The morning of June 30, 1908, was unusual. At about seven o'clock in the morning, the sky over Siberia split in two and it became unbearably hot, like in an oven. Then a strong shock wave passed and it seemed that stones fell on their heads.
After that, a magnetic storm lasted for 5 hours, and in the next three days unusual light phenomena were observed over the entire Earth. But this, contrary to the first hypotheses, was not the end of the world. The described event was named the Tunguska meteorite. However, scientists and non-scientists are still arguing about what, after all, fell to the Earth in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River.
Meteorite
The first serious version of what happened was the collision of a meteorite with the Earth. It is noteworthy that it was put forward only in the 1920s: until then, the fall of a cosmic body into Siberia did not attract public attention. The meteorite hypothesis is supported by the fact that trees were felled over an area of two thousand square kilometers. And at the epicenter of the explosion, the trees remained standing. Also, substances were discovered, the origin of which may well be cosmic. However, the first expeditions led by Leonid Kulik did not find a crater, which inevitably had to form when a meteorite fell.
Modern Italian scientists came to Kulik's aid to confirm his theory of the meteorite. They found that Lake Cheko, located eight kilometers from the alleged epicenter of the explosion, could very well be the desired crater. This is evidenced by its cone-shaped shape, which is not typical for Siberian lakes. The Italians, having drilled the bottom of the lake, allegedly even found the remnant of a cosmic body ten meters below it.
Comet
The absence of not only a crater, but even a significant concentration of substances that make up meteorites gave rise to the theory that the space object that caused the explosion and anomalous atmospheric phenomena is a comet. Unlike a meteorite, it itself consists largely of ice, and its core is easily destroyed, which happened from a collision with the dense layers of the earth's atmosphere. This hypothesis explains both the absence of fall marks and the huge effect produced by the collision. In addition, almost half of the cosmic bodies crossing the trajectory of the Earth and theoretically capable of crashing into it are comet nuclei, and therefore the probability of a cometary origin of the Tunguska "meteorite" is quite high.
A specific comet is even called - either Enke-Backlund, or Halley.
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Dust cloud
The third version, even a whole group of versions: it was not a meteorite or a comet that fell into the swamps of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, but a cloud of dust brought by some cosmic body, the same comet, for example. The body itself happily passed the Earth, and the dust was less fortunate, and in a single mass it entered the atmosphere. This explains the strange noctilucent clouds observed from June 30 to July 2 in many parts of the world.
Another version of this version is that it was not the dust that flew to the Earth, but the Earth itself flew into the accumulation of some substance.
Antimatter
It is known that most of the space objects in the foreseeable part of the Universe are composed of particles, but there are also those that are composed of antiparticles. Domestic physicist Boris Konstantinov proved that there are comets made of antimatter. And on June 30, 1908, a small piece of such antimatter collided with matter, that is, the Siberian taiga (or the atmosphere above it). As a result, the energy that fell down the forest was released. And the substance and antimatter themselves annihilated, that is, they destroyed each other without a trace.
Black hole
The events described could have been produced not by a small fragment of antimatter, but by a small black hole that passed through the Earth. She entered the planet through Siberia, and left somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean - therefore there is no evidence of a second, similar to the Tunguska, explosion. However, the black hole theory did not gain popularity: the calculations of physicists showed that the consequences of a collision with a miniature black hole that passed through the Earth at high speed should have been completely different.
Mosquitoes
The "comprehensive amateur expedition", which repeatedly went to the taiga to look for traces of the Tunguska phenomenon among the swamps, once suffered so much from blood-sucking insects that it came to the conclusion: on June 30, 1908, a strong thermal explosion occurred due to the fact that in the interfluve of the Lena and Podkamennaya Tunguska a large cloud of … mosquitoes gathered, the size of some sort of 5 cubic kilometers. That is why there are no traces of the detonated substance left.
Aliens
The seventh version is connected with unlucky aliens. Their spacecraft, for still unclear reasons, began to suffer a disaster, and the alien astronauts, having lost control, collapsed into the taiga. Or, according to other supporters of this version, they did not fall, but maneuvered, and their orbital module collided with the Earth. Whether the landing was successful is hard to say. The only thing that is known is the name of the alien ship: "Black Prince".
There is a hypothesis that the aliens dropped three containers with a message to humans, and we can find them when we are ready. In this case, it is significant that the containers were dropped on the territory of Russia.