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said that UFO's were still 'an extra-scientific problem’; but, said Oberth, UFO's were probably 'space- ships from unknown worlds' and to use his own words: ‘Obviously the beings who man and fly them are far ahead of us culturally, and if we go about things properly we can learn a lot from them.' Oberth, who accurately predicted rocket development on earth, suspects that the prerequisites for abiogenesis exist on other planets in the solar system. Oberth, a research scientist himself, demands that serious scientists, too, should tackle problems that may seem fantastic at first. 'Scholars behave like stuffed geese who refuse to digest anything else. They simply reject new ideas as nonsense.’ On 17.11.67, under the headline 'Second Thoughts', Die Zeit said: 'For years the Russians have ridiculed western hysteria about flying saucers. Not long ago Pravda contained an official denial that such peculiar celestial vehicles existed. Now the Air Force General Anatolyi Stolyakov has been appointed director of a committee which is to examine all reports of UFO's. In this connexion the London Times writes: "Whether UFO's are the product of collective hallucinations, whether they originate from Venusian visitors or are to be understood as a divine revelation—there must be an wo explanation for them, otherwise the Russians would never have set up a Committee of Enquiry". The most spectacular and puzzling incident connected with the phenomenon of 'matter from the universe’ took place at 7.17 on the morning of 30 June, 1908, in the Siberian Taiga. A fire-ball shot across the sky and was lost in the steppe. Travellers on the Trans-Siberian Railway observed a glowing mass which moved from south to north. A thunder-bolt shook the train, explosions followed and most of the seisomographic stations in the world registered an appreciable earth tremor. At Irkutsk, 550 miles from the epicentre, the needle of the seismograph went on quivering for nearly an hour. The noise could be heard over a radius of 621 miles. Whole herds of reindeer were destroyed. Not until 1921 did Professor Kulik begin to collect eyewitness accounts. Finally he also succeeded in collecting the money for a scientific expedition to this sparsely populated region of the Taiga. When the expedition reached the Stony Tunguska in 1927, they were convinced that they would find the crater made by a gigantic meteorite. Their conviction turned out to be quite wrong. They saw the first trees without tops as much as 37 miles from the centre of the explosion. The nearer they came to the critical point, the more barren the district became. Trees stood there like shaved telegraph poles; in the vicinity of the centre even the strongest trees had been snapped off outwards. Last they found traces of a tremendous conflagration. Pushing on further north, the expedition became convinced that a vast explosion must have taken place. When they came across holes of all sizes in swampy ground they suspected the impact of meteorites; they dug and drilled in the marshy ground without finding a single remnant, a piece of iron, a bit of nickel or a lump of stone. Two years later the search was continued with bigger drills and improved technical resources. They drilled to a depth of 118 ft without finding a single trace of any-kind of meteoric material. In 1961 and 1963 two more expeditions were sent to the Tunguska by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The 1963 expedition was under the leadership of the geophysician Solotov. This group of scientists, now equipped with the most modern technical appliances, came to the conclusion that the explosion in the Siberian Tunguska must have been a nuclear one. Nomads were whirled up into the air with their tents.