Legendary 1908 Tunguska Mystery May Be Solved at Last

In 1908 in Siberia, over the Tunguska region, something went boom in a big way.

The shockwaves of that boom, which decimated 800 square miles of trees and was heard halfway around the world, have echoed down throughout the last 99 years, with some people adamantly insisting that the boom was caused by the busting of a UFO spaceship's nuclear reactor (that would have been its engine.)

This interpretation of the source of the event, while far from the only one, has persisted because no-one has been able to determine exactly what happened over Tunguska.

But now, scientists Mark Boslough and David Crawford insist that they do know what happened.

Using supercomputer 3D modeling technology, the pair have determined that the incoming something exploded while it was yet headed toward the Earth at hypersonic speed, which resulted in an unusual amount of the big boom's wave being directed downward. This would have required an impacting object that only packed three-to-five megatons of kinetic energy.

Boslough describes the result as "supersonic white-hot mega-tornado rings".

Previous researchers have insisted that the source of the blast had to pack the kinetic equivalent of 10 to 40 megatons of TNT; that is, a 15-megaton nuclear bomb.

Back in June, Italian researchers believed themselves to have found an impact crater that they interpreted as the signature of a meteor impact just five miles away from the epicenter of the original blast, in Lake Cheko.

"When we looked at the bottom of the lake, we measured seismic waves reflecting off of something. Nobody has found this before...Expeditions in the 1960s concluded the lake was not an impact crater, but their technologies were limited," said physicist Giuseppe Longo of that finding.

However, there is a dark side to this illumination: we can expect these potentially very deadly Earth-party disruptors to fly our way every few hundred years.

And we might get to witness one of them via telescope in the very near future.

Scientists with NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, are saying there's a 1-in-75 chance that an asteroid 160-feet in diameter is going to strike Mars on January 30th of 2008.

The computer modeling by the two Sandia National Laboratories scientists, however, says that the impacting object over Tunguska was probably less than 100 feet in diameter.

But the people that this journalist speaks with by and large still think that what exploded over Siberia that fateful day was an extraterrestrial space ship that was out of control. They remain skeptical about a meteor spontaneously exploding, especially before impacting the Earth. A few have expressed the take that the angel of entry into the Earth's atmosphere that the object took was too acute to be that taken by a natural object.

There is also a high level of distrust for orthodox scientists among UFO researchers, because these scientists have a strong tendency to blow off all consideration of E.T. events here on Earth as "stupid" or "foolish", even while NASA hunts for signs of E.T. life with the "foolish" method of analyzing radio waves via the SETI program.

And still others cite the fact of accelerate biomass growth and biological mutations in the Tunguska beginning in the months and years immediately following the event as evidence for a radiation source that they say would not be found within a meteor.