Yet no comet had been seen approaching the Earth. As early as 1930 it had been suggested that the impact was that of a comet with a mass of several million tons and that its attendant dust trail had caused the night glows seen throughout the world after its arrival. It had been clear for a long time that the event was caused by a fiery object that flew from southeast to northwest before exploding. Analysis of soil samples found globules containing nickel, cobalt, copper and germanium in them, many of them fused by high temperatures – perhaps 30 million degrees Fahrenheit – and similar to substances found at meteorite sites. After his last expedition in 1939, the area was neglected until the 1950s, when aerial surveys identified a butterfly-shaped area, 43 miles in radius, containing 40,000 fallen trees. Yet despite his stubborn search for evidence of a giant meteorite and/or crater, Kulik’s efforts proved fruitless. While flying, it was saying ‘troo-troo,’ but not loudly.’ He was so shaken that he prayed to Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. He observed that ‘The devil was going faster than airplanes now do. He said he saw ‘the Devil’ with two eyes in front and a fire behind, flying to the south. It was not until 1967 that a shaman called Ivan Ivanovich Aksenov admitted he was only 30 miles south of the explosion. The Soviet authorities edited out any such references to the event. The indigenous Evenki people believed that Ogda, the god of fire and thunder, had returned to strike them down with invisible fire. Odd clumps of trees remained standing but they were stripped of bark and foliage.Īs they got closer to the epicentre of this devastation Kulik’s guides abandoned him, overcome by superstitious fears. Using local guides he found a vast area of trees knocked down and uprooted as if dashed down by a giant hand. Kulik obtained funding for a proper expedition in 1927 he had to use horses and then sledges pulled by reindeer to traverse 435 miles of frozen countryside.

Over the following years more eyewitness testimony was collected and it was anticipated that a huge crater and meteorite was likely to be found in the area. He travelled to Kansk hoping to find a giant meteorite that the newspaper said was buried nearby, but on examination it was merely a natural rock that was wrongly attributed to the event. In 1921, Leonid Kulik, a geologist at the Mineralogical Museum of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, came across an old newspaper clipping about the explosion. The glare in the sky was compared to the atmospheric effects that followed the volcanic eruption at Krakatoa in 1883. For the following two nights the skies of Europe and Asia were unusually bright. Wiki Commons.Īt 7.17am on June 30th, 1908, a huge object exploded six miles above the Stony Tunguska River area, central Siberia, causing an atmospheric shockwave that circled the Earth twice. Photograph from the Soviet Academy of Science 1927 expedition.

Tungusta meteorite