Tunguska alien evidence!!

"Booya! Bolshevieks in the house! Raise the winter palace roof!"

See 'Challenge to Apollo'/Asif Siddiqi page 260 quote "the payload landed
about 3500 km downrange from the launch site in one of the most remote and
inaccessible areas of Siberia, in the region of the Podkamennaya Tunguska
River close to the impact point of the famed Tunguska meteorite".

As this area is more or less directly underneath the flightpath of Baykonour
launches, it can be expected that it is littered with rocket debris....

finally reading the big tunguska book

it needed a stricter editor in some sections ("allude" for "elude") but it's full enough of interesting detail to make up for the woollier reaches: i did not for example know that the second expedition to find the meteorite in 1928 became a big deal in the soviet tabloid press -- the expedition was desperately raising money and put the story round that those out in the field (taiga) were (i) lost, (ii) being menaced by bandits and (iii) even now eating one another, none of which was true (they were suffering from scurvy however; also boils)

there was even a boardgame for soviet kids, called "in the taiga for a meteorite"

reminds me of a book I started reading and gave up on about the people who actually did eat other on a nightmare desolate river island in Siberia in the 30's, it was technically part of the gulag archipelago, but there was nowt there at all in terms of shelter or provisions and they just simply ate each other!

It's mad that a country can be such a huge sprawling empire and it took them so long to investigate an area the size of London that was destroyed in a blast wave. I understand that Tsar Nicki was a lame dickhead who liked to fuck about in daft uniforms and the Soviet regime was a bit preoccupied in the 20's - but come on lads.

the story didn't really reach moscow until after the revolution! leonid kulik, the main guy who investigated in the 1920s, was a difficult obsessive crackpot (who happened to be correct but also kept falling out with the locals, who distrusted all outsiders, tsarist or bolshevik, and considered kulik both rude and insane)

this was still the era when everyone was explaining (for example) meteor crater in arizona as a consequence of volcanic activity

a difficult obsessive crackpot (correct and not insane):

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Kulik_Leonid_Alekseevich.jpg

them spectacles look so robust

Next stage of the story:

1: fascists invade and siberian expeditions are shelved, a wounded leonid kulik dies in a nazi prison camp (RIP! yes he was a difficult crackpot but he was CORRECT and in most ways admirable and also courageous)

2: the USSR right after the ar is a swirl of topdown paranoia (stalin!) manipulating upsurges of populism fake and genuine, science versus pseudoscience (lysenko!) in unending battle, the bomb and spacerockets as topics of huge (and justified) public anxiety — and meanwhile at the moscow planetarium in 1948 a spectacle is staged to raise public awareness of all things tunguska, still an unresolved mystery (e.g. no fragments of meteorites yet unearthed) .

The spectacle takes the form of a scripted discussion panel of scientists explaining the meteorite theory, complete with questions (scripted and planted) from the audience (peppered with actors) poking holes in this and demanding exploration of other better theories (aliens). This show runs for several years, and totally seeds Tunguska with nascent soviet UFOlogy, conspiratorial and mystical (professional technological science was at this time a seething background hum of Kosmism; plus also several of the genuine giants of Soviet SF are cutting their teeth on versions of the alien-spacecraft atom-blast theory).

3: Periodic attempts to tamp this down just make it more energetic, right through to the 1980s (rho again I wish Andy Bruno had a better editor, to help him more securely place the individual stories within the shifting politico-cultural background, which he evidently understands p well but just doesn’t set out very clearly). At one point a key dissenter within the primary (amateur) investigation org declares that he does not want to “’deepen existing and annoying misunderstandings,’ which could ‘play into the hands of aggressors from a galactic power.’”

> Has there ever been a quality Tunguska movie?

i, and probably millions of others, only know about it because of the x-files

The boardgame Expeditions is about this event: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/379078/expeditions

it is but i still want to find and play the 1920s soviet boardgame

jeez, dying in one of them stalags in occupied Russia was a terrible way to go.

yes! he was a grumpy sod but he did not deserve that!

to koogsy's point, i suspect chicxulub surged up western imaginary in the 1980s to occlude tunguska (tunguska: becoming better known in the increasingly fortean 70s but still only capable of razing a london-sized patch of boggy siberian pine forest; chicxulub: destroyed the dinosaurs and also the world, more or less)

Gathering evidence is a lot easier - you can go to a national park and see the K–Pg extinction boundary layer *right there."

I just assumed that more people have visited Antarctica than the Tunguska hypocenter. I'd be surprised if it was the other way around

Also, I had no idea there was enough material to support a Tunguska Event in Fiction wikipedia page. The crashing spaceship theory has been around since 1930!

i was too was excited by how much related SF there was from quite early -- tho i slightly suspect that 1930 story (which is american not russian) is a red herring: the soviet stories began with kazantsev's explosion, where the key new element was atomics (which wasn't really on the fiction menu in 1930)

soviet science had been fascinated and frustrated by tunguska since the late 20s, when kulik's expeditions were sending up please for funding and kinda loudly making stuff up about their plight (e.g. they were never in any danger from gangs of anti-communist bandits lol). the explanation for the blast was still “meteorite”, but by 1946 no fragments had been found (still none today i believe) and no impact crater (ditto). many alarmed soviets were also reading about the aftermath of hiroshima and nagaski (russia had not yet publicly owned to having the bomb; first test = 1949); kazantsev saw the similiarites and was the first to think out loud "what if this blast was atomic? it sure readslike it! but how would atomics have arrived in siberia!?"

ans = evidently they came from mars!! (lots of soviet SF fascination with social systems on other planets in the 1920s: red planet, aelita etc -- the line was thst human space travel could only succeed under the aegis of world co-operation and more ugrent problems solved = communism)

interesting twist: the soviet stories combined "atomics are necessary for interstellar travel and that's good!" and "atomics may blow up and that's bad!"

anyway the ed earl repp story of 1930 (aka "the second missile") not only predates atomic explosions as a potential feature but also lacked at that date any pressing need for a new explanation (no one in 1930 was yet impatient with meteorite-as-cause… lol except some of kulik's exhausted mosquito-dogged companions)

also (tho i wouldn't rest much on this) the tunguska story hadn't so much escaped the soviet cultural sphere as early as 1930 -- so to me it's a little surprsing that a minor US pulp author would be the first to be playing around with it (hence wikipedia's caveated “possibly’)? but perhaps he was! this is why i want to read it! (sadly the collection it's in seems to be rare and expensive)

about kazantsev

about kazantsev

https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v05n09_1930-12/page/n33/mode/2up

I don't know if it's connected but here's his earlier story 'the stellar missle': https://archive.org/details/Science_Wonder_Stories_v01n06_1929-11.Stellar/page/n19/mode/2up

ooh thank you! now at last (20 minutes later) i can disprove my own booming post

looking bad for my theory! (ps this story is quite racist)

"It was with a slight shudder that the recalled Dr Miles Farrington's efforts to revive the Stellarites by removing the living brain of his son, Thompson, for experimenting with certain drugs he had formulated."

Only a slight shudder, eh?

maybe dr miles farrington was the monster all along

ok lol WELL

spoilers: the second missile is indeed abt the tunguska impact -- the "second" bcz it's also abt what was found beneath meteor crater (at the time still called barringer crater), which was an alien spaceship full of aliens in suspended animation. an expedition to siberia -- led by dr miles farrington's angry son tom -- discovers another such ship, hidden in caverns excavated beneath the deep bog and full of more aliens, the "stellarites" or as they call themselves, janosians, very much NOT in suspended animation! and themselves angry, advanced and telepathic! after much peril and other shenanigans the janosians fly off home, taking with them a large number of tunguskans as slaves. the american scientists seem not very bothered by this: they consider the tunguskans "ugly uncivilised natives" and the narrative is not respectful towards them; they are alternately brutish and cowardly. if the soviet SF of the forties is dominated by anxieties about atomics and the space race, the US SF of 1930 is dominated by anxieties about who is colonising who and who deserved it! leonid kulik is mentioned on the first page and repp evidently gathered the story of the siberian meteorite expeditions from the pages of the scientific american (which is also quoted). despite this almost all the science is extremely silly in various different ways, even if you ignore, like, telepathy… no atomics (tho casual drive-by mentions of radium, uranium and thallium) and definitely no airburst

in conclusion: acc. this story the aliens are kind of mean but also kind of OK (by white-man standards) and definitely better than the tunguskans

mark s... somewhat adjacent to this, have you read The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers?

oddly the page for the tunguska episode of the x files is low on tunguska details and instead points to a different meteorite

> "Tunguska" was inspired by reports of evidence of extraterrestrial life possibly being found in the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite

no such evidence ever found on the tunguska meteorite as no fragment of it has ever been identified IF IT WAS EVEN A METEORITE (it was a meteorite)

elvis: no, i've never read anything major-length on them, i should; there was a page or three about them in a book i edited a few years back and i know a little about scriabin and also the rocket guy

some think it might have been a chunk of the comet Encke, also 12500 years earlier another chunk of it colliding with earth is thought to be a major driver of the Younger Dryas period of climate change. Fucker just keeps doing its rounds with chunks breaking off and hitting earth with era defining consequences, which possibly get smaller and less consequential as the comet does.

graham hancock klaxon!

hancock also thinks encke destroyed atlantis (located in antarctica) *and* inspired the swastika (as an age-old symbol for comets when they're headed straight towards you)

now off down the victor clube rabbithole

finished the tunguska book: my review is a bit mixed

1: it has lengthy footnotes, bibliography and index, and it's reasonably evident that andy bruno has read extremely widely, including (importantly) among the russian sources, scientific and lol non-scientific. i can't say how well he's read these sources (i haven't read them!) but the first important task has been done: putting them all down in one place for those who choose to follow him (so i could start reading them, except for all the ones in russian)
2: he's not a terrific writer (which is i suppose my faintly anxious pointer to how perceptive a reader he is) -- he definitely needed a wise editor to help him lose up to a fifth of the needless baggage of the phrasing (without losing anything substantive, fact or idea); someone to steer him away from phrases like "producing cultural products"
3: i had that perhaps typcial kindle-puzzle of being suspended mid-text not having a good sense of how much there was to come (yes 48% but how does it reckon with footnotes, bibliography and index percentage-wise) and half-assuming that a ssummary of the results of all the field-work he describes might form a later chapter. it does not: which is not a disaster (i probably could not ably have processed it anyway) but it feels like a shoe that drops in an odd way, bcz what replaces it is evidently well-meant rhetoric about threats to the planet and stewardship and balancing cultural with ecological demands (he indicates that the locals, the Evenki, have not beren especially well treated at age stage, imperial, soviet, post-soviet… ) but we don't seem to have any direct modern-day Evenki input? (or if there is any, it's mulched down with all the other material)
4: in conclusion, hurrah, useful book, i learned a lot but it feels like there's a lot more to say (a sit-down interview with the aliens)

age stage s/b any stage

adding: it has lots of pictures, old and recent! these are a bit rubbish on a kindle tho

OK I just got a copy. Going to throw it into the juggle with the other five books I have going.

Related: https://earthsky.org/space/younger-dryas-comet-burst-crashed-earths-climate/

With that in mind, the evidence suggests the Younger Dryas comet was about 62 miles (100 km) wide. That’s much larger than the object that killed the dinosaurs. The Chicxulub impactor – suspected of wiping out much of life on Earth – was likely an asteroid. The asteroid that took out the dinos was only 6 miles (10 km) across. Yet because it was so much more dense and actually hit Earth, it was far more destructive.

The Younger Dryas comet burst was more like the atmospheric explosion of a meteor over Tunguska in Russia in 1908. That object was likely just 130 feet (40 meters) wide. But, it took out 830 square miles (2,150 square km) of forest. It also left no impact crater.