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The
surrounding forest, 13 miles from the epicenter.
Taken in 1927.
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| Almost
a century after the 1908 Tunguska explosion, flattened
trees still cover the Siberian landscape. |
HOUSTON - A flurry of reports from Russia
about the discovery of fragments of an alien spaceship
at the site of the 1908 Tunguska explosion may be nothing
more than wish fulfillment by devotees of a half-century-old
Russian space myth, or they may actually have been based
on genuine spacecraft fragments — but of Russian
origin.
Either way, or even in the highly unlikely
event the reports turn out to be credible, these stories
reflect the way the century-old Tunguska blast continues
to resonate in the human psyche.
Expedition leader Yuri Lavbin prefers
the alien technology interpretation. That’s the theory
he admits he started with, even before he got to the area.
But other space experts have pointed out that the region
is a drop zone for discarded rocket stages launched into
space from Russia’s Baikonur base, and in fact was
the crash site of one prototype manned space capsule at
the very dawn of the space age.
On June 30, 1908, residents of southern
Siberia spotted a dazzling fireball crossing the sky,
followed by a flare brighter than the sun. Minutes later,
a shock wave knocked many of those residents off their
feet. When later expeditions reached the nearly inaccessible
swamps where the explosion had occurred, they found trees
flattened down in a pattern pointing away from ground
zero — but no crater, and no meteorite fragments.
The first Soviet expedition was sent to
the site in 1927, in hopes of finding metallic ore. Although
a series of natural theories followed over the years,
a Russian scientist and science-fiction author who visited
Hiroshima in late 1945 postulated that the Tunguska blast,
too, must have been nuclear in nature — and hence,
the result of a visit by space aliens.
But Dutch space historian Geert Sassen
suggests an earthly origin for the space fragments reportedly
just found, and they could well have no connection with
the 1908 event. “They might have found some parts
of the fifth Vostok test flight,” he told associates
via e-mail.
Sassen was referring to a flight on Dec.
22, 1960, meant to carry two dogs into space. According
to “Challenge to Apollo,” NASA’s definitive
history of the space race, "the payload landed about
3,500 kilometers downrange from the launch site in one
of the most remote and inaccessible areas of Siberia,
in the region of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River close
to the impact point of the famed Tunguska meteorite."
A team of space engineers located the
capsule, disarmed the destruct system, and rescued the
canine passengers.
Natural explanations
Initially, astronomers were attracted
to the idea that the object had been a comet nucleus,
to account for the explosion when it slammed into the
atmosphere. They toyed with other theories, including
proposals involving antimatter and “mini-black holes,”
but for many years there were no reliable theories on
what happens when large objects hit Earth’s atmosphere.
That changed in the 1980s, as observations
of artificial and natural fireballs expanded, along with
the power of computer simulations.
“When the first modern models for
atmospheric impacts were published in 1993,” NASA
asteroid expert David Morrison said, “it became clear
that this was a stony body.” He suggested that it
was “somewhere between an ordinary chondrite and
a carbonaceous chondrite in physical properties.”
It couldn’t have been a “dirty
snowball” — that is, a light, fluffy comet,
he continued. “In contrast, cometary objects with
this mass, of low density and/or icy composition, would
explode tens of kilometers above the surface and cause
no harm.” We know this now because Pentagon satellites
have actually been observing such explosions for several
decades.
Unfortunately, Morrison adds, “the
old comet theory persists out of inertia.” As to
current scientific thinking, he says “Tunguska was
very likely a stony object about 60 meters [196 feet]
in diameter that disintegrated explosively at an altitude
of approximately 8 kilometers [5 miles].”
UFO versions
It didn’t do the new Russian UFO
story’s credibility much good that it first appeared
on the pages of the newspaper Pravda on Tuesday. In Soviet
days, Pravda was the propaganda arm of the Soviet Communist
Party, but under new management, it became a tabloid-style
scandal sheet with a special penchant for wild paranormal
tales.
“Explorers believe they have discovered
blocks of an extraterrestrial technical device,”
the article stated, adding that they assumed it was the
one that had crashed in 1908. After dismissing a century’s
worth of scientific investigation into natural theories
for the H-bomb-sized explosion, the article concluded:
“The only real explanation can be linked with powerful
electromagnetic phenomena,” presumably of artificial
origin.
The head of the expedition, Yuri Lavbin,
told journalists that his team had concluded that the
object moved from west to east, not from southeast, on
its approach to the explosion zone. Using satellite photographs,
he identified search areas near the town of Poligus, and
that is where he located the metal fragment.
Lavbin reported that he knew all along
that the crash had been caused by a UFO, and that his
expedition had been organized to find the proof. In his
scenario, there was a natural object that threatened to
destroy Earth, but aliens intervened to save our planet.
“I am fully confident and I can make
an official statement that we were saved by some forces
of a superior civilization,” he explained. “They
exploded this enormous meteorite that headed toward us
with enormous speed.”
Photographs of the fragments may become
available in the near future, as well as the results of
laboratory testing. This would help differentiate something
truly alien from the space debris that the Russians have
been scattering across the Tunguska region for the last
50 years.
History of a mystery
Sassen’s suggestion that the mysterious
“space fragment” found in the Tunguska area
is more likely to be of Russian origin than Martian origin
is supported by decades of history during which the Soviet
government tolerated public interest in UFOs as a way
of camouflaging actual space and missile events. Many
of the most famous Soviet UFO stories that are still promoted
in Western books and on Internet sites have been traced
back to original — but highly classified — military
space missions.
The most spectacular Soviet “UFO
wave” in history occurred over the southern part
of the country in 1967 and 1968, when crescent-shaped
giant spaceships were reported flying across the skies.
Endorsed as “unexplainable” by top Russian scientists,
the widely witnessed apparitions turned out to be secret
tests of Soviet thermonuclear warheads diving back from
orbit.
In 1978, the smoking gun of Soviet ufology
was a “jellyfish” UFO that drifted through the
skies of northwest Russia, zapping computers and panicking
predawn witnesses. It turned out to be the contrails from
a rocket carrying a spy satellite from a secret space
base. A similar secret launch in September 1984, seen
by the crews and passengers of several commercial airliners,
sparked stories of death rays and alien attacks.
At the time, Moscow officials denied that
such space and missile events were occurring — and
some were borderline violations of arms control treaties.
Thus, it was convenient to have an explanation for ordinary
people who saw them in the skies and wondered what they
could have been. So for a generation of Russians, “alien
visitors” became the explanation of choice for unusual
lights in the sky.
NBC News space analyst James Oberg
spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission
Control operator and an orbital designer. He is the author
of several books on UFOs as well as the Soviet space effort,
including "UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries" and
"Uncovering Soviet Disasters."
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