THE UNKNOWN: The Tunguska Event

On June 30, 1908, a giant explosion shook the remote forests of Siberia, flattening millions of trees and unleashing a blast heard hundreds of miles away. The Tunguska Event remains one of the most mysterious disasters in recorded history. Despite decades of investigation, the cause of the blast continues to puzzle scientists and fuel speculation – mainly because there was no evidence or impact site to be found.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I don't know about you guys, but anytime I hear on the news like, "An asteroid is going to be passing within X miles of Earth's atmosphere", I sort of feel like a doomsday prepper. I'm like, "All right, the end is near, everyone. Kiss your loved ones goodbye. Duck and cover." But in reality, meteors and asteroids hit Earth way more frequently than I care to know about. And we have survived to tell the tale so far. Including that time a massive piece of space debris caused an explosion in Russia back in 1908. Only, in that case, the possibility of an asteroid or meteor was called into question

• 0:43Speaker 00

  due to one glaring omission: there was no crater left in its wake. This led many people to wonder what really caused the mysterious explosion known as the Tunguska event. Because for years, people have tried and failed to figure it out, leading many to wonder, was something more supernatural to blame for one of the biggest impact events in modern history? I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is So Supernatural.

• 1:29Rasha Pecoraro?

  Aloha, friends. I'm Rasha Pecoraro.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  And I'm Yvette Gentile.

• 1:34Rasha Pecoraro?

  And today, we're talking about something that's literally out of this world. More than 100 years ago, something seemingly from outer space flattened 830 square miles of forest in central Siberia. That's almost the size of Rhode Island. And at the time, it was the biggest explosion of the millennium.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  But when the investigators went to check it out, they couldn't figure out what caused it. There was no meteorite, no crater, nothing. Whatever the object was, it just seemed like it vanished without a trace.

• 2:10Rasha Pecoraro?

  To this day, people still wonder what happened in Tunguska. But in this case, the best answer might really be extraterrestrial.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  We're talking UFOs, naturally.

• 2:24Rasha Pecoraro?

  And believe me, this one gets good.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect.

• 2:36Speaker 03

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• 2:38Speaker 02

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• 2:55Speaker 03

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• 3:04Yvette Gentile?

  I am a total sucker for big blockbuster films like, you know, Armageddon with Ben Affleck and our dear friend Will Patton. But it's one thing to go to the movies and watch some good-looking men suit up to save the world.

• 3:17Rasha Pecoraro?

  Uh, we can't forget the beautiful women that were in that movie like Liv Tyler. Hello?

• 3:22Yvette Gentile?

  Okay, fair enough, fair enough. But damn, it is another to imagine that one of these things may actually land on my house.

• 3:30Rasha Pecoraro?

  Right. And when you think about it, we've gotten really lucky when it comes to this stuff. Because apparently, millions of meteors enter Earth's atmosphere every year. Millions.

• 3:42Yvette Gentile?

  That's right. And if you listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson, he's amazing. He's so invested in this. It's literally millions.

• 3:51Rasha Pecoraro?

  Yeah, I love Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now, most of these meteors are tiny. You rarely see one bigger than a baseball. And the heat from plummeting through the atmosphere usually burns them up before they even reach us. But still, there's like 10,000 of these things that actually hit the ground each year. And when they do, it isn't pretty. For example, in 2023, a metallic meteorite the size of a brick smashed through a house in New Jersey. It bounced off the floor and tore another hole in the ceiling. The family that lived there was home at the time, but luckily, no one was hurt.

• 4:28Yvette Gentile?

  That's terrifying. I guess it could get worse, right? I mean, we all know what happened to the dinosaurs.

• 4:33Rasha Pecoraro?

  Yes, but like the age-old mystery of what happened to the dinosaurs, I think you'll find the situation at Tunguska equally mind-blowing. So let's turn the clock back to June 30th, 1908, when our story begins and travel to the Gobi Desert. Now, the maps have been redrawn a few times since then. But at the time, the Gobi was part of northern China near the border of Imperial Russia. A little after 7:00 a.m. that day, a nomadic caravan looked up at the morning sky, and that's when they saw a ball of fire zipping north towards Russia. Seventeen minutes later, there's a massive explosion in the central Siberian Plateau near the stony Tunguska River in Russia.

• 5:16Rasha Pecoraro?

  And when I say massive, I mean massive. People hundreds of miles away said they saw an enormous pillar of fire reach all the way up to the heavens. It was followed by a roaring sound as the ground shook beneath their feet. To put it into perspective, if it had happened today, the earthquake would be a 5.0 on the Richter scale. And if you were there, looking up, it would have seemed like the sky was cut in two. A witness said, quote, "One had the impression that the earth was just about to gape open and everything would be swallowed up in the abyss."

• 5:54Yvette Gentile?

  It sounds like those who witnessed this, they thought that they were experiencing some sort of apocalyptic event, like the world was actually coming to an end.

• 6:03Rasha Pecoraro?

  And a quick side note here, there are a lot of names outside of our native tongue coming up. You'll hear us give it our best go, but it's worth calling out. Anyway, this one guy named S. B. Semenov was about 50 miles away when the explosion happened. He was sitting on his porch when all of a sudden, the whole sky lit up like there was a second sun. He barely had time to register what was happening before the shockwave literally tossed him into the air and knocked him unconscious. When he woke up a few seconds later, the ground was still shaking and it nearly brought his entire house down.

• 6:42Yvette Gentile?

  Almost 400 miles away, hurricane-force winds shook doors and windows and even made horses fall over. Some fishermen were fixing their boats when the shockwave hit, and they were thrown into the stony Tunguska River. The explosion sucked up tons of dirt and dust into the sky, literally blocking out the sun and creating thunderstorms. And over the next few hours, black rain drenched nearby villages. The next day, the story was front-page news on almost every Siberian paper. They talked about a flying object that set the forest on fire.

• 7:22Yvette Gentile?

  They all suspected that it was a meteorite, but as far as we can tell, no one actually went to see the blast site for themselves.

• 7:31Rasha Pecoraro?

  Which was why the mystery prevailed, especially when people as far as Western Europe noticed something strange in the night sky. And this was weeks after the blast. Newspapers in Germany, England, and Spain commented on the inexplicable yellow and white lights that kept appearing after sunset. But word of the Tunguska explosion hadn't reached them yet, so most newspapers chalked it up to electrical discharges from the sun, sort of like the aurora borealis.

• 8:01Yvette Gentile?

  But the aurora usually lights up northern spots, like Iceland and Canada, and it's pretty rare for it to get as far south as Spain. Something like that only happens, I don't know, maybe every 20 years or so?

• 8:15Rasha Pecoraro?

  But even then, a lot of people said it didn't really look like the northern lights. In places like Scotland, it was still so bright after midnight, you could literally read a book outside.

• 8:26Yvette Gentile?

  That is so, so very eerie. And the fact that these lights are seemingly popping up all over Europe for weeks? It definitely doesn't sound like your average northern lights.

• 8:39Rasha Pecoraro?

  Totally. And it takes a long time for anyone in Europe to make the connection between the lights and the explosion in Tunguska, probably because the event happened in one of the most remote, uninhabited places on the planet.

• 8:53Yvette Gentile?

  And look, okay, we won't bore you with all the geographic details, but it's important to get a sense of the landscape where this actually happened. First of all, Siberia is ginormous. It makes up three-quarters of Russia's total landmass, pretty much the whole northern part of the country. It's like if you place Mexico next to Brazil, that might give you a sense of how big we're talking. But the area is only home to, I don't know, about 36 million people, which might sound like a lot, but it evens out to be like seven people per square mile. And back in 1908, it was even less than that.

• 9:34Rasha Pecoraro?

  And that might be because it isn't exactly the easiest place to live. During the winter, it's brutally cold. In the summer, the snow melts and it becomes this dense wilderness of pine trees and swamps. There are even giant swarms of mosquitoes. In 1908, most of the people who lived there were actually exiles and prisoners, folks who were sent there to work in brutal labor camps, sometimes for life. The rest of the locals were either poor rural settlers or members of the local indigenous population called the Evinkey.

• 10:08Yvette Gentile?

  Okay, so this all goes to say, this really big thing happens, but it's way out in the boonies where hardly anybody lives, and the newspapers that actually reported on it were these tiny publications. So no one in the bigger cities really paid any attention. Plus, the country had bigger fish to fry. Imperial Russia was going through this dark period of turmoil and unrest, and it got worse as the years went on. We're talking World War I, the Communist Revolution, a bloody civil war, and a typhus epidemic that killed millions. Russia was not a good place to be back then. And in the midst of all the chaos,

• 10:50Yvette Gentile?

  there probably wasn't a lot of interest in this weird explosion out in the middle of nowhere. People had better things to worry about.

• 10:59Rasha Pecoraro?

  Exactly. So this enormous blast goes off and Imperial Russia basically shrugs its shoulders. Then, the government gets replaced and rebranded as the USSR, and the new government is basically just trying to keep its head above water. Which may be why it wasn't until 12 years later, around 1921 or 1922, that anyone even bothered looking into the Tunguska event. And that person was Leonid Kulik.

• 11:27Yvette Gentile?

  Kulik was a geologist and exactly the kind of person you'd want digging into this mystery. He was this rugged scientist adventurer type who liked nothing better than solving the riddles of the universe. It all started back in 1918 when he was serving in the army. Kulik was called out to inspect fragments of a 300-pound meteorite in the Soviet town of Khachin, about 130 miles north of Moscow. At the time, there weren't many scientists who knew a lot about meteorites. So his report on the Khachin rock pretty much made him Russia's top meteorite specialist. And he took it as a calling.

• 12:08Yvette Gentile?

  Then in 1921, one of his colleagues handed him a decade-old newspaper clipping. It described a large meteorite strike in Siberia. Kulik realized if he could find this meteorite, it might contain all sorts of valuable metals like nickel, iron, and platinum. Stuff that would be worth a lot of money even today. Not to mention, it could make him super famous.

• 12:36Rasha Pecoraro?

  He convinced the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the biggest scientific institution in the USSR, to pay for an expedition to Siberia. But due to delays and issues with funding, he didn't arrive in the area until October, which was pretty bad timing since the brutal cold was setting in. Kulik knew they couldn't go meteorite hunting in the Siberian winter, so he settled for collecting eyewitness statements instead. He hoped they would at least confirm the explosion actually happened and give him an idea of where to look. At least on that front, his mission was a success. He learned that the impact probably happened near one specific trading post on the stony Tunguska River.

• 13:18Rasha Pecoraro?

  After the expedition was over, he vowed to return as soon as he could. He wanted to find the meteorite and bring it home. Unfortunately, it would take another six years to fund a second expedition. But in 1927, he finally got the green light. This time, Kulik left in early spring, just as the ice was starting to thaw. He hired a few indigenous guides from the Avanki tribe to lead him to the site. But as soon as he got close to his destination, the guides became jittery and forced him to turn around. When he asked why, they told him the land they were about to enter was cursed.

• 14:00Yvette Gentile?

  This is my first thought, like, listen to the indigenous people. If the land is cursed, listen to them.

• 14:06Rasha Pecoraro?

  Always.

• 14:07Yvette Gentile?

  But anyhow, there's a few different versions of the story. But one of them goes like this. In the years before the Tunguska event, a particular Avanki clan living in the area used a shaman to cast a spell on their rivals. That shaman called an evil spirit to give the other clan some kind of disease. So to return the favor, the rival clan summoned Ogadi, a powerful god who ruled over Siberia. And on June 30, 1908, the day of the event, it's said that Ogadi sent a flock of fiery iron birds to wreak havoc and burn the forest down.

• 14:48Yvette Gentile?

  Ever since then, many Avanki refused to visit the area, fearing the wrath of Ogadi. And look, I totally get it because y'all know that I wouldn't be wandering around some cursed forest in the middle of nowhere.

• 15:04Rasha Pecoraro?

  Well, Kulik thought it was nothing more than superstition, but it was a setback nonetheless. He had to go back to the nearest town, hire new guides who weren't scared, and try again a few weeks later. This time, Kulik and his new team hiked through streams and over rocky hills and swamps. They followed a trail of toppled trees until they reached the center of the devastation. And what he saw was, well, let's just say you can understand why people thought it was cursed.

• 15:35Yvette Gentile?

  That's right, because miles and miles of pure destruction. I mean, we're talking giant trees burnt to the core like matchsticks. Yet, they're still standing. And if you guys Google this, you will see exactly what I'm talking about.

• 15:52Rasha Pecoraro?

  Kulik had spent six years dreaming of this exact moment. He pictured himself being praised like a hero, posing for pictures with the giant metal space rock that he believed caused this damage. But, when he finally got there, there was no space rock, no impact site, no crater, nothing that could explain the damage whatsoever.

• 16:21Speaker 02

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• 16:51Rasha Pecoraro?

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• 17:36Rasha Pecoraro?

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• 18:11Yvette Gentile?

  When Leonid Kulik arrived at the epicenter of Tunguska's devastation, there was no crater or impact site, which left him and his team completely perplexed. Even weirder, the trees at the very center were blackened but somehow still standing, almost like the shockwave had spared them somehow.

• 18:33Rasha Pecoraro?

  Kulik had come for a space rock, but with no signs of a meteorite, he really didn't know what to do with himself. He camped out for weeks, taking as many samples as he could, and when his team ran out of food, they turned back. Kulik had to return to his hometown of Lennigrad, which is now St. Petersburg, empty-handed, and frankly, he was feeling a bit embarrassed.

• 18:57Yvette Gentile?

  Just imagine being Kulik after spending all that time and money making such a big deal publicly about this expedition. He basically comes home with his tail between his legs. I mean, people probably thought he'd made the whole thing up just for fame and attention.

• 19:14Rasha Pecoraro?

  Even though he had pictures of the trees, without the meteorite, people just said it was probably a forest fire. But Kulik really believed there was more out there. He just needed more time and resources to find it. And he kept telling people how much money it would be worth when he finally did. So Kulik ends up leading more expeditions. First, in 1928 and 1929, and then again in 1937, 1938, and 1939. For each of these outings, he brought gear for digging trenches and taking samples. He scoured the area with metal detectors, looking for iron and other metals you'd see in space debris. He even collected dead birds and checked their bodies

• 19:59Rasha Pecoraro?

  for possible rock fragments they may have eaten. But despite his best efforts, he still came up empty-handed. It was like the mystery was taunting him. And time wasn't on his side either. His investigation was cut short the same year as his last expedition when World War II broke out. Kulik eventually joined a local Soviet militia, only to be captured by the Nazis. And on April 24th, 1942, Kulik died as a prisoner of war.

• 20:31Yvette Gentile?

  Kulik was well-respected. He actually has a crater on the moon. It's on the far side and it's called the Kulik Crater. But even with Kulik gone, the questions just kept coming. Like, what really happened along the Tunguska that day? What did all of those eyewitnesses see in 1908? Theories began to spawn.

• 20:55Rasha Pecoraro?

  So we don't have time to get into all of them, but believe me, they get pretty crazy. Things like black holes and antimatter asteroids, stuff that would take a whole episode to explain, and frankly, don't hold much water in our opinion anyways.

• 21:11Yvette Gentile?

  But there's one theory that definitely deserves a mention because, you guys, it's just so cool. It says that the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla accidentally blew up Siberia with an experimental death ray.

• 21:29Rasha Pecoraro?

  Okay, I love this theory, but I have a love-hate relationship with Tesla because my father, since he wasn't your dad, he didn't make you do this, but he forced me at the age, I think I was like eight or nine, to read Tesla's autobiography and the autobiography of Per Mahansa Yogananda, but that's a whole nother episode.

• 21:50Yvette Gentile?

  That I can get behind, yes.

• 21:51Rasha Pecoraro?

  Okay. But basically, all I remember is that Tesla was a mad scientist.

• 21:57Yvette Gentile?

  He totally reminds me of Doc Brown from Back to the Future, right? I mean, to describe him as a mad scientist is an understatement. The guy really was ahead of his time, and there's so much that he pioneered. And although he's best known for his discoveries in electricity, he had this super creepy lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And apparently, you could hear the thunder from his experiments 15 miles away in the next town over. Residents of the town, they got so used to all the weird phenomenon that happened near Tesla's laboratory, like sparks jumping from the ground as they walked by, or from a faucet when they turned on the tap.

• 22:41Yvette Gentile?

  Light bulbs lit up even if they weren't plugged in. I mean, all kind of crazy stuff. Tesla's inventions laid the groundwork for so much of the technology we use today, like radios, X-rays, remote controls, smartphones. I mean, you name it, there's so much. His most ambitious and secretive project was a transmission system, one that would allow him to wirelessly beam electricity anywhere around the world.

• 23:11Rasha Pecoraro?

  But Tesla was thinking even bigger, if you can believe it. Because on July 10, 1934, he told the New York Sun that he'd invented a so-called "death beam." It was completely silent and left no trace. Supposedly, this machine could wipe out entire armies in an instant, making the country that had it invincible.

• 23:34Yvette Gentile?

  Now, it's hard to say if he actually developed this beam and it worked, because he never demonstrated it in public. But Tesla seemed really confident it was a sure thing. Apparently, he even tried to get several governments to buy it. Although, um, as far as we know, no one did. And here's where things get really interesting. Tesla was talking about this beam years before Tunguska, but he had no idea what it was capable of yet. At that point in time, he just thought this device could shoot electricity from one power generator to another, anywhere on the planet. And in 1908,

• 24:17Yvette Gentile?

  he supposedly got the chance to test that theory.

• 24:22Yvette Gentile?

  An American explorer named Robert Perry was headed from New York to the North Pole. Tesla initially thought he could use his device to communicate with Perry in real time once he got there. Basically, he originally saw this device as like, an old time cellphone, right? And as the story goes, Tesla aimed the beam at Perry's location and pulled the trigger. It's unclear how Perry was supposed to receive the energy. The sources out there are pretty slim, but Tesla did invent the radio, so maybe he gave Perry one of his smaller prototypes to take with him. When Tesla didn't get a response from Perry on how his little experiment was going, he

• 25:05Yvette Gentile?

  scanned international newspapers for anything unusual. And that's when Tesla supposedly read about Tunguska and realized his device was capable of mass destruction.

• 25:22Rasha Pecoraro?

  It's a cool theory, but there are a few problems with it. We've already talked about how the Tunguska story didn't really reach international papers for more than a decade. Even our geologist, Leonid Kulik, who lived in Russia, didn't hear about it until 1921, which was 13 years later. So unless Tesla got his hands on some remote Serbian news, I'm not sure this one holds up. Plus, Robert Perry hadn't even left for his trip before that June 30, 1908 date. He was still in New York at the time. So if Tesla was trying to beam electricity to someone, it definitely was not Perry.

• 26:00Yvette Gentile?

  Okay, do I think this is the best theory out there? Probably not, but it's definitely fun to entertain. And I can see why people gravitated towards it early on if they were looking for answers, because no one besides Kulik had really tried to do a proper investigation.

• 26:18Rasha Pecoraro?

  At least, not until Alexander Kazansev came onto the scene. And he had a radical idea that would change everything. Kazansev was born in what is now Kazakhstan in 1906 and trained as an engineer. He spent World War II helping the Soviet Union create new weapons. But he was fascinated with Kulik. He followed his adventures in the newspaper when he was a teenager. And as he got older, the mystery of Tunguska still fascinated him. After learning about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, he thought he saw a connection with Tunguska. And he wondered, could that have been an atomic bomb too?

• 27:02Rasha Pecoraro?

  Maybe an early prototype? It was just a hunch, but he had to investigate it.

• 27:07Yvette Gentile?

  Kazantsev knew nuclear blasts left behind unique fingerprints. And if you know where to look, it could prove the explosion was nuclear and maybe even point to who was behind it. He started by comparing the vibrations produced by Hiroshima with the ones made after Tunguska. For almost a century, scientists all over the world had used the seismographs to detect earthquakes. And what these listening stations recorded in 1908 after Tunguska was eerily similar to what they recorded in 1945 after Hiroshima. So Kazantsev dug deeper.

• 27:50Yvette Gentile?

  And when he saw the photos of the charred trees left standing in the middle of the Tunguska blast site, his blood ran cold. When the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the shock wave spread outwards from the center, allowing the trees directly below the explosion to survive. So in other words, the charred but still standing trees at Tunguska were proof of a mid-air explosion, at least to Kazantsev.

• 28:22Rasha Pecoraro?

  He pored over thousands of firsthand accounts from both incidents and saw similarities there too. Many of Venky described seeing a brilliant flash like a second sun. It was so hot, one person said his shirt almost burned off his back. Then came a huge tower of black smoke that could have been a mushroom cloud and black rain. Detail for detail, these reports read just like Hiroshima.

• 28:51Yvette Gentile?

  After the dust settled, the Evinkey noticed their reindeer getting sick with a mysterious disease. Scabs started appearing all over their bodies, which could have been signs of radiation poisoning. And if the bomb exploded in the atmosphere, it would have filled the sky with radiation, causing those weird spooky lights that everyone saw all the way back to Europe. While the weird lights weren't reported with Hiroshima, they had occurred with other nuclear tests that went off higher in the sky.

• 29:24Rasha Pecoraro?

  So if Kazantsev was right, that meant someone dropped an atomic bomb on the Soviet Union decades before they were ever invented.

• 29:34Yvette Gentile?

  That's what the evidence seemed to point to, but here's the thing. The Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear bomb, which was this huge feat of engineering during World War II, it took years. I'm talking years and billions of dollars, not to mention the legit geniuses working around the clock to make it happen. So Kazantsev figured if Tunguska was nuclear, and it happened decades before the nuclear bomb was invented, well, then the one that exploded over Tunguska likely wasn't made by humans. Which means...

• 30:17Rasha Pecoraro?

  Oh yeah, here we go.

• 30:19Yvette Gentile?

  It may have been a UFO.

• 30:28Speaker 02

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• 30:32Speaker 03

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• 30:35Speaker 02

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• 31:00Yvette Gentile?

  So it's 1945, and this Siberian engineer Alexander Kazantsev has a huge epiphany. He thinks that the Tunguska event was some kind of nuclear explosion.

• 31:14Rasha Pecoraro?

  Now, as far as we know, humans didn't have nukes back in 1908, which meant that some other intelligence probably made it. Maybe someone not from our planet. But even though the explosion looked like an atomic bomb, Kazantsev still had his doubts. After all, why would someone want to blow up an uninhabited patch of forest? And why Siberia of all places?

• 31:40Yvette Gentile?

  Well, he believed whoever it was didn't do it, obviously, on purpose. So Kazantsev knew it was theoretically possible to power a spaceship using nuclear fuel. So he wondered, what if one of these nuclear-powered spaceships may be piloted by extraterrestrial life blew up on accident?

• 32:05Rasha Pecoraro?

  If that were true, the location actually makes a lot of sense. If you were an alien coming in for a crash landing, would you aim for a big city or somewhere remote like Siberia? Maybe the pilots knew they were doomed and didn't want to take anyone out with them.

• 32:21Yvette Gentile?

  It felt like that to Kazantsev, but he knew that he'd get crazy looks if he came out and said this. So in 1946, he published a work of fiction to get this idea out there and to get people talking. In his short story, he had two scientists arguing about what might have appeared in 1908. And one of them floats the spaceship idea as kind of a fun what-if, right? The short story didn't get a whole lot of attention, but it impressed one of Kulik's old friends, Evgeny Krynov. Krynov was part of Kulik's 1929 expedition. And this guy is hardcore. He lost his toe to frostbite on that trip.

• 33:06Rasha Pecoraro?

  But Krynov believed Kazantsev was on to something with his spaceship theory. He also knew that a little controversy would get more people talking about Tunguska. Maybe he could use that to drum up support for more research expeditions. Perhaps even finish the work that Kulik had started years ago. So in 1948, Krynov helped Kazantsev turn the short story into a play. It sounds pretty clever, too. Kazantsev would plant actors in the audience to shout that the spaceship theory was bogus. The other plants would stand up and argue with them and get real audience members to join in. So the play got really popular in Russia, which annoyed a lot of scientists.

• 33:48Rasha Pecoraro?

  Most of them still believed it was a meteorite that hit the ground, and they tried to discredit Kazantsev. They didn't like that his nuclear-powered UFO theory was catching on with the public.

• 33:59Yvette Gentile?

  The scientists didn't know it, but Kazantsev's theory also caught the eye of some powerful people. One of them was Lavrentiy Beria. Now, we've covered some really creepy things on this show. I mean, monsters, ghosts, you name it. But Beria was definitely worse than all of them put together. He was the head of the secret police and Stalin's right-hand man at the time. He also ran the Soviet Union's atomic bomb program.

• 34:31Rasha Pecoraro?

  As head of the atomic program, he had access to all sorts of classified stuff that we will never know about. And when he heard Kazantsev's theory, he may have believed it. Because in 1949, he sent a secret team of experts to look for debris in Tunguska.

• 34:49Yvette Gentile?

  If I had to guess, I'd say he probably wanted to reverse-engineer the crashed spaceship to make some kind of frickin' horrible new weapon.

• 34:58Rasha Pecoraro?

  Who knows? The mission was top secret, and we still don't have a lot of details. But it seems they reported back, saying the explosion was "very likely caused by a nuclear detonation." Whether they thought it was a UFO is unclear. But after the experts gave Beria their report, the trail went cold. We don't know what, if anything, Beria chose to do with it.

• 35:22Yvette Gentile?

  And even though Beria kept those secrets close, he couldn't stop the growing wave of public interest in Tunguska. And thanks to Kazantsev's writings, more and more people wanted to visit Siberia and solve the riddle for themselves.

• 35:39Rasha Pecoraro?

  In 1959, two Siberian friends, an engineer and a paranormal researcher, created what they called the Complex Amateur Expedition, or if we use the Russian abbreviation, KSE. They led a bunch of grad students, science fiction fans, and hikers into the Siberian wilderness in search of clues. They scoured the blast zone with metal detectors, took lots of photos, and collected samples from the soil. They also brought Geiger counters to measure radiation. When they analyzed the results, the KSE found that the soil near the center was slightly more radioactive than the area around it. This would have been one of the fingerprints of a nuclear explosion like we mentioned earlier.

• 36:23Rasha Pecoraro?

  They also found a bunch of other really odd stuff, though, like the trees nearby grew faster after the explosion, something that also happened after Hiroshima. Even stranger, blood tests taken from a local Evan Key family revealed a rare genetic mutation that only appeared in those born after 1908. There was also a trove of untapped data from research stations around the world on the day of the event. For example, at Lake Baikal, about 800 miles from the epicenter, scientists detected a big magnetic storm only minutes after the explosion. This might have been what caused the glowing clouds seen across Europe. If you remember from earlier,

• 37:08Rasha Pecoraro?

  the only things we knew that could create a storm like that were high-altitude nuclear tests. But here's the bottom line: All this evidence pointed to some kind of nuclear blast.

• 37:22Yvette Gentile?

  And apparently, Kulik had overlooked some of the details from the eyewitnesses he'd originally interviewed. Most people said they saw something flying overhead before the explosion. Kulik had assumed they were talking about a meteor, but some of the witnesses described something very un-meteor-like, as they described it: "a long tube or cylinder."

• 37:49Yvette Gentile?

  The fact that they could see it so clearly was another red flag for investigators, because that meant it was flying a whole lot slower than an actual meteorite would, like 10 to 20 times slower. And here's the best part: it may have changed direction midair. Near the center of the blast, trees toppled in a pattern suggesting the object was coming from the southeast. But people southwest of the explosion saw it pass overhead. And the only way it could have come from one direction and land in another is if someone had actually physically grabbed the steering wheel in mid-flight.

• 38:34Rasha Pecoraro?

  Or if the amateurs who calculated the flight plan made a mistake. Look, you know that both of us love a good UFO story, but in this case, I have a few doubts. Because while a lot of this stuff sounds like a UFO, none of it is 100% conclusive. Like the radiation, for instance. If a nuclear spaceship really did blow up, you'd expect it to be dropping atomic fuel all over the place. But the amount of radiation they found was so small that when folks went to check again the next year, it was all gone. So maybe it was just an asteroid, but it disintegrated before it hit the ground.

• 39:14Rasha Pecoraro?

  We know this is possible because it actually happened recently, in February of 2013. An asteroid the size of a house blew up over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. It exploded midair about 14 miles up. The shockwaves smashed windows for 200 square miles around the city and injured more than 1,600 people. It was super bright, like Tunguska, and it didn't make a crater.

• 39:42Yvette Gentile?

  Okay, fair, fair enough. But unlike Tunguska, it did leave some fragments behind. And there weren't any weird northern lights that came after, which is why I still need more to be sold on this asteroid theory. To me, the nuclear-powered UFO theory checks the most boxes. Like, first and foremost. The blast, the after-effects, the radiation. And if the KSE figured out about the object's speed and change of direction is true, it's pretty much the only explanation that works in my book.

• 40:21Rasha Pecoraro?

  And there's no way that some other country may have developed a nuclear bomb and tested it before the Manhattan Project?

• 40:28Yvette Gentile?

  And never came forward with the results? I think that's even less likely than the UFO theory, to be honest. If the Soviets, or any country for that matter, built an atomic weapon before the United States, I'm sure, I'm like, so, so sure that they would have been shouting it from the rooftops. The arms race was just as alive and well back then as it is today.

• 40:55Rasha Pecoraro?

  Okay, okay, fair. But if we are seeing UFOs, it would be nice to have something we could actually point to in this case, like a piece of the ship or something.

• 41:05Yvette Gentile?

  Funny that you should mention that. There was a guy named Yuri Lovpin who claimed he'd found exactly that. In 2009, he told newspapers that he'd discovered quartz stones near the blast center. Supposedly, these crystals had unusual etchings that were just too perfect to have been made by human technology. Because of that, Yuri believed it was a piece of a control panel, specifically for the ship that exploded over Tunguska. And his own theory was, get this, that it had rammed into an oncoming asteroid to save humanity. I mean, come on, y'all.

• 41:50Yvette Gentile?

  Talk about a blockbuster movie franchise.

• 41:54Rasha Pecoraro?

  Yeah, it's exactly like Armageddon. And if that's the case, we should all be truly grateful. But as far as I can tell, he hasn't let any actual scientist look at the crystals. So all we have to go on are his words and a single low-res photo.

• 42:12Yvette Gentile?

  All right, maybe it's not a smoking gun, but that's the problem right there. I mean, whatever did blow up over Tunguska was totally vaporized. So when people say it's an asteroid, a meteorite, or a UFO, they're basically just guessing. Look, the universe is a really big place. And sometimes we think we know what's out there. And a mystery like this comes along and shows you just how small we really are. But you know what? Maybe the mystery is the best part.

• 43:03Yvette Gentile?

  This is So Supernatural, an AudioChuck original, produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at So Supernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com. Join Yvette and me next Friday for an all-new episode. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

• 43:27Speaker 05

  I've been having a hard time trying to explain what Midnight Burger is. How about I let them give it a shot?

• 43:33Speaker 06

  Your podcast is amazing.

• 43:35Speaker 07

  It's such an amazing show altogether.

• 43:36Rasha Pecoraro?

  You guys have actively ruined all other audio dramas for me. You can't get people to understand the humaning that happens in this damn show.

• 43:44Speaker 07

  Keep doing what you're doing, because it's awesome.

• 43:46Rasha Pecoraro?

  You might not think it, but you are far more important than you realize. Thank you.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  At the nexus of all things, there is a diner. Look for Midnight Burger on your favorite podcasting app, or just go to weopenat6.com.