations at Hiroshima. Virtually every important astronomer in what was then the Soviet Union condemned his provocative hypothesis.

In 1989, at the invitation of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a group of Japanese UFO researchers joined the first International Tunguska Expedition. They tried to convince the scientists that the 1908 explosion was caused by a Japanese nuclear-powered spaceship that had left Japan 2,000 years earlier.

Over the years, scientists studied various hypotheses that the tunguska event was caused by meteorite, asteroid, nuclear explosion (possibly a result of antimatter), comet, or even a "black hole" singularity. Factors taken into account included atmospheric resistance, fracturing, abaltion, radiation, post-disintegration flight dynamics, shock wave characteristics, ground effects and so on.

The mystery has not been solved to anyone's satisfaction. Most investigators today favor the asteroid or comet hypotheses. Eyewitness accounts of the event include descriptions that fit these hypotheses when compared to other known oberservations of meteorite falls. The blast pattern was consistent with an object exploding at high altitude with a yield of approximately 40 megatons. The object may have completely vaporized, as did most of the Canyon Diablo iron meteorite (a potentially much denser body that actually struck the ground) in Arizona.