What do you think about this?
On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky over a remote stretch of Siberia split open. Reindeer herders camped near the Tunguska River saw a column of light brighter than the sun race across the sky. Then came a flash, a thunderclap heard hundreds of miles away, and a wave of heat so intense that men were thrown off their feet and knocked senseless. One herder said he felt as though his shirt had caught fire.
When the dust settled, roughly eight hundred square miles of forest had been flattened. An estimated eighty million trees lay on their sides, all pointing away from a single center, like matchsticks blown flat by one enormous breath. The blast carried the force of something like ten to fifteen megatons, close to a thousand times the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Here is the part that has puzzled scientists for over a century. There is no crater. Whatever did this never actually hit the ground. The leading explanation is that an asteroid or comet exploded in the air miles above the surface. But the first scientific expedition did not reach the site until 1927, almost twenty years later, and by then the evidence had nineteen winters to fade.
Makes you wonder how little warning we would get if the next one arrived tomorrow.
An asteroid airburst, a comet fragment, or something stranger still? What do you think tore open the sky over Tunguska?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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