It was during the early morning hours of June 30, 1908 when, in the isolated Tanguska region of central Siberia, an enormous fire ball was seen rapidly plowing across the sky. "I was in the fields hitching up a horse", a local farmer recounted, "when I heard something like a huge explosion on my right. I immediately turned my head and saw a long object that was on fire, flying across the sky. The front part was wider than the tail, and the color was like fire in daytime. It was much bigger than the sun, but not so bright, and you could see it with the naked eye. Behind the flame, there was a wake that appeared to be dust. It was full of whirlwinds, and the flames left behind blue streaks. When the flames disappeared, there were bangs louder than canon shots, the ground shook and the windows of the house broke into hundreds of pieces". The Czarist government was not interested in investigating a phenomenon in such a remote area. It was only in 1921 that the first of a series of scientific expeditions, led by a geologist, went to the site of the event. Even after so many years, the scene was incredible: thousands of centuries-old trees lay on the ground in a direction opposite from the impact point for a radius of several kilometers. What could have caused such a strange phenomenon? Scientists and people with a great deal of imagination formulated some fantastic hypotheses: an alien spaceship crashed into the ground, a nuclear explosion, a collision with a meteorite... However, at the center of the ring of felled trees, there was a large area in which the tree trunks were still erect, the ground was still intact, and there was no trace of craters, fragments of unknown material or radioactivity. At this point, only one hypothesis was possible: a comet, that was mostly made of ice, came into contact with the atmosphere, generating a giant impact-wave that left only a handful of grain-like particles of the solid nucleus on the ground.
It was during the early morning hours of June 30, 1908 when, in the isolated Tanguska region of central Siberia, an enormous fire ball was seen rapidly plowing across the sky. "I was in the fields hitching up a horse", a local farmer recounted, "when I heard something like a huge explosion on my right. I immediately turned my head and saw a long object that was on fire, flying across the sky. The front part was wider than the tail, and the color was like fire in daytime. It was much bigger than the sun, but not so bright, and you could see it with the naked eye. Behind the flame, there was a wake that appeared to be dust. It was full of whirlwinds, and the flames left behind blue streaks. When the flames disappeared, there were bangs louder than canon shots, the ground shook and the windows of the house broke into hundreds of pieces". The Czarist government was not interested in investigating a phenomenon in such a remote area. It was only in 1921 that the first of a series of scientific expeditions, led by a geologist, went to the site of the event. Even after so many years, the scene was incredible: thousands of centuries-old trees lay on the ground in a direction opposite from the impact point for a radius of several kilometers. What could have caused such a strange phenomenon? Scientists and people with a great deal of imagination formulated some fantastic hypotheses: an alien spaceship crashed into the ground, a nuclear explosion, a collision with a meteorite... However, at the center of the ring of felled trees, there was a large area in which the tree trunks were still erect, the ground was still intact, and there was no trace of craters, fragments of unknown material or radioactivity. At this point, only one hypothesis was possible: a comet, that was mostly made of ice, came into contact with the atmosphere, generating a giant impact-wave that left only a handful of grain-like particles of the solid nucleus on the ground.
