Page Content (OCR)
The type of an explosion can be determined when several physical orders of magnitude that caused it are known. One of these orders of magnitude in the Tunguska explosion was known in the vast amount of radiant energy emitted. In the Taiga the expedition found trees eleven miles from the centre of the explosion that had been exposed to radiation and set on fire by it at the moment of explosion. But a growing tree can only catch fire if the amount of radiant energy per sq. cm reaches 70 to 100 calories. Yet the flash of the explosion was so bright that it continued to cast secondary shadows at a distance of 124 miles from the epicentre! From these measurements they worked out that the radiant energy of the explosion must have been around 2-8 x 10 <23> ergs. (Let me explain: the erg in science is the so-called ‘measurement of work’. A beetle with a mass of 1 gramme performs 981 ergs' worth of work when it climbs a wall 1 cm high.) The expedition found branches and twigs on the tops of trees that had been carbonised, up to range of eleven miles. From this they concluded that sudden heating had taken place. This was the result of an explosion, not a forest fire! These carbonisations were only found where there had been no shadows to interrupt the diffusion of the flash. Clearly and unquestionably it must have been a case of radiation. The sum of all these effects makes the energy of 10 <23> ergs necessary for the gigantic devastation. This immense energy corresponds to the destructive power of an atom bomb weighing 10 megatons or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, ergs! In March 1964, an article in the reputable Leningrad paper Svesda put forward the theory that intelligent beings living on a planet in the constellation Cygnus had tried to make contact with the earth. The authors, Genrich Altov and Valentina Shuraleva, said that the impact in the Siberian Taiga was a response to the colossal explosion-like eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the Indian Ocean that had sent a large concentration of radio waves into the universe when it erupted in 1853. The distant stellar beings had erroneously taken the radio waves for a signal from space; so they had directed a Laser beam, which was much too strong, at the earth, and when the beam hit the earth's atmosphere high above Siberia, it had turned into matter. I must admit that I do not accept this explanation because it seems too far-fetched. I am equally unable to accept the theory that seeks to explain the incident by the impact of anti-matter. Even though I believe that there is anti-matter in the depths of the cosmos, there cannot be any left in the Tunguska, because the collision of matter and anti-matter results in their mutual dissolution. Moreover, the possibility of a piece of anti-matter reaching the earth without a collision with matter on its long journey is very remote. I prefer to adhere to the opinion of those who suspect that the nuclear explosion was caused by an unknown spaceship's energy pile bursting. Fantastic? Of course, but does that make it impossible? There are shelves and shelves of literature about the Tunguska meteorite. There is one further fact I want to emphasise: radioactivity around the centre of the explosion in the Taiga is twice as All the investigations confirmed a nuclear explosion and related to the realm of fable explanations such as the impact of a comet or the fall of a great meteorite. What explanations are offered for this nuclear explosion in the year 1908?