The airburst at Chelyabinsk felled buildings (Image: Zuma/Rex features)
IT’S just after 7 on a quiet Tuesday morning in June 1908 when a dazzling fireball streaks across the Siberian sky. Minutes later an immense blast topples 80 million trees and knocks people off their feet 60 kilometres away. It’s the violent end of an alien dogfight, with one spaceship destroyed in mid-air and the other turning and vanishing into space.
His voice trembles as 79-year-old retired Russian physicist Viktor Zhuravlyov tells me this rather unorthodox theory of what happened that day at Tunguska. The enigma has fascinated scientists for more than a century. Something exploded over the Siberian taiga – but what?
Back in 1959, when he had just graduated from Tomsk State University, Zhuravlyov joined one of the earliest expeditions to the region, marching for three days from the nearest town of Vanavara to get there. But neither he nor the hundreds of other researchers who have visited the area ever found a crater or any debris.
And so they keep guessing. Was it an icy comet? An asteroid? The Earth spewing out a huge cloud of methane gas? Antimatter? A black hole colliding with our planet? Aliens? All of these, and more, have been considered. But they all have a little something that just doesn’t add up, keeping Tunguska shrouded in mystery.
Another fire in the sky may finally lift the veil. Earlier this year, thousands of people in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia watched as a large fireball shot across the morning sky before exploding…
