Saucer nuts have spoiled the 1908 Tunguska Event

[cthulu2016]

One of the most interesting events in fairly-modern history was the 1,000-Hiroshima bomb equivalent meteorite explosion in Siberia in 1908. Anything from outer space that does this to thousands of square kilometers of forest is worth noting! (The forest was flattened in a radial pattern, with all the snapped off trees pointing away from the center of the event. All the animals were killed, of course. Only a few peple were around.)



Unfortunately, the force of the explosion was so great that it became canonical among saucer nuts that it could have only been the nuclear explosion of an alien spacecraft and the majority of the words expended on the event are... shall we say, less than scientific.

A least the Wiki summation is fairly saucer-free.

The Tunguska event was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near (and later struck) the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 7:14 a.m. KRAT (00:14 UT) on June 30 [O.S. June 17], 1908.[1][2][3] The explosion, having the epicenter (60.886°N, 101.894°E), is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) above the Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded widely varying estimates of the object's size, on the order of 100 metres (330 ft).[4] It is the largest impact event on or near Earth in recorded history.[5] The number of scholarly publications on the problem of the Tunguska explosion since 1908 may be estimated at about 1,000 (mainly in Russian). Many scientists have participated in Tunguska studies, the best-known of them being Leonid Kulik, Yevgeny Krinov, Kirill Florensky, Nikolai Vladimirovich Vasiliev, and Wilhelm Fast.[6]

Although the meteoroid or comet appears to have burst in the air rather than hitting the surface, this event still is referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 to as high as 30 megatons of TNT (21–130 PJ),[7][8] with 10–15 megatons of TNT (42–63 PJ) the most likely[8]—roughly equal to the United States' Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb tested on March 1, 1954; about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; and about two-fifths the power of the later Soviet Union's own Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.[9]

The Tunguska explosion knocked an estimated 80 million trees down over an area covering 2,150 square kilometres (830 sq mi). It is estimated that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.[10] This possibility has helped to spark discussion of asteroid deflection strategies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

[Baclava]

1. plenty of firsthand accounts recorded...

“At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara Trading Post (65 km from the epicenter), facing north… I suddenly saw that directly to the north, over Onkoul’s Tunguska Road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment, I became so hot that I couldn’t bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few meters. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered, and in the barn a part of the iron lock snapped.”

http://www.vurdalak.com/tunguska/witness/witnesses.htm

Another interesting side effect of this blast was that, for several days after the blast throughout most of Asia and Europe, the night sky glowed. It was so bright that people as far away as China reportedly were able to read in the middle of the night by nothing but the glow of the sky.

[Taverner]

2. Wonder if it was a meteor or comet?

Of course, standing on the ground, I guess it's all the same

[NoGOPZone]

3. That was a metorite? The always reliable Internets told me

it was a directed energy weapon created by Tesla.