The Comet Nobody Could Find

Name: The Comet Nobody Could Find
Genre: Documentary

The absence of a crater turns Tunguska into a battle between an icy comet, a stony asteroid and increasingly fantastic alternatives.

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Transcript

A herder was blown into a tree—and later died.
It happened June 30th, 1908, over one of Siberia’s remotest regions.
NASA places the local time at about 7:15 a.m.
Evenki witnesses saw a smoke-trailing fireball before the explosion. Among them were reindeer herders camped across the forest.
The forest is burning. Their camps and reindeer stood inside the spreading devastation.
Modern models estimate 10 to 20 megatons in an airburst about 6 miles high.
At about 37 miles (60 kilometers), people were thrown down and windows broke.
In 1921, geologist Leonid Kulik headed toward the site but couldn't reach it.
Kulik reached Tunguska in 1927, finding burned, stripped trees near the epicenter.
Kulik found no physical evidence of the bolide, and Tunguska left no impact crater.
Missing debris pushed investigators toward an active comet instead.
Witness S. Semenov recalled seeing fire above that morning. I saw the northern sky split apart, and fire appear above the forest.
Available evidence includes eyewitness accounts, seismic records, and burned trees.
The primary constraint was simple: quantitative data was scarce.
A 1993 study concluded a stony meteorite exploded in the atmosphere.
Today, most scientists believe Tunguska was caused by an asteroid.
Later surveys mapped a butterfly-shaped, 830-square-mile destruction zone.
Later expeditions found extraterrestrial-looking microparticles, but couldn't tie them conclusively to Tunguska.
The evidence pointed outward, without naming what arrived.

The object may have left no crater because the explosion erased it in mid-air.

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