In the early morning of June 30, 1908, an explosion was heard over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. According to various estimates, the TNT equivalent of the Tunguska explosion is practically equal to one or two bombs detonated over Hiroshima.
In addition to the Tunguska, the amazing phenomenon was also called the Khatanga, Turukhansky and Filimonovsky meteorites. After the explosion, a magnetic disturbance was noted, which lasted about 5 hours, and during the flight of the Tunguska fireball, a bright glow was reflected in the northern rooms of nearby villages.
With all the phenomenality of what happened, a scientific expedition led by L. A. Kulik to the place of the "meteorite fall" took place only twenty years later.
Meteorite theory
The first and most mysterious version lasted until 1958, when a refutation was made public. According to this theory, the Tunguska body is a huge iron or stone meteorite.
But even now its echoes do not give rest to contemporaries. Even in 1993, a group of American scientists conducted research, concluding that the object could be a meteorite that exploded at an altitude of about 8 km. It was the traces of a meteorite fall that Leonid Alekseevich and a team of scientists were looking for in the epicenter, although they were embarrassed by the initial absence of a crater and a forest that was fanned out from the center.
The most obvious version has one weak point - numerous expeditions to the site of the alleged meteorite fall did not allow to find debris and remnants of meteorite matter. Moreover, the forest at the site of the cosmic catastrophe was tumbled over a large area, but just at the place where the meteorite crater was supposed to be, the trees remained standing.
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Supporters of the meteorite version say - yes, there is no solid meteorite, it completely collapsed, and numerous small debris fell to the Earth. The problem is that to this day it has not been possible to find these fragments in any serious quantity.
Comet
The "comet" version appeared after the meteorite. Its main difference lies in the nature of the substance that caused the explosion. Comets, unlike meteorites, have a loose structure, part of which is ice. As a result, the comet's substance began to rapidly disintegrate at the moment of its entry into the Earth's atmosphere, and the explosion completely completed what it had begun. That is why, say the supporters of the version, it is not possible to find traces of matter on Earth - they simply were not there.
Comet and meteorite theories exist in different forms, sometimes intertwining with each other. However, no one has yet been able to convincingly confirm their case.
Fantastic theory
Not only the inquisitive minds of scientists are occupied by the Tunguska riddle. No less interesting is the theory of science fiction writer A. P. Kazantsev, who pointed to the similarity between the events of 1908 and the explosion in Hiroshima.
In his original theory, Alexander Petrovich suggested that the fault was the accident and explosion of the nuclear reactor of an interplanetary spacecraft.
If we take into account the calculations of A. A. Sternfeld, one of the pioneers of cosmonautics, then it was on June 30, 1908 that a unique opportunity was created for a drone-probe to fly around Mars, Venus and the Earth.
The idea was first published in the magazine Around the World in 1946. Some Western researchers adhere to the same version. F. Edwards wrote that in this catastrophe we lost a “guest from the Universe”.
Kazantsev's version received a lively response and found a lot of supporters who developed and transformed it.
Scientists have always been extremely skeptical about the "alien" explanation of the incident, but in fact, in this case, the main problem is the same - there is no material evidence.
Already in the 1980s, Alexander Kazantsev corrected his version. In his opinion, the aliens in distress took the ship away from the Earth, and it exploded in space, and the "Tunguska Meteorite" was the landing of their orbital module.
Nuclear theory
In 1948, the American scientist Lincoln La Paz put forward the idea that the "Tunguska phenomenon" is explained by the collision of matter with antimatter from space. As you know, during annihilation, there is a mutual destruction of matter and antimatter with the release of a large amount of energy. The theory is confirmed by the presence of radioactive isotopes in the wood material from the explosion site.
The Soviet physicist Boris Konstantinov stated even more clearly in the 1960s - a comet consisting of antimatter invaded the Earth's atmosphere. That is why it is simply impossible to find its fragments.
The lack of knowledge of the nature and properties of antimatter allows us to consider this version to be admissible, but most scientists are skeptical about it.
In 1965, the Nobel Prize laureates, American scientists K. Cowanny and W. Libby developed the idea of L. Lapaz's colleague about the antimatter nature of the Tunguska incident.
They suggested that as a result of the collision of the Earth and a certain mass of antimatter, annihilation and the release of nuclear energy occurred.
Ural geophysicist A. V. Zolotov analyzed the motion of the fireball, the magnetogram and the nature of the explosion, and stated that only an "internal explosion" of its own energy could lead to such consequences. Despite the arguments of opponents of the idea, nuclear terrorism is still the leader in the number of adherents among specialists in the field of the Tunguska problem.
Ice comet
One of the latter is the hypothesis of an ice comet, which was put forward by the physicist G. Bybin. The hypothesis arose on the basis of the diaries of the researcher of the Tunguska problem, Leonid Kulik.
At the site of the "fall" the latter found a substance in the form of ice, covered with peat, but did not pay special attention to it. Bybin, however, claims that this compressed ice, found 20 years later at the scene, is not a sign of permafrost, but a direct indication of an ice comet.
According to the scientist, the ice comet, consisting of water and carbon, simply flew about the Earth, touching it at speed, like with a red-hot frying pan.
Comet ricochet hypothesis
First formulated by IS Astapovich in the article "The failure of the hypothesis of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite on the Earth on June 30, 1908" (1963). The author believed that the Tunguska body was a comet, with parameters close to the comet of 1874 (Winnicke-Borelli-Tempel). Having invaded the atmosphere along a gentle trajectory, the comet lost all shells in 13 seconds, but the nucleus entered space along a hyperbolic trajectory.
In 1984 the hypothesis was corrected by E. Iordanishvili, in his view, the Tunguska body was a meteorite, not a comet.
Ball lightning
Back in 1908, the first researchers of the "Tunguska Phenomenon" suggested that a huge ball lightning was the cause of the explosion.
To this day, the nature of such a rare natural phenomenon as ball lightning has not been fully understood. Perhaps this is the reason why the "ball and lightning" version of events gained popularity among scientists in the 1980s.
According to this version, a giant ball lightning exploded at the crash site, which appeared in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of powerful energy pumping by ordinary lightning or sharp fluctuations of the atmospheric electric field.
Space dust cloud
Back in 1908, the French astronomer Félix de Roy suggested that on June 30, the Earth collided with a cloud of cosmic dust. This version was supported in 1932 by the famous academician Vladimir Vernadsky, adding that the movement of cosmic dust through the atmosphere caused a powerful development of noctilucent clouds from June 30 to July 2, 1908. Later, in 1961, the Tomsk biophysicist and enthusiast of studying the "Tunguska phenomenon" Gennady Plekhanov proposed a more detailed scheme, according to which the Earth crossed an interstellar cloud of cosmic dust, one of the large conglomerates of which was what was later called the "Tunguska meteorite".
The same Gennady Plekhanov put forward a humorous version, which, with some stretch, can be considered a "7 bis version". Being bitten by a gnat during one of the expeditions to the Podkamennaya Tunguska region, he proposed the idea that on June 30, 1908, a cloud of mosquitoes with a volume of at least 5 cubic kilometers gathered at this place, as a result of which a volumetric thermal explosion occurred, which entailed the felling of forests.
Is Tesla to blame?
At the beginning of the XXI century, an interesting theory appeared, indicating the connection of Nikola Tesla with the Tungus events. A few months before the incident, Tesla claimed that he could light the way for the traveler Robert Peary to the North Pole. At the same time, he requested maps of the "least populated parts of Siberia."
According to this hypothesis, on June 30, 1908, Tesla from his laboratory fired an "energy super-shot" in the Alaska region in order to practically test the capabilities of his equipment. However, the imperfection of technology led to the fact that the energy directed by Tesla went much further and caused huge destruction in the Podkamennaya Tunguska area.
After learning about the consequences of the tests, Tesla chose not to voice his involvement in the incident. The scale of the destruction forced Tesla to stop such large-scale experiments.
The weak point of this theory is that there is no evidence that Nikola Tesla conducted the experiment on June 30, 1908. Moreover, the laboratory from which the "super shot" was allegedly made did not belong to Tesla by that moment.
Other theories
At the moment, there are several dozen different theories that meet various criteria for what happened. Many of them are fantastic and even absurd.
For example, the disintegration of a flying saucer or the departure of a graviobolide from the ground are mentioned. A. Olkhovatov, a physicist from Moscow, is absolutely convinced that the event of 1908 was a kind of earthquake, and the Krasnoyarsk researcher D. Timofeev explained that the cause was an explosion of natural gas, which was set on fire by a meteorite that flew into the atmosphere.
American scientists M. Rian and M. Jackson stated that the destruction was caused by a collision with a "black hole", and physicists V. Zhuravlev and M. Dmitriev believe that it was the breakthrough of a solar plasma clot and the subsequent explosion of several thousand ball lightning that was to blame.
For more than 100 years since the incident, it has not been possible to come to a single hypothesis. None of the proposed versions was able to fully meet all proven and irrefutable criteria, such as the passage of a high-rise body, a powerful explosion, an air wave, a burn of trees at the epicenter, atmospheric optical anomalies, magnetic disturbances and the accumulation of isotopes in the soil.
Spaceship launch
Another original version of the “Tunguska Phenomenon” is associated with science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It was expressed in a humorous form in their story "Monday begins on Saturday." According to her, on June 30, 1908, a spacecraft was launched in the Podkamennaya Tunguska area. Landing it happened a little later, that is, in July, since it was a ship of not just aliens, but aliens-countermotes, that is, immigrants from the Universe, where time moves in the direction opposite to ours.
But if the Strugatsky brothers' version of the counter-alien aliens was expressed in a humorous manner, then in the early 1990s, the well-known ufologist, the leader of the Cosmopoisk association Vadim Chernobrov, proposed it as an absolutely serious explanation of the Tunguska phenomenon.
Tectonic forces
In 1991, A. Yu. Olkhovatov published the first article in Izvestia of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the provisions of which were developed in the monographs of 1997 and 1999. According to A. Yu. Olkhovatov, the Tunguska explosion was a manifestation of the tectonic energy of the belt of ancient explosive formations - astroblems located near the East Siberian geomagnetic anomaly. Thus, the Tunguska explosion was only a local manifestation of processes on a global scale.
Solar plasmoid
In 1984, A. N. Dmitriev (Novosibirsk), together with V. K. Zhuravlev, published a paper in which they proved the possibility of the formation of microtransients, that is, microscopic plasma bodies that can be captured by the Earth's magnetic field and drift along its gradients.
Dmitriev and Zhuravlev applied mathematical methods to the testimony of eyewitnesses (in 1981, a catalog of eyewitness testimonies was published in Tomsk, including the testimonies of 720 people), as a result of which they found out that the observers on June 30, 1908 saw two different objects: one was walking along the eastern trajectory, the second - along the southern one, and the observation time was also sharply different. Thus, according to the Novosibirsk researchers, there were two plasmoids.
The energy corresponding to an explosion of 30 Mt can be stored in an ionized plasma formation, with its diameter of about 500 meters, which corresponds to eyewitness accounts of the huge size of the fireball.
The trajectory of the plasmoid, like ball lightning, can change during movement, which explains the inconsistency of data on the direction of movement of the fireball. Sound and light effects during the movement of the plasmoid are caused by electromagnetic phenomena, which significantly differs from the effects associated with a ballistic wave and removes the existing contradictions.
The explosion of the plasmoid explains the occurrence of a fire in the taiga. The electromagnetic phenomena accompanying the movement and explosion of the plasmoid, obviously, can be the cause of geomagnetic effects that cannot be properly explained within the framework of the meteorite version. The plasmoid version explains the futility of attempts to find noticeable traces of meteorite matter at the explosion site.
Gas-mud emission
The hypothesis was put forward in 1981 by N. Kudryavtseva and developed in 1986 by N. S. Snigirevskaya. In the Vanavara region, there are manifestations of paleovolcanism, thus, first there was an explosion, and then - atmospheric phenomena, which were mistaken for a fireball.
Interesting finds
Often the versions were based on unusual finds made near the study area. In 1993, Corresponding Member of the Petrovsk Academy of Sciences and Arts Yu. Lavbin, as part of the research expedition of the public foundation "Tunguska Space Phenomenon" (now he is its president), discovered unusual stones near Krasnoyarsk, and in 1976 in the Komi ASSR they discovered "Your iron", recognized as a fragment of a cylinder or sphere with a diameter of 1.2 m.
The anomalous zone of the "devil's cemetery" with an area of about 250 square meters, located in the Angara taiga of the Kezhemsky district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, is often mentioned.
Plants and animals perish in the area formed by something "fallen from the sky", people prefer to bypass it. The consequences of the June morning of 1908 also include the unique geological object Patomsky crater, located in the Irkutsk region and discovered in 1949 by the geologist V. V. Kolpakov. The height of the cone is about 40 meters, the diameter along the ridge is about 76 meters.