Forgotten Ages Research

Once More to the Stars?—Part Two: Are Ancient Astronauts Returning Even Now?

Report Topics:

• Evidence our prehistoric ancestors, members of lost advanced civilizations who sent explorers into the stars, have returned more than once in the past, and are either watching us from afar, or are journeying back to their home planet even now. How will we greet them when they arrive?
• Report Update—The Tunguska Debate Continues

Full Report:

One phenomenon that interstellar travelers would experience is relativistic time. The nearer a body approaches the speed of light, the more the passage of time slows down for that body, relative to its surroundings. In other words, the closer a traveler approaches the speed of light, the greater would be the difference between their time and the Earth’s time. They would age only a few years, while the world passed through centuries and millennia.

One calculation made has it that if an astronaut left our planet for a round trip to the nearby galaxy of Andromeda, traveling at 99.99 percent the speed of light, for the astronaut the journey would take a total of 55 years. In the meantime, however, the Earth would have aged an incredible three million years.

Catastrophes could take place in their absence, civilizations could rise and fall, and the world could have forgotten that it once sent a voyager to the distant stars, even losing knowledge of advanced energy systems by which such a feat was accomplished. If some past civilization ages ago once launched an expedition from our Solar system using near-light power drives, then it is possible that that expedition could only now just be returning. In fact, there is evidence that a party of prehistoric interstellar travelers did return a century ago, only the final lap of their odyssey ended in tragedy.

On June 30, 1908, at 7:17 AM, an explosion took place approximately two miles above Yuzhnoya Boloto, the “Southern Swamp,” a water tableland between the Stony Tunguska and Chunya Rivers in central east Siberia. It was no ordinary explosion. Within seconds, a forest of 1,200 square miles was charred by tremendous heat, and all the trees were knocked down in a radial pattern outward from the blast center. A herd of 1,500 reindeer were burned beyond recognition, and scattered over several miles.

Nomads living within a forty-mile radius of the blast were thrown to the ground, their cloths almost burned off their backs, while houses shook, ceilings collapsed and windows shattered.

The local Indigenous Peoples described the holocaust as “a pillar of fire,” a “blinding column,” a “forked tongue of flame that broke through the clouds” accompanied by the “roar of gunfire,” a “fiery pillar in the form of a spear,” “a vertical fountain of heat and smoke” that “moved the earth” and “deafened people.” The explosion, fireball, column of clouds were seen at distances of over three hundred miles away, which means the inferno and its after-effects must have reached an altitude of 65,000 feet.

Meanwhile at Irkutsk, 550 miles from the epicenter, the noise of the explosion was heard, and seismograph needles quivered for an hour. Three thousand miles away, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, other earthquake recording instruments were also set in motion, as well as in Germany, and even in Washington D.C., on the other side of the world. Greenwich station in England noted that on that date a major disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field occurred, and at London barometric instruments recorded that a huge air shock wave circled the globe twice. For three nights following the Siberian explosion, the skies over Russia, the Orient and northern Europe were filled with mysterious silvery clouds that often irradiated with eerie “yellowish-green to rosy hue” colors. In Tokyo, Berlin, Copenhagen and London, the florescent vapors glowed so brightly that at midnight it was possible to read a newspaper by their light.

What was the cause of this tremendous yet mysterious explosion? Early investigators in the 1920’s and 1930’s could only guess that it had been caused by a huge meteor or comet plummeting to Earth. But new evidence, especially since the advent of the Nuclear Age, puts the Siberian blast in a new light. The 1908 event was nothing less than a thermonuclear blast.

In 1927, L. A. Kulik was the first to organize an expedition to search for what he called the Tunguska meteor. Arriving at the nearly inaccessible site of the explosion, he was surprised to find no meteor crater, and no iron-nickel remains of any meteorite.

Theorizing that the object could have embedded itself deep in the Southern Swamp, where the blast took place, Kulik returned in 1929 and drilled down to over a hundred feet in several places. Still no trace could be found.

All that Kulik discovered at the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion was a radial pattern of fallen and burnt trees, all pointing away from the Southern Swamp area. And in the center of the Swamp, directly below where the blast occurred, he found a lonely group of trees standing upright, completely charred and stripped of leaves and branches. Kulik dubbed the mystery the “telegraph pole forest.”

Two decades later, another Soviet scientist, Dr. Alexander Kasentsev, visited the city of Hiroshima not long after its destruction by an atomic bomb. At ground zero, where the explosion had taken place directly overhead, Kasentsev saw a sight he had seen before. Trees, standing upright, were charred and stripped, like blackened poles. The Soviet scientist had been to the Southern Swamp in 1936, and had seen Kulik’s mysterious forest. Now he saw the exact same phenomenon in the destroyed Japanese city. As the first researcher who had been to both scenes of holocaust, he was also the first to point out the unmistakable similarities between the two. The Siberian explosion of 1908, he announced, had been a nuclear blast, only far greater in extent of damage than Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and all the early atomic tests of the 1940’s.

The same conclusion was reached by other Soviet researchers as a result of a 1963 expedition to the Tunguska area, led by geophysicist A. V. Zolotov. The expedition calculated the energy output produced by the explosion, based on the area and degree of destroyed trees that had been burned. They noted that the forest fire had not been ordinary. “Flash” shadows and burn marks found more than 124 miles from the blast center showed that the heat had been radiated.

The final figure arrived at for heat output was 10 to the 23rd power ergs, the equivalent of a 30 megaton bomb, or thirty million tons of TNT. No chemical reaction could produce such a heat—only a nuclear reaction.

Further proof came with the discovery of radioactive residue and radiation effects in the Southern Swamp. An expedition headed by G. P. Plekhanov detected radioactivity in plant and ash samples, “one and one-half times higher above normal radiation background more than thirty to forty kilometers” away from the blast center.

Puzzling eye-witness reports gathered in the 1920’s now began to make sense. In 1926, herdsmen told researcher I. M. Suslov that soon after the explosion, many of their reindeer died from a strange disease they had never seen before or since—radiation burns they called “scabs and sores.” There was at least one documented case of a herdsman who entered the Southern Swamp a few days after the explosion, and died of “burning fires” inside his body.

So horrible was his death that other locals declared the area taboo, and to this day their descendants are fearful of approaching the destroyed forest.

A 1959 expedition to Tunguska found larches and birches that had germinated just after the 1908 explosion to be genetically altered, and much larger than normal. Other trees, which had survived the blast, also showed marked changes in their ring-growths following the year 1908. Such radical growth, in height and girth, is indicative of changes brought about by radioactive contamination.

Further, when tree sections were analyzed by the Valga Geophysical Institute, they found increased radioactivity in the rings, immediately after the Tunguska event. And when charred sections were subjected to sensitive spectrometer tests, traces of cesium 137 were discovered, an isotope that does not exist in nature, but is a by-product of nuclear fission.

More recent research in the Southern Swamp region has discovered abnormalities in the Rh blood factor of local inhabitants, genetic variations in certain indigenous ant populations, as well as dramatic changes in pine seeds and needle clusters.

Looking at all the evidence, the conclusion is unmistakable. The accounts of a fireball and rising column of smoke and fire, the heat and air blasts, the type of destruction, the heat output, traces of radiation residue—all point to the 1908 explosion having been or nuclear origin. Even the green and red silvery clouds seen in Europe and Asia on the nights following the blast are identical to the glowing green and red radiation clouds seen in Hawaii and the western United States just after the 1958 Bikini atoll H-bomb blasts. But if the 1908 event was indeed the result of a nuclear fission, where had it come from?

Just before the explosion, there were many who saw a strange object descending to the Earth, and described it in some detail. It was first seen at dawn over western China as a flash of light, and from its angle and approach, was at that time about eighty miles above the planet. Within minutes, caravans crossing the Gobi Desert saw it as a flaming ball, moving northward, until it disappeared on the horizon.

In central Russia, the object had already reached closer to the surface, and at Irkutsk one witness described it as, “a shining body with a bluish-wite light. It moved vertically downward, for about ten minutes. The body was in the form of a pipe, cylindrical.” Others called it “chimney-shaped,” “an elongated flaming object,” a “cylinder with an incandescent tail.” As French researcher Lucien Barnier reported:

“Many witnesses described the falling object as having the shape of a tube or being elongated. Has anyone ever seen a cylindrical meteor?”

Even more curious is the speed at which the mysterious object was traveling. Professor Felix Zigel noted that witnesses saw the object and heard a deafening roar at the same time. In other words, the object was breaking the sound barrier, but not at any great speed. If it had been otherwise, witnesses would have reported the object first, then the shock waves several seconds after, like thunder following lightning.

Furthermore, if the object had been traveling very fast, no one would have been able to describe its appearance in the detail they did. Russian aerodynamics expert A. Monotskov, using these clues and others involving angle of descent and time lengths of sighting, calculated that the object was traveling no more than 1,500 miles per hour when it exploded. This is far too slow for a meteor, but is exactly right for a craft I the process of braking for a landing.

Another mystery came to light after a detailed mapping was made of the Tunguska site in 1959 and 1960. It was discovered that the radial explosion pattern preserved in the broken, burned forest was off-center from the trajectory on which the object came in. The only plausible answer was that the fissionable material that had caused the blast had been contained in something else, and had exploded off to the side, like powder contained in a firecracker blown out the side of the cracker.

Both Zigel and Zolotov concluded that the object that descended to Earth and was obliterated n a blinding flash was composed of two parts—the fissionable material that for some reason reached critical mass, and an outer shell or container. Based on the physics of the pattern and force, Kasentsev estimated the container’s total mass was 50,000 tons.

Remains of what is left of this container were found in soil samples collected in the Southern Swamp in the 1950’s. Upon close examination, microscopic globules or tektites were discovered, formed by material disintegrated by tremendous heat.

Many were of silicate and magnetite, of natural origin, but others were composed of cobalt, copper, germanium and metal alloys that do not occur naturally. Kasentsev noted that the alloys and cobalt are essential for wiring and semi-conductors in space communications equipment.

The Russian researcher, based on this new evidence, expressed his opinion that the “container” or object from space that was the source of the 1908 explosion was a spacecraft.

Perhaps the most startling evidence comes from eye-witness accounts that reveal that the object actually changed directions just before the explosion. First, it was seen crossing China and Mongolia on a northern course. Near Keshma, and as seen at Kansk three hundred miles from detonation, the object had veered northeastward in a spiral, and finally, seconds later, above Preobraszhenka, Nizhe Karelinka and Kirensk, the object was suddenly seen moving northwest. Having passed an Earth Crystal node point, the craft had executed a sudden turn to veer onto a new grid line. No meteor, comet or other natural falling object can make such a dramatic change of course. The change of direction was a carefully controlled, carefully calculated maneuver, planned and executed with intelligence.

More recent investigations has determined that in the final seconds of the craft’s descent, portions of its outer surfacing began to break off. Eye-witness reports indicate that just before the main explosion, several small fireballs appeared traveling in several directions—like the more modern falling debris from the ill-fated Columbia shuttle re-entry. Besides the main blast area, designated as the Kulik site, two other smaller crash sites have been identified where pieces of the craft are thought to have landed, called the Voronov crater and the Shishkov site. These secondary locations also show traces of radioactivity and their after-effects.

Russian researcher Yuri Labvin—head of a group of fifteen geologists, chemists and mineralogists known as the Tunguska Space Phenomenon Foundation of Krasnoyarsk—announced in 2004 his discovery at one of the crash sites “two strange black stones in the form of regular cubes with their sides measuring a meter and a half (five feet)” which are “manifestly not of natural origin.” The research group’s analysis concluded that the “stones” are of a sophisticated alloy akin to that used in modern spacecraft engineering. Were these equivalent to the ceramic tiles used on American shuttle spacecraft?

These enigmatic “stones” are not the first debris discovered from the Tunguska event. In the 1990’s something called the “deer stone” was uncovered by a local Yakut in a crag near one of the crash sites. Since its discovery the Russian government has kept its description secret—but other investigators claim that the “stone” is in truth a portion of an antenna of unknown metal composition. Only a micro-second after the initial break-up began, the final explosion obliterated the rest of the mysterious craft. But what went wrong? Kasentsev has concluded:

“Whether we approve or disapprove, we must admit that the thing which was long known as the Tunguska Meteorite was in reality some very artificial construction, weighting in excess of fifty thousand tons, which was being directed toward a landing when its atomic motors exploded. In the catastrophe along the Tunguska in 1908, we lost a guest from the universe.”

But were the astronauts only “guests” as Kasentsev believed, or were they someone returning from a trip to the stars, launched long ago by a forgotten civilization from here on Earth? Their journey unfortunately ended in disaster, but they certainly left evidence of themselves in a dramatic way.

And there are important questions left to us. If the Ancients launched one flight to the outer reaches of space, could they have also sent others? Is perhaps another craft on its way home, even now? And, if their return is more successful than their colleagues in 1908, how will we greet them? As aliens, or as brothers and sisters?

And the opposite would also be true. How would the survivors of long lost civilizations view us, their distant descendants? How “alien” would we be to them?

The prospect also exists that not only did advanced cultures in the prehistoric past send out explorers to the distant stars, but also colonists. While today’s astronomers are just now beginning to discover evidence for other Earth-like planets circling other Suns a neighboring to distant from our own, the Ancients may not only have known about these, but actively seeded them with human populations. And though these settlements lost contact with the “home world” ages ago, are they still curious about what has happened to it, and what kind of people are inhabiting it now?

In November, 1991 a peculiar object was first seen coming from the depths of space and heading for Earth. At first it was classified as an NEO—a Near Earth Object—one of many small asteroids and meteoric chunks of rock which makes a close approach to our planet every year. Though it was given a natural space debris designation—1991 VG—several astronomers observed that the visitor did not behave naturally. The unknown object tended to “wink” or become three time brighter for a fraction of a second every seven and a half minutes, which is not characteristic of an asteroid or meteor, but is a phenomenon usually associated with pulsations of light observed on reflective, rotating artificial satellites.

On December 5, 1991 the mystery orb passed within 288,000 miles of the Earth, and was a that time determined to be about 60 feet in diameter. As it continued on, astronomers noted that 1991 VG was following a path that was remarkably similar to the Earth’s orbit, and as such repeatedly swung back from time to time for a close encounter with our planet.

The last rendezvous that the object had with us had been in March of 1975 and before that in the late 1950’s. At first scientists were of the opinion that what 1991 VG might be is a piece of discarded launch debris from either an American or Russian spacecraft, such as a spent booster rocket. But a check of records for the last two encounter dates indicated that all launch debris was accounted for. Clearly, 1991 VG did not originate here.

In 1995, Australian astronomer Duncan Steel, who is associated with a group called SETA—Search for Extra-Terrestrial Artifacts—was the first to recognize the possibility that the strange object might be a probe from another world. As Steel further noted, the gravitational forces arising from the closely aligned paths of the Earth and 1991 VG should have eventually kicked the object into an unstable orbit. However, its orbit seems inherently stable, so the astronomer is fairly confident the object is a new arrival in stellar terms, and therefore could not be an asteroid or any other natural space body.

The tantalizing question is, was 1991 VG under control when it passed by the Earth? The fact that it is in a unique orbit that periodically allows it to come within visible range of our planet seems to have been by deliberate choice.

Nine years later, in September, 2000, another enigmatic object was spotted coming out of deep space, which observers catalogued as 2000 SG344. When it passed within four million miles of our planet, it was determined to be somewhat larger than 1991 VG, being about 230 feet in diameter. Further observations have discovered that it is elongated, perhaps cylindrical. Once again, it exhibits strange “winking” or evidence of rotation, once every ten minutes, and has parked itself in a parallel orbit to that of the Earth. Its last approaches had come in May, 1999 and before that in 1971, but once more a check of launches and space junk cast off on those dates could not explain the size and orbit of 2000 SG344 as having come from here. The next calculated close encounters for this second object will occur in 2030 and in 2071.

The appearance of these mystery objects has been coupled with a strange phenomenon termed LDE or Long Delayed Echoes. Beginning in 1927, ham radio operators world-wide have noticed that their output signals will sometimes be reflected back to them as an odd and unexpected delay. Usually such signals return in a fraction of a second as a result of bouncing off the ionosphere, but other echoes occur from three to as much as thirty seconds later—which means they are being returned from a source much farther out.

LDE’s have been periodically reported from the 1930’s through to the present day, but as yet no satisfactory explanation for their cause has been demonstrated. Yet in February, 1960 a mysterious blip appeared on radars operated by NORAD and was tracked in a polar orbit for three weeks before it disappeared. The object was calculated to have been fifteen metric tons in size. At that time the largest orbiting space debris pieces from America and Russia were only four tons in size. During the same period as this sighting, ham operators all over the globe reported a spate of LDE signals.

In the same year as the mysterious polar orbiter, Standford University professor Ronald Bracewell proposed that advanced civilizations from space could try to contact us by sending back our own radio broadcasts. Such probes, he speculated, would be self-sufficient and possess a high degree of artificial intelligence. The concept explains that:

“After arriving in a new star system, such a probe would take up orbit in the star’s habitable zone where it could scan for narrow-band radio transmissions. If signals were discovered, the probe would identify the source and re-broadcast the contents unchanged in order to draw attention to itself.”

Has someone else, from “off world,” been trying to contact us in a similar manner?

In the 1960’s Scottish researcher Duncan Lunan began investigating LDE’s with this thought it mind. He plotted out all the LDE’s recorded from 1927 to his day on an XY graph. His effort resulted in what he believed was a map showing the constellation Bootes and the binary star system Epsilon Bootis, more than two hundred light-years from the Earth. Though other researchers were quick to criticize Lunan’s results as “highly speculative,” the data still stands on its own. And a star map is the result.

Is Epsilon Bootis the source of the extraterrestrial probes now visiting our planet? Is this the location of “aliens,” or is it possibly where the descendants of a group of our ancestors once settled in the distant past?

It would appear that they have only begun to gather information about their home world, and today are in the process of transmitting it back to their planet. Once they have finished studying us, then contact may be made. And whenever they do decide to let their presence be known, we may be in for many surprises, especially about our long forgotten past, and the other races of humanity who inhabit the stars.

Report Update—The Tunguska Debate Continues

In the early 1960’s, Vassili Fesenkov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences established that the height of the incoming object’s explosion was at 5 to 6 kilometers (3.5 miles) above the Earth’s surface, based on the measurement of the atmosperic shock waves received on the morning of June 30, 1908 at observatories in Irkutsk, Siberia and Potsdam, Germany, as well as at six microbaragraph stations in Britain. However, this same evidence also revealed that the object, when it hit the atmosphere, was traveling around the Sun in a retrograde direction, which discounts it having been a meteorite. The object was moving from south to north at a time when the planet was turning from north to south, which meteorites never do.

What is more, meteorites hardly ever approach the Earth in the morning, because the morning side faces forward in the globe’s orbit, instead of overtaking it from behind on the evening side, which is what usually happens. The only natural type of celestial debris that could possibly execute such a motion might be a small comet, but this too is extremely rare.

In an interview for the New York Times in November 20, 1960, Fesenkov further revealed that the data he found suggested that the Tunguska object in its final moments had exploded over avery small area in three different locations, based on a detailed analysis of the flattened tree patterns resulting from the detonation, and on experimental test models simulating the blast event. The original object—which the Russian scientist concluded had been the head of a small comet of compacted gases with a total weight of one million tons that caused a one megaton explosion—had separated into three individual parts before its fiery demise.

But in 1975, the eminent American astrphysicist Fred Whipple discounted the whole idea of a comet plunging toward Tunguska, because the odds of such a body targeting the planet in such a way was only about 1 in 20,000. Most of Whipple’s colleagues at the time also agreed, further pointing out that the tremendous amount of dust and gases that usually accompanies a typical comet would have filled the entire upper atmosphere, blanketing out the sunlight and significantly altering the global climate. Zdenek Sekanina, an expert on comets at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, made this assessment:

“The effect of life on Earth would have been horrendous. It would have been a global catastrophe, comparable to nuclear winter. The effect on mankind would have been so overwhelming that we could not discuss the topic, because we would not be here.”

Also contradicting the comet impact theory, Australian experts Duncan Steel and Richard Ferguson estimated that, based on the object’s trajectory, if it had been a cometary body then its tail of debris which typically extends out for millions of miles as it approaches the Sun, would have come in contact with the Earth’s orbit, creating a glowing aura that would have been seen around the world for at least seven hours before the impact. In 1908 no such aura was observed or reported prior to the Tunguska blast.

In 1969, American author George St. George wrote a book entitled Sibera—The New Frontier, in which he described his childhood and later travels throughout the taiga country of Transbaikalia, now known as Sibera. In his autobiography, he told the story of a doctor friend of his father who visited the site of the Tunguska blast only a few months after the event. He wrote:

“The doctor had a detailed diagram shoing the zig-zag course of the falling body over some one hundred miles (where the tops of the trees were sheared off) before the actual explosion. He also said that some unusual glow was observed each night over the epicenter of the explosion for weeks after it had occurred, suggesting some sort of radiation.”

This was one of the earliest recorded references we have of the unusual course-changing flight path of the object, as well as an eye-witness account of the long-lasting radiation effects left behind from the catastrophe. Since that time, these reports have been verified by the detection of increased radioactivity at the blast site, the accelerated growth of trees caused by genetic mutation, and the documentation of radiation burns, scabs, sickness and genetic alterations among the local animal and human populations.

In the 1960’s all the way through to the 1980’s, geophysicist Aleksei Zolotov has been convinced that the 1908 event was caused by a large space vehicle with nuclear propulsion that tragically reached critical mass. As researcher-author John Baxter describes his work:

“He compared the effects of the ballistic waves caused by the velocity of the Tunguska body in the atmosphere and the blast waves caused by the explosion itself. His study of trees—those that remained standing and on which the traces of the effects of both waves remained—showed that ballistic waves arrived from the west and broke only small branches, whereas the blast from the north broke larger branches. He estimated the velocity of the body in its final stage of flight to be a relatively low 4,300 kilometers (2,600 miles) per hour; therefore, the explosion was due to the internal energy of the body, and not the energy of its motion.”

More recently, Russian scientist Victor Zhuravlev, in going back and reviewing magnetic activity recorded for June 30, 1908 at the Irkutsk Magnetic and Meteorological Oservatory, found evidence among the old megnetograms for a major localized geomagnetic disturbance that began within minutes after the detonation and lasted for the rest of that morning. As Zhuravlev noted, such a signature aberration has nothing in common with meteorite falls, but do have all the distinctive earmarks of a powerful nuclear type detonation event. In his opinion, the Tunguska explosion was caused by “a cosmic object the composition and structure of which is unknown to astronomers and physicists.”

In the late 1970’s, Emil Sobotovitch, a contributing member of Kiev’s Institute of Geochemistry and Mineral Physics, found a vast quantity of tiny diamonds scattered over the entire Tunguska region. The diamonds had not been produced by any local volcanic activity, so the only other possible source was from deep space, where the tremendous heat and pressure caused by collisions between celestial objects can create the unique very hard structures of diamonds. There is in fact a class of meteorites called uralites that are known to contain microscopic diamond fragments.

However, the sheer amount and individual sizes of the Tunguska diamond debris precludes it from being of meteoric origin, unless we somehow imagine the exploding object itself having been composed of a significant aggregate of diamond. It points instead to an artificial, even a manufactured origin.

Proponents who believe the Tunguska object was some type of spacecraft have noted that—based on the proportion of the estimated volume of the entire object compared to the total volume of diamond debris discovered—there would have been a sufficient amount of diamond material present to have been utilized as an outer protective covering. Such a covering—far beyond anything today’s technology can produce—would have served as an excellent heat shielding material for a space vehicle trying to survive the tremendous fires and pressures of re-entry into our atmosphere. When the craft denoted in a nuclear holocaust, such a shielding would have been reduced to diamond nodules in a millionth of a second, then scattered as they cooled and fell across the Tunguska terrain, just in the same configuration they were found today.

In 1983, American meteor expert Ramachandran Ganapathy investigated eight globules of extraterrestrial debris found in Antarctica, using an advanced nuclear analysis technique. He discovered that all eight globules contained significant amounts of iridium, nickel, cobalt, gold, chromium, antimony and iron. Such elements have been known to be found in meteorites—but what was most unusual was that in this case the amounts detected were extremely high. One of the debris pieces possessed a staggering 57,000 parts per billion of enriched iridium. Most meteorites have only 500 parts per billion, while rocks on Earth have less than 0.3 parts per billion. This, plus the unnaturally high abundance of chromium in a number of the globules, was a major indication that the single object they had come from could not have been an iron meteorite. There were also disproportionally greater levels of nickel and cobalt present, pointing not to a natural origin, but artificially concentrated levels found instead in manufactured artifacts.

Ganapathy likewise discovered that every one of the Antarctican globules had identical ratios of their constituent elements, proving they had all come from the same object, and not from separate cosmic debris falling over different periods. Based on calculations of the average accumulation of ice at the South Polar region, the ice core layer in which the globules were brought to light was dated to 1908. Ganapathy concluded from this—as well as from the sudden appearance of radioactive materials in the same layer—that these globules had been cast off from a slowly disintegrating Tunguska object as it had entered the planet’s atmosphere, perhaps initially in a high altitude orbit before beginning its re-entry over China and Siberia..He further estimated that the original object, before taking its plunge from its high orbit, may have been as much as seven million tons in size and 525 feet in diameter.

The prospects that the Tunguska crafrt may have been circling the globe for a certain period of time—with pieces breaking off and nuclear fuel leaking before being pulled out of orbit on its fatal descent toward Sibera—may explain why optical anomalies, fluctuating geomagnetic radiation, and bright lights were observed in both Asian and European nocturnal skies for a week before the explosion. The occurrences of these strange phenomena peaked with the blast, immediately followed by a local magnetic storm that lasted for four hours’ duration, and then luminescent nights seen world-wide for months thereafter. These were all tell-tale signs of the effects of high altitude radioactive fallout and disturbances caused by an exclusively nuclear event.

In 1989 and again in 1991, an Italian group of scientists from the University of Bologna traveled to Tunguska with a mission to collect as many tree and soil samples as possible. Later analysis revealed in several thousand particles extracted that they all had high levels of anomalous iron, calcium, aluminum, silicon, gold, copper, titanium, nickel and various forms of black graphite. Veru curious is the fact that a few of these elements are not usually found in meteorites, or are of such high abundance as to preclude being of natural origin. The team further observed that the consistently smooth and spherical shape of the particles means they were not formed out of the ground, because of its low conductivity, but rather they had come directly from the cosmic body itself.

In 1996, Vladimir Svetsev of the Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres in Moscow calculated that for the Tunguska blast to have caused the extensive conflagration it produced, it had to have generated a heat of 15,000 degrees Celsuis, a temperature “quite comparable with that of a nuclear explosion.”

Two years later, Vladimir Alekseev of the Troitsk Institute for Innovation and Fusion Research, attempted to explain this very high yield energy release as originating from the unexplained presence within the plummeting object of deuterium. A thermonuclear reaction resulted when the object exploded, instantaneously converting its inherent deuterium into tritium.

The major problem with this scenario is that naturally occurring deuterium in both space and on Earth is usually found in far too small quantities to start a nuclear chain reaction, even in the center of a huge impact explosion. Only when deuterium has been first artificially enriched and specifically concentrated together is what enables it to reach critical mass when acted upon by an outside surrounding detonation, inaugurating a nuclear blast.

A further analysis of the flattened tree patterns at Tunguska performed by Wolfgang Kundt, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Bonn, shows that the descending object, in the last microsecond of its existence, may have actually broken apart into five pieces, each of which set off their own minor detonations after the initial mega-blast. This has given rise to the possibility that, while no evidence for a main crater created by remnants has been detected at ground zero, other offshoot fragments may have survived within distances of ten or twenty miles away in the outlying areas of the blast. In 2007, the Italian scientific team from the University of Bologna who had visited Tunguska in past decades, returned yet again. This time their focus was to conduct a survey in and around Lake Checko, located near the northern edge of the flattened forest. They suspect this lake may have been formed by a 1908 fragment actually hitting the ground.

So far, the team’s efforts have proven to be disappointingly inconclusive. Even though the lake bottom’s profile is not bowl-shaped like other nearby bodies of water and looks more like a funnel—possibly caused by an impact—the sedimentation appears too thick to be of fairly recent origin. However, the team, using a magnetometer, did detect near the bottom a large oddly shaped metal object. The Italians hope to return again in the very near future to better explore and perhaps bring this enigmatic piece to the surface. Will it prove to be a meteoric fragment, or will it be something artificial? Could this finally be conclusive evidence for the mysterious Tunguska object lost in 1908 having been an ancient spacecraft returning from the stars?

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]