Retro Raunch Revisit

JUN 30, 1908: The largest impact event on earth in recorded human history occurs with an explosion in Tunguska over Eastern Siberia. The collision had occured in the early morning hours at 7:14AM in a sparsely populated area, with a crash that felled an estimated 80 million trees in a region of forest (830 sq mi) larger than London. Eyewitnesses & local newspapers described a giant fireball with a long-stretching trail of flame, and noise that was similar to artillery fire that was followed by a thunderous shockwave with an impact that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of km's away. The explosion's airwaves were detected on seismographs far away in Germany, the UK, Denmark, the Dutch East Indies and also said to have registered in Washington,DC, and nearing the earthquake measuring of 5.0 on the richter scale. The first investigation for scientific analysis of the devastation took place in 1921 led by Russian mineralogist & meteorologist Leonid Kulik and again in 1927 when he was able to reach the remote central blast area where he found a flattened wasteland of scorched trees in a radial pattern. To the surprise of his team, they found no impact crater leading him to believe that a giant meteor or comet had exploded 3-6 miles above the Earth's surface, travelling at a speed of 33,500mph. In 1938, Kulik arranged an aerial photographic survey and expeditions continued into the 1950's & 60's that mostly examined soil from the bogs. With only small fragments collected, over the next century, the enduring mystery of Tunguska would make it one of the most speculated environmental intrigues ever with many believing the explosion was an early atomic bomb with a powerful energy release of force (10-15 megatons) said to be a thousand times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb which was still 37yrs away. Other more outlandish explanations have theorized that the event was triggered by Nikola Tesla experimenting with a deathray(!) from testing at his Wardenclyffe transmitter tower in New York, a microscopic black hole had passed through the earth's atmosphere, the blast was a volcanic eruption of natural gas, a UFO(!) had crashed and was quickly retrieved by the Russian military who threatened villagers to keep quiet, and/or the military had shot down an incoming missile using a nuclear weapon with the debris causing unintended damage.