http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030228.html
As my intro astronomy teacher told our class, there was no Christmas that year. 
I am surprised that the Tesla explanation did not make the post. Like to hear it, here it go:
Tesla was looking for funding for his experiments, and he went to admiral Faragut (sp?) to provide some demonstrations, and to show how his research could be useful. Faragut said, “thats nice.” But to impress Faragut further, Tesla made a promise to Faragut that he would see exactly how spectacular, and how purposeful his research could be, when Farragut went on manuvers in the North Pacific. As it just so happens, Farragut’s manuevers were to take place during a span of time which included the Tunguska event. Tesla, performed an experiment which, supporters of this theory believe, charged the Ionosphere of the Earth, and caused a lightning discharge to fly from where-ever Tesla was at the time of the Tunguska event over the North Pacific region, and targeting the ground zero of the tunguska meteor site.
This was explained on some television show, a long time ago, and I am sure some quick googling will discredit this explanation. However it makes a good story.
PBS recently rebroadcast a program about the blast. They might have information available at their website at pbs.org
I did some googling, and found that Admiral Farragut died in 1870, so this explanation is BS. I still say that it is a good story though.
Yeah. 
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=157850
Here is the OP from Rayne Man:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3062504#post3062504
All interesting posts … but what I want to know is this:
What wacko thoery was Slug illustrating?
I mean, I get the flying saucer, which is a nod to the crazy UFO theories … but a laser/phaser/photon beam slicing off someone’s butt?
WTF?
Time to decrease/increase Slug’s meds, me thinks.
Maybe Slug is one of them Outland fans. One strip involved a fanny-whacker machine, this machine shot out laser beams and whacked off other chacters’ fannies.
There is a part at the end where Uncle Cecil says:
Why is it important that an asteroid 13 meters in diameter missed us by 105,000 km? Is he talking about his personal spacecraft? Is it a typo? Were there explosives aboard that particular asteroid? Or perhaps something more sinister?
I think the illustration meant that if we’re prepared to accept the ideas of fanny-whacking aliens, we can accept the idea of alien spaceships detonating in our atmosphere.
Or they were shooting at somebody’s fanny and missed, with catastrophic results.
One of the main problems with the UFO theory (or any theory involving a guiding intelligence) about the Tungukaska explosion is that they haven’t tried it since. In nearly a century, we haven’t heard anything else from them. Aside from all the other credibility problems associated with the theory, it seems unlikely that, having caught our attention, they wouldn’t have stopped by to brag about it.
I’d say we were damned lucky that such a big explosion occurred in perhaps the remotest region on the planet. If it had happened a few thousand miles away over China, there would have been millions, perhaps tens of millions, of deaths. If it had happened near any major city in the United States, it would have been the defining moment of this country.
Cecil did a good, if too short for some, job of covering the major facts and theories of the case.
The Tunkangaska incident may have made the X-Files, but I’m waiting for it to make Everybody Loves Raymond. Yeah, that would be a good show.
Joe Reindeer Herder.
CSI: Crater.
8 Rules for Dating My Daughter After An Explosion Wiped Out Our City.
Who Wants To Marry A Survivor of a Meteorite Blast… hmmm… I better stop.
I see what you mean, ShibbOleth, why worry about a 13 meter rock when Earth was hit 136 times by 30 to 50 meter rock. When I googled, I came up with a lot of references to military satellites finding explosions of meteoroids less then 10 meters–but one site that mentioned the 30 to 50 figure, too. Maybe some typo left out a decimal point somewhere?
I don’t get it. Why would a “comet or asteroid” explode above the Earth’s surface? Are those things packed with TNT or something? I thought they’d just land and make a huge impact crater/dust cloud/dinosaur extinction?
They’re blunt bodies, come in with even more trauma than the shuttle–and these ones are a lot smaller than the shuttle, too.
Friction, friction, friction.
Good article on the Tunguska meteorite, but I have two questions:
As I remarked in our recent thread on the Tungu event (evidently the one that sparked Cecil’s column this week) I noted that plenty of micrometeorites were found dispersed aroun the site. They were found by th 1959-1960 expeditions, and if you look at their report or, for instance, the Sky and Telescope article about them you’ll see microscope photos of the spherical meteorite bits. This indicates that hey ere subjected to great heat. In some cases iron-nickel and “stony” mirometeorites were fused together, indicating that both types were resent. There’s also a map showing their ellipsoidal distribtion, exending to the nrtheasy of the explosion sie. So why does Cecil ay that no pieces were ever found?
In fact, as I noted, Leonid Kulik even thought he finally found a small piece at the end of one of his last expeditions to the site in the 1930s. I don’t know what became of that piece.
Id been wondering who came up with the recent theory that the Tungus event was an ordinary meteorite, rather han a fragment f comet. Now I have to look that paper up. For my money, I still side with the cometary hypothesis. It still seems to def probability that the single solid chunk of meteorite could be just the right size and mass to explode in midair (with a consideravble release o energy, equivalent to a Hiroshima bomb – something no other meteorite I’m aware of has done) rather than making it to the ground, or exploding “harmlessly” higher in the atmosphere. It’s a pretty small window of opportunity. I find it easier to buy that a comet nucleus was responsible. Being made of relatively volatile materials and ice, you’ expect it not t rach the earth. Comet nuclei contain prettyy unstable compounds that can believe would contribute to the eplosion, and the solid bits would be diverse (stony and metallic) and dispersed into small pieces alread, making the production of tiny micrometeorites (rather than pieces big enough to reach the ground) likely.
Surprisingly (to me at least) it’s claimed that friction doesn’t have so much to do with it. Most of the heating is done by the pressure wave–which is air heating air. Seems like a quibblee, but it makes a sort of sense. The energy comes from the body, of course, but when you press down a plunger, the resultant heat is not called friction, is it?
Sorry to beat this to death; please help me fight (my own) ignorance here.
I understand that they woud get superheated, but I still don’t get the exploding part; wouldn’t they just melt or break into fragments (as the shuttle did)? If I put a rock on my Superstove[sup]TM[/sup] and heat it to a zillion degrees, will it suddenly become a hand grenade and explode?
Maybe I’ve got the wrong impression of what the word “explode” means? I’m imagining an extremely hot piece of rock falling at high speed to Earth, and then suddenly, a few miles up, it explodes like a bomb, leaving no large, central impact crater. And this picture ain’t clicking for me.
Yep, especially if, even after it starts breaking up, it’s still on the stove.
Why would the trees be pointing towards ground zero? Shouldn’t they be pointing away from it due to the blast??
Funny, when I read that, I took it to mean that the trunks were closer to ground zero, and the tops were farther. I guess I just assumed…