Tunguska

As the programme put it, 4 hours later and there would have been no Leningrad....Think about that.


There was a relatively uninformative documentary about Tunguska on More4 earlier. In case you don't know your mysterious happenings too well, in 1908 something exploded with the force of 1000 atom bombs over wilderness in Siberia. Trees were uprooted for over 800 miles around, all laid flat in radiating lines, all scorched by the blast. No one knows exactly what it was for sure, but the general view today is that it was either a meteorite or a comet, though some still believe the theory of an exploding alien spacecraft. The curious thing is that there was no crater and no debris (well, not unless you believe some wackos shown in the programme who claimed a meteorite was intercepted by some guardian aliens, and the wackos have the alien spaceship's unearthly alloy metal to prove it!). Personally I think it was a meteorite with a relatively thin shell and a frozen gas core. As it passed through the atmosphere heating up, the shell would burn while the core would melt, building in pressure until it reached a point where the shell was too thin to contain it. The explosion, though powerful, would leave little in the way of debris. There's my tuppence worth. Of course, I believe there's an episode or two of 'The X Files' that also deals with the matter.