Meteorite? UFO crash? Exploding a giant flock of mosquitoes? Miscalculations of the Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla? These and other versions are collected in the educational book “Tunguska Meteorite. The Mystery of an Alien from Space”. It was presented in Krasnoyarsk.
The book is based on the materials of the expedition of the Krasnoyarsk regional branch of the Russian Geographical Society to the place of the meteorite fall. The author of the book, Evgeny Sazonov, together with the researchers walked along the channel of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, trying to find the exact place of the fall of the space object.
The researchers interviewed the local population and found that there could be two places where the meteorite fell: a rocky block, bursting into the earth's atmosphere, bounced off the ground and jumped 200 kilometers away. Researchers believe that this is why all expeditions could not find the meteorite fragments, they were simply not looked for there.
What did the members of the first expedition see to the place where the celestial body fell? Why was its organizer Nikolai Kulik taken to the interrogation of the German occult organization "Ahnenerbe"? What amazing discoveries did the pioneers make in the Tunguska Valley? You will learn about this from an excerpt from Evgeny Sazonov's book “The Tunguska Meteorite. The Mystery of an Alien from Space”.
LEONID KULIK - THE FIRST RESEARCHER OF THE TUNGUSIAN PHENOMENON
Now, when even children know about the secret of the Tunguska meteorite, it is hard to believe that in 1908 itself, an event of a planetary scale did not attract the attention of the general public. Local newspapers wrote that in the sky over the Krasnoyarsk Territory some mysterious body flew by, there was some kind of explosion, possibly an aerolite fell. The event caused quite a stir among the population and local authorities. But even Academician Vernadsky, the most progressive and inquisitive scientist of that time, was satisfied then with a reassuring report from the Siberian police - that, they say, they checked, looked, but found nothing. It never occurred to anyone to equip the expedition, but even to document eyewitness accounts.
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A week later, mentions of the meteorite itself and of the miraculous optical phenomena disappeared from newspaper and magazine pages. Oblivion awaited the Tunguska phenomenon. Maximum - a narrow circle of scientists would remember him, and he would actually be buried in dusty catalogs …
People who are not familiar with the biography of Leonid Alekseevich imagine him either as the kindest myopic eccentric scientist, or as an unprincipled careerist who put the Tunguska phenomenon in his personal service (among the locals there were rumors that in fact the “strange Russian” was looking for a golden mountain). Both of these pictures are equally distant from reality, except perhaps for myopia. Kulik was a man with an iron character, strong in spirit and body, a real fighter, capable of challenging the whole world if he believed that the truth was on his side. This is proved not only by the Tunguska history, but also by a number of facts from his biography.
Leonid Kulik was born in 1883 in Dorpat (Tartu) into a noble family. He graduated from school with a gold medal, entered the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute, but was expelled for participating in the revolutionary unrest. Sent to military service as a simple soldier. After retirement, Kulik settled in Miass, where he was engaged in the exploration of minerals in the Southern Urals. He did not have enough knowledge for such work, therefore he is intensively engaged in self-education: he studies mineralogy, botany, zoology. It was then that he became interested in aliens from outer space - meteorites. In addition, he learned the intricacies of instrumental photography so successfully,that it was he who was invited to work as a surveyor in the Radium Expedition of Professor Vladimir Vernadsky in 1911, and he was even entrusted with an extremely difficult and responsible job - drawing up a "milestone map of the entire Ilmensky region with the designation of deposits on it … with accurate drawing of all mines." This is a turning point in the fate of a “simple lover of stones,” as the future world famous scientist modestly called himself. A close friendship was struck between the two naturalists, thanks to which in 1912 Kulik moved to St. Petersburg and took the position of a cataloguer-mineralogist at the Geological and Mineralogical Museum named after V. I. Peter the Great, and also entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of St. Petersburg University in the Department of Mineralogy. At this moment, the First World War begins and the scientist goes to the front. And here his military talents are clearly manifested,and - which will come in handy later - unparalleled courage and amazing organizational skills in emergency situations. He ends the war with two orders and with the rank of lieutenant. He also managed to serve in the Red Army under the command of Tukhachevsky.
Finally, in 1921, Kulik finally said goodbye to a military career for the sake of a scientific one. “At the request of the Academy of Sciences,” he returns to the northern capital, leads a permanent Meteorite expedition, and for the first time in Russian history sets out to hunt for heavenly stones. Thousands of kilometers by rail, on horseback, on foot, on rafts … And - a sharp increase in the meteorite collection of the Academy of Sciences 30 times! And most importantly, from that moment on, Kulik begins to engage in the main business of his life - the search for the Tunguska meteorite.
The fact that the Tunguska phenomenon came out again, and from that moment began its triumphal march around the world, was due to the similarity of many accidents. And the main one is almost mystical, when a piece of paper falls into the hands of Clique, which turned his whole life over. This is how he himself recalls what happened: “How vividly I remember this moment. Leningrad. March 1921. The editor of the journal "Mirovedenie" D. O. Svyatsky and, holding out a leaf of the tear-off calendar for July 15, Old Art. (old style. - author's note) 1910, says: "Look, there is no smoke without fire."
God and Kulik alone know what inhuman efforts it cost to organize the first expedition in a country ravaged by a civil war. “… The situation was not very favorable for this: the scientific staff was emaciated and was cut short; The Academy of Sciences did not have sufficient funds,”the scientist wrote, but in the end he managed to ignite the government, like a meteorite taiga, in order to give it funds for problems that are completely far from earthly ones. Although here Kulik went for a little trick. Then it was believed that only iron meteorites, consisting of rare metals, in particular, of nickel, fell to the earth, the proven reserves of which in Russia were extremely small, and the need was great. Kulik promised to find an alien weighing hundreds of thousands of tons and save millions of gold rubles for the treasury. As a result, the scientist was allocated funds and even a separate carriage.
During the expedition, Kulik made the main emphasis on exploring the vicinity of Kansk, where, judging by the first publication, an alien fell, and the farrowing of eyewitnesses. And although nothing was found, two important facts became clear: the grandiose scale of the phenomenon and the need to transfer the search to the Vanavara region.
Returning to Leningrad, Leonid Alekseevich began to seek the organization of a new special expedition dedicated exclusively to the Tunguska phenomenon. Troubles, the search for justifications and evidence, the war with officials lasted until 1927. Until Kulik played the main trump card again - the metallic composition of the meteorite. The country needed rare metals more than ever.
And now, in the 21st century, getting to Pokamennaya Tunguska is not easy, but then it was generally compared to a feat. Leningrad - Taishet - Angara River - Kezhma village - Vanavara trading post. Passenger planes did not fly yet, and it was necessary to get there by train, boats, horses, deer, and on foot. We were in a hurry to go along the winter roads, otherwise the swamps would thaw out and the expedition could get stuck for a long time halfway.
However, it was possible to get from Vanavara to the epicenter only on the third attempt in the spring. For the first time, the horses got stuck in half-meter snowdrifts and had to turn back and change them to deer.
For the second time, Kulik was banally deceived by the only guide who agreed to go, profiting from the "gullible, like a child, Russian" and solving his problems with his help - it turns out that the Tungus had to take an elk killed in winter hunting from these places.
“We started our journey in early April. - wrote Leonid Kulik. - We went on skis, doing 5-7 kilometers a day. The Tungus reindeer breeder did not want to worry himself anymore. He set out on a hike with his youngest wife, infant, eldest daughter and nephew. We got up at 10 o'clock in the morning, drank tea for a long time and looked for deer even longer; they performed in the afternoon, and at 3-3.5 o'clock in the afternoon, and rarely later, they stopped for the night, arranged a yurt and drank tea for a long, long time. And so it all dragged on for an endless week. On the third or fourth day of the journey, the trail disappeared, and the Tungus had to cut it through the taiga thickets. Moans and lamentations began, feigned illnesses and demands to heal … with "moonshine". The refusal worsened the relationship, because the Tungus did not believe that the hare went to the taiga without this universal medicine."
Having reached the border of a windbreak, where "… a large forest in the mountains was tumbled down to the ground in dense rows, in the valleys not only the roots of the inversions protruded upward, but also the trunks of the broken, in the top or in the middle, like reeds, of the age-old warriors of the taiga." Kulik had to stop: the guide refused to lead him further north to the forbidden lands. Nevertheless, having climbed the nearest hill, the scientist made sure that he was on the right path.
“A stunning picture opened before me on the horizon to the north. - Kulik recalled. - The taiga, which does not know taiga meadows, parted there to the sides, almost 120 degrees along the horizon, and powerful chains of snow-white mountains, without signs of any vegetation, sparkled under the bright rays of the April sun, separated from me by tens of kilometers covered with shallow undergrowth of the plateau. And to the right and to the left on the horizon, the endless, solid, mighty taiga turned blue … I became convinced that the center of the fall lies in the north, namely, where this incomparable whiteness could be seen the sugar heads of the mountains cut by a gloomy gorge, where the sacramental the Khushmo river … And suddenly (I shuddered) the owner of my horned horses, waving his hand towards the distant white mountains, in a fit of frankness said: “There, they say,the forest fell in all directions and fired everything, fired up to here, and then the fire did not go …"
The return trip to Vanavara took only two days.
Only on the third attempt, already with Russian workers and without guides, risking his life every day on the rivers that had opened up from the ice did Kulik penetrate the forbidden “mountains of Khushma”. After 16 days, his eyes open a grandiose radial fall of the forest, according to his estimates, thousands of square kilometers.
Closer to the center, he discovers burn marks that have spread for hundreds of kilometers, and even closer - a peat cover gathered in folds, dotted, as he was sure, with craters from multi-ton meteorite fragments, up to 50 meters in diameter. For several days, the scientist walked around the entire area.
“During the day, especially in the first half, when the wind was picking up, it was very dangerous to walk in the old dead forest: twenty-year-old dead giants, rotting at the root, were falling from all sides. The fall sometimes occurred in our immediate vicinity, and we sighed with relief, descending into a hollow or valley protected from the wind, or getting out to a bare place or tundra. We walked, all the time looking around at the tops of the pillar trees, so that if they fell, we could have time to jump to the side. But this method of movement also had its unpleasant side: looking at the tops, we did not look at our feet and all the time came close to the vipers that swarmed this area."
Subsequently, Kulik characterized the investigated part of the fallen forest area - the depression as follows: “The central part of the fall is an area of several kilometers across on the watershed between the Chuni river basins and the Podkamennaya Tunguska plateau itself, which looks like a huge depression surrounded by an amphitheater of ridges and individual peaks. From the south, tangentially to this circus of mountains, the Khushmo River flows from west to east, the right tributary of the Chambe River, which flows into the Podsmennaya Tunguska on the right. In the mentioned basin, in turn, there are hills, ridges, individual peaks, plain tundra, swamps, lakes and streams. The taiga, both in the basin and outside it, was practically destroyed, being completely thrown to the ground, where it lies in parallel, in general, rows of naked (without branches and crown) trunks, facing their tops to the sides,opposite to the center of the fall. This peculiar "fan" of the fallen forest is especially clearly visible from the tops of ridges and individual heights that form the peripheral ring of the basin. However, in some places the taiga forest remained standing with standing trunks (usually without bark and branches). Likewise, insignificant strips and groves of green trees have been preserved in places. These exceptions are rare and are easily explained in each case. All the former vegetation of both the basin and the surrounding mountains, as well as in a zone of several kilometers around them, bears characteristic traces of a uniform continuous burn, not similar to the traces of an ordinary fire and, moreover, existing both on the fallen and standing forest, the remains of bushes and moss, both on the tops and slopes of mountains, so in the tundra and on isolated islands of land among water-covered swamps. The area with burn marks is several tens of kilometers across. The central area of this "burnt" area, which has several kilometers in diameter, in that part of it, which is covered with shrubs and forest tundra, bears, as it were, traces of lateral pressure that collected it in flat folds with depressions, a few meters deep, elongated in general perpendicular to the north-east direction. In addition, it is dotted with dozens of freshly formed flat “funnels” with different diameters - from several meters to tens of meters, with a depth of just a few meters”.collected it in flat folds with depressions, a few meters deep, elongated generally perpendicular to the northeastern direction. In addition, it is dotted with dozens of freshly formed flat “funnels” with different diameters - from several meters to tens of meters, with a depth of just a few meters”.collected it in flat folds with depressions, a few meters deep, elongated generally perpendicular to the northeastern direction. In addition, it is dotted with dozens of freshly formed flat “funnels” with different diameters - from several meters to tens of meters, with a depth of just a few meters”.
The picture of the incident turned out to be so impressive that Kulik did not doubt for a second that a new, more prepared expedition was needed! And Kulik's report made such a splash at the meeting of the Academy of Sciences that it took place the following year and became the most famous of all the campaigns to Tunguska (1928). Newspapers and magazines wrote a lot about her, a documentary film was shot by cameraman Nikolai Strukov, and even a children's board game “Into the taiga for a meteorite. In the wake of L. A. Kulik . But it also had a lot of trials.
At the end of winter, across loose snow and thin ice from Taishet, they walked with horses to Vanavara, where they built three shitiks, which were given the space names "Bolid", "Comet" and "Meteor". And already along them were going along the route Podkamennaya Tunguska - Chamba - Khushma - the mouth of the Churgim stream.
On Chamba and Khushma, the boats had to be dragged like a burlack, and on one of the rapids Leonid Kulik almost died! Operator Strukov just filmed this moment: “There are two left in the boat: a hangar worker with a pole and L. A. Kulik is driving. I, on the other hand, settled down on the shore with my apparatus and began to film this critical-critical boat crossing the threshold. In the most dangerous place, the boat suddenly turned across the current, and it instantly filled with water. An experienced hangar man managed to jump onto the stone. Kulik got into the water. Captured by the whirlpool, he hid under water twice and would have inevitably died if he had not caught his foot on the string at the stern and if he had not been wearing a life belt … This incident had little effect on Kulik: having quickly changed his clothes, he continued to direct the work of promoting the boats with the same energy."
At the mouth of the Churgim, a temporary camp was set up, a hut, a bathhouse and a storage shed were built, which have survived to this day and on which KP and the Russian Geographical Society installed a memorial plaque in honor of the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the scientific study of the Tunguska phenomenon.
From there, the expedition went along the road that would later be called the Kulik path. More precisely, there was no road at that time - people cut and sawed through a path already through an impassable windbreak, until they reached the epicenter of the explosion to the Big Swamp, on the shore of which a permanent camp was cut down (two huts have also survived from that time).
At first, the Presidium of the Academy reacted coolly to Sytin's information. However, the situation changed dramatically after his interview with Krasnaya Gazeta and the publication of the article “Alone in the Taiga”. The public's worries about the rescue of Umberto Nobile's polar expedition have not yet subsided, and the story of Kulik's heroic wintering place has greatly excited the readers. Another publication added fuel to the fire that the researcher was allegedly threatened by escaped bandits who went to capture, having heard rumors that the expedition was actually mining gold. A wave arose in the press, there were massive demands to save the scientist. Funds were immediately found, and a new expedition was immediately formed. Sytin was allocated a special plane for the speedy transfer from Siberia. The arriving detachment not only evacuated the scientist, equipment and research results, but also allowed new ones to be carried out.
The following year, a third expedition was organized (1929-30), but it severely crippled Kulik in every sense. Various specialists were brought to the camp, including drillers. Draining the Suslovskaya funnel went faster with the use of mechanisms, but people still had to work hard to dig a 38 meter long trench to drain the water. But the members of the expedition were ready to endure, because there was a hope that the solution to the meteorite was very close and at the bottom they would find an important artifact! But…
As soon as the funnel was drained, everyone - and especially Kulik - was terribly disappointed. At the bottom, only an old larch stump was found, the age of which exceeded the time since the meteorite fell. This proved the natural origin of the funnel. The reaction of the head of the expedition was unexpected: he forbids photographing the find and, in general, the bottom of the funnel. From this moment on, failures go in jamb. The agreements with Osoaviakhim, who undertook to carry out aerial photography, are thwarted. Financing is suspended. Three employees unauthorizedly leave the camp, and one of them writes a denunciation to the chief, accusing him of incompetence and deliberately misleading the Academy of Sciences about the place of the meteorite fall. Kulik quarrels with yesterday's friends, who are increasingly suggestingthat the meteorite could have fallen elsewhere and it is worth expanding the search area. He stops communicating with Viktor Sytin, calling him a traitor for the phrase that he saw similar funnels in other places, which means that they can all be of natural origin. He kicks out Evgeny Krinov for going beyond the boundaries of the search area defined by him and the assumption that the development of the Suslov funnel is useless and one should try his luck in the South Swamp. Kulik ends the expedition very old and sick. However, they did not lose faith in their correctness. He still achieves the organization of aerial photography in 1938 and breaks through a new expedition, which took place in 1939. At this time, the scientist draws attention to the Southern Swamp, because of which he quarreled with Krinov. There, while drilling, he again (as it seems to him) finds signs of a meteorite falling. A large-scale survey of these places was planned for 1941, but then the Great Patriotic War broke out.
Despite the fact that the grave of the scientist has survived, this does not prevent the supporters of the alien version of the Tunguska disaster (we will talk about it later) fantasize that Kulik died much later, and in 1942 he was urgently taken to Berlin for interrogation by the mysterious Nazi organization Ahnenerbe, which engaged in the occult sciences and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Although it is possible that German scientific intelligence could also be interested in a world-renowned scientist, because already at that time there were versions that the Tunguska could not be a meteorite, but the mysterious Wunderwaffe - a miracle weapon that the Nazis especially actively tried to invent at the end of the war.
Some science fiction writers generally assume that Kulik did not die, but was stolen by an alien civilization, whose ship crashed near Vanavara. Of course, one cannot take these versions seriously.
As for the question, would Leonid Alekseevich find his meteorite in the end if he had remained alive, here, knowing his purposefulness, the answer is obvious - no doubt. But even without completing the main work of his life, Kulik did a lot: he did not let the "Tunguska Diva" sink into oblivion and carried the whole world away with his searches.