Modern photo from the place where the explosion took place
In the spring of 2011, residents of the Siberian village of Ongoy in the Irkutsk region witnessed the "second Tunguska disaster." The sky above the taiga was lit up with a bright flash, a loud bang was heard. Then a sparkling object disappeared behind the trees, and then a sound like an explosion came again
Those who did not see the fall decided that there was an earthquake - the blast wave was so strong. Eyewitnesses of the event believe that they saw an alien ship, and scientists say: it was the fall of a large meteorite. Meanwhile, humanity has not yet figured out a much more ancient mystery - the Tunguska meteorite itself. It fell 103 years ago - June 30, 1908.
Every time on the anniversary of the catastrophe on June 30, 1908, the "mystery of the century" - where the Tunguska meteorite got to and what exactly happened on the territory of present-day Evenkia - is declared solved.
However, not an ounce of what the cosmic body actually consisted of, which exploded over the taiga at an altitude of several kilometers, was never found. “The Tunguska disaster is a Boeing crash over the jungle, and we are pygmy eyewitnesses trying to interpret an incomprehensible event to the best of our knowledge of the world,” one of the researchers of the problem once said, and turned out to be closest to the truth.
Today this one of a kind area of the planet is marked on the ground with shields announcing "Special Protected Zone". They were installed by the inspectors of the Tungusky reserve. It evokes an analogy with the well-known image from the story of the Strugatsky brothers "Roadside Picnic" and the film by A. Tarkovsky "Stalker": there the "zone" that arose at the landing site of the alien ship also becomes a symbol of the unknown. Indeed, you experience unusual sensations even when approaching the epicenter of the fall. Mi-8 lands in the crater of an ancient volcano, over which the explosion occurred. Crater, but not that one - coincidence. Or, conversely, it is not accidental, if we believe the hypothesis of the Tunguska plasmoid. According to her, the area of the fall is a special place on Earth - an antenna or a channel through which energy flows from space into the interior of the planet and back. Along this antenna, a piece of plasma in a magnetic bag detached from the Sun was attracted to the volcano. Over the taiga, the plasma was discharged in a megaton explosion:
The catalog of eyewitnesses to the event of 1908 contains an eloquent story of the Evenk Ilya Aksenov, a witness to the catastrophe. Later, in 1911, he was the guide of the Siberian expedition, led by the famous writer, author of the novel "Gloomy River" Vyacheslav Shishkov. And early in the morning of June 30, he shot a moose in the taiga and began skinning the carcass. “Suddenly everything turned red,” and then “hit”. The man fell and lost consciousness. “When I woke up, I saw: everything around was falling, burning,” he said to one of the researchers. - Do not believe: that God was flying there, the devil was flying there. The devil himself was like a lump, light in color, in front there were two eyes, like red windows, and behind - a tail of fire: ". Aksenov also visited the place of the fall. According to him, “there were two mountains”: one collapsed, a hole formed in its place, and it was flooded with a lake, and the second was half cut. The water in the lake was going around, something whitish floated on the surface - "like fat" or gasoline (by smell): Then many Evenks got sick - the body was covered with spots. And the rusty earth from the funnels glowed in the dark like snow in the moonlight:
According to the Evenks, after the explosion, strange places appeared in the taiga: a "dry river" (a furrow and a hole at the end, and along the banks - dead trees), "a bare mountain on a mountain", etc. Pieces of white silver metal lighter than a knife, and dry swamps, where deer used to graze, became impassable. Somewhere the ground struck, and a fountain several meters high erupted there: One of the local streams is called Uklem ("steel"), the other was called Fiery, because, according to legend, it appeared at the moment when Aghdy - iron birds descended from heaven with burning eyes. Shamans declared Churgim sacred and frightened the first explorers: “Don't drink water from the Fiery Stream! You will die from the heat in your chest! " Churgim flows out of the swamp at the epicenter of the fall, where also "water was like fire, and both man and wood burned."
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Garden of mutants
A century later, there was the last true witness of the legendary event: dead trees felled by the shock wave of the explosion.
They say that for so many years the catastrophic fall seems to have long since rotted among the new taiga that has grown in its place. Rumors are exaggerated: as a member of meteorite expeditions, I walked on it, chopped it with an ax (the blade dulls), burned in a fire (burns badly), threw it into the water (drowns quickly). The "Witnesses" still lie in the taiga like a giant amphitheater - tops outward, roots to the epicenter. The remains of powerful larch trees, broken at a height of two to three meters, are the most obvious evidence of the force of the explosion - this is how a match crumples in a smoker's fingers. At the same time, the break lines are not sharp, cutting, but soft, lubricated - the wood was exactly flattened by a giant press: Not so long ago, scientists from the University of Bologna scanned the cuts of "8th year trees" using a conventional medical tomograph. And then they called Tunguska Chernobyl without radiation. The bottom line isthat the trees suffered in the same way as in Ukraine after the explosion of the 4th power unit, only without exposure to radioactive radiation.
Up close, the dump looks like a tree mutant graveyard. But the real mutants of Tunguska are ants and crustaceans in water bodies. For some reason, after the disaster, their legs and shells changed. Some of the scientists called the place of the fall the garden of mutants due to the abnormal growth of plants and other living organisms. In the "zone" pine needles also mutate: for example, young pines in the epicenter grow much faster than in the usual taiga. According to one hypothesis, the whole point is in the substance of the meteorite, which has become a kind of fertilizer for the Tunguska flora. And in the 1970s, scientists discovered a genetic anomaly in the inhabitants of the village of Strelka-Chunya on a tributary of the Nizhnyaya Tunguska - a mutation of a blood protein. The Evenks of three generations of one of the families in 1912 received a unique combination of the Rh factor, which was absent among the northern peoples. The genus of mutants came from the hunter, who was near the epicenter at the time of the explosion. Why did this person's blood mutate?
There are many similar facts and observations, including the most exotic ones, on Tunguska. The meteorite left a puzzle of paradoxes in memory of researchers. The three most insoluble of them are white nights, trajectory and matter. The problem is that, as one of the leaders of the Tunguska scientific expeditions, academician Nikolai Vasiliev, emphasized, the explosion of a cosmic body was the most striking, culminating, but far from the only episode in the chain of anomalous natural phenomena that took place in the summer of 1908. For example, according to the testimony of eyewitnesses, thunderous sounds in the sky were heard not only during and after the flight of the fireball, but also before it. It is also unclear why unusual white nights were observed in northern Eurasia both before and after the fall; the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses, who observed the flight of the car in different directions, do not agree in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening,but never - two meteorites at the same time. In this regard, the completely unscientific version of the ufologist Felix Siegel about the maneuver of the "meteorite" explains a lot. And the most offensive, as one more Tunguska pioneer, cosmonaut Georgy Grechko put it, “there is absolutely nothing to touch with your hands”.
An unpredictable past
The history of the battle over the Tunguska problem is a real drama of ideas with its ascetics and heretics. Despite the surplus and even overabundance of facts, the scientific debate around the riddle of the century never subsides.
The situation becomes clearer if we assume that on Tunguska mankind really encountered a phenomenon, which still does not really know anything about. In this we were not far from the Tungus themselves, who were sure that the iron birds of Agdy with burning eyes came down from the sky and punished people.
One of the researchers of the problem said: "The Tunguska fall, as in a joke, has an unpredictable past." One thing is clear: it was the first and so far the only cosmic catastrophe in the memory of mankind. Since 1927, there have been about a hundred expeditions “behind the meteorite”. What is their bottom line? In the end, official science came to the conclusion that the catastrophe was just the invasion of a small comet, not noticed by astronomers. The key phrase here was: “There is a theory about how comets are destroyed. What we know about the Tunguska meteorite does not contradict it. " As well as that, I will add that we do not know about it yet.