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On the 30th of June, 1908, in Siberia, the peaceful morning was shattered by an object flashing across the sky. Described by many of the eye-witnesses as an oval-shaped object leaving a trail of light hundreds of kilometers long. It was seen to weave and drastically change course, before it crashed into the ground and exploded with a thunderous noise, an explosion estimated to be equivalent to a 10-15 megaton nuclear detonation. Witnesses in the nearby village of Vanovara reported a mushroom shaped cloud rising over the impact point. Over 800 kilometers away, in the village of Kansk, the noise was so loud that a train engineer stopped his train, thinking one of the freight cars had exploded. The shockwave was recorded as far away as London.

At the point of impact, hurricane-force winds ripped through the forest, uprooting every tree within miles, ripping roofs off houses, and shattering windows. The Angara river flooded, the blast forcing huge waves over its banks. Over 500,000 acres of pine forest were vaporized, along with whole herds of reindeer and several nomadic villages.

However, it wasn't until 1927 (following the Russian Revolution) that an expedition, led by the Russian scientist L. A. Kulik, could finally be mounted to investigate the actual impact site. However, the expedition did not find a crater. They assumed that the crater, and the meteorite that caused the explosion, had been buried in the swampy ground. However, a geologic survey 20 years later proved that there was no crater anywhere near the impact point.

What the searchers did find was extensive devastation. Trees were ripped from the ground and laid outwards from the center of the explosion, while at ground zero, there were still some trees standing, indicating an explosion directly overhead.

Analysis of materials from the center of the blast show rapid tree growth, indicating radiation exposure. Comparisons between Hiroshima and Tungus gives every appearance of a nuclear air-burst.

Several explanations have been given for the Tunguska event. The officially accepted (and most likely) version is that a 100,000 ton fragment of Encke's Comet, composed mainly of dust and ice, entered the atmosphere at 62,000 mph, heated up, and exploded over the earth's surface creating a fireball and shock wave but no crater. Alternative explanations of the disaster include a renegade mini-black hole or an alien space ship crashing into the earth with the resulting release of energy.

The most startling theory about the devastation in Siberia is that it was caused by a damaged flying saucer from outer space, disintegrating into a nuclear explosion. The theory has been put forward recently by the Australian journalist John Baxter, and the American scholar, Thomas Atkins, who followed up the work of Russian experts, including engineer Alexander Kazantsev and Professor Feliz Zigel. They claim there is considerable evidence to support the theory of a nuclear blast.

In the first place, they say, the earth's magnetic field was disturbed at the time of the explosion, as it would have been by a nuclear blast.

Secondly, the pattern of destruction in the shattered forest is more consistent with the shock waves produced by an atomic bomb than with those of a conventional explosion.

Other clues were the extreme intensity of the light, and a later discovery of numerous tiny green globules of melted dust, called trinitites, which are characteristic of an atomic blast.

According to a Russian expert on the area, Professor Alexei Zolotov, the globules also contained metallic fragments of elements which are not found naturally in the area, and which are not the part of the usual makeup of meteorites either. Baxter and Atkins believe that this metal could have come from a spaceship's hull or fuel tank.

Finally, the two men point out that plant mutations in the area after the explosion were similar to those at Hiroshima in Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945.

Baxter and Atkins draw on the eyewitness evidence of people in the Tungus region at the time to complete their theory. Many of them described a large bluish object, cylindrical in shape, hurtling across the sky with a multi-coloured vapor trail in its wake. The noise of the object could be heard, while it was still in sight, according to their evidence, and this, they calculate, suggests that it was travelling at around twice the speed of sound, or about 1,500 miles per hour.

On June 30th, 1908, an extraterrestrial flying object dived towards the earth, from space to attempt a landing. Because of some accident abroad, its situation was critical. Having succeeded in entering the atmosphere, it flew in a wide arc, and began its manoeuvres for touchdown. But it was too late. Two miles above Siberia, the atomic fuel which powered it became heated to a point above the critical threshold and set off a nuclear explosion of about 30 megatons - equivalent to 30 million tonnes of dynamite. This turned 25 miles of the earth's surface into molten rock, and burned people as far away as 400 miles away from the center of the explosion. What sort of people were in the crippled spaceship? Where could they have come from? What could they have looked like? These are other mysteries lost in the debris of the Tungus.

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