Column by Cecil.
New evidence emerges to pin it to an icy comet.
Interesting article. Thanks for the link. 
As it happens:
- THE BLAST HEARD AROUND THE WORLD DEPARTMENT -
Team Claims to have Found Tunguska Crater
Try not to get put off by the Bible prophecy and secret civilisation adverts heading the page - this is quite a way down. Despite the name and willingness to carry the weird and wacko, Conspiracy Journal is a lot less willing to take everything at face value than might be imagined.
And another Wacko theory involving who else but Nikola Tesla. About this time he had proven his resonant power transmitter worked in Colorado Springs but run out of money for the full-sized version and George Westinghouse would not back him further. There was an Arctic expedition at the time, and Tesla had said that the system could be set up to focus on a particular geographic spot as an almighty weapon - unimaginable in days before aircraft. So he arranged a demonstration within sight of the expedition. Only his calibration was way off. Which casts doubt on its military potential I would think!
I’m not sure how the expedition was supposed to confirm observation either, or why he didn’t choose somewhere closer to home easier to observe. But come on - you don’t expect sense where a Theory is concerned.
Jerseyman said:
Nah, it just appears that way because this article is actually balanced. But if you look closely, you will see this is a repeat from the BBC.
So the balance doesn’t come from the authors of that [del]nutjob[/del] conspiracy site, but from their source.
I love the Tunguska explosion. Watch the Bad Science - I mean The History - Channel and you’ll get to see crazy explanations. It is one of my favorite bad science topics.
The real news here is about the theory of water transport that explains how the shuttle could cause such noctilucent clouds. By extension, tjhis may have happened with the Tunguska event as well.
But it doesn’t really prove anything. The extreme noctilucent clouds over Europe* at the same time as the Tunguska event could as well have been caused by dust injected into the atmosphere. I’ve long believed the Whipple “Dirty ice ball” theory that the Tunguska event was caused by a comet (possibly a fragment of the Pons-winneke comet, that coincided with the event), and would love something to substantiate it. This nudges it a bit in that direction, but doesn’t offer anything conclusive.
The clouds were so bright that they turned night into day, with people able to read newspapers after midnight. It was pretyty clear that psomething* had happened. Torvald kul of Norway suggested on that very day that a meteorite had fallen, although it was years later that the truth finally came out of Siberia.
Incidentally, it’s rarely mentioned, but there was an undoubted meteorite that fell on that same day, elsewhere in Russia. That seems to me a pretty significant fact, too.
When Carl Sagan did Cosmos in 1980, the prevailing theory was that an icy comet caused the Tunguska event, because no asteroid fragments were found on the ground.
When a later team of researchers simulated the blast damage caused by a mid-air asteroid detonation, and found it to match the pattern on the ground near Tunguska very closely, the prevailing theory was that a rocky asteroid caused the Tunguska event.
So, now, we’re back to icy comets?
Hey! I’m living in Ireland too! All their stuff is reprint. But for all the crap they advertise, and however weird some articles are, they aren’t just Weekly World News online. They’ll reprint research into ‘Atlantean’ tunnels but they’ll leave it at that and they’ll take it from somewhere that adds enough detail about the background to make you wonder if this explorer found something but it wasn’t what he thinks, or wants other people to think. To their credit, I have not seen any David Icke or Laurence Gardner direct on there.
But of course, if you have any intelligence, you look at the crazy and decide for yourself what is too neat and too unlikely and what might be genuine. I believe most things about Nikola Tesla (but not the Tunguska one), and I believe that the US may have experimented with some of his ideas - and found they did not work. Likewise, I believe that a lot of early UFOs were German design gyroscope aircraft - and they didn’t work either. I do not believe in secret treaties between the USA and Nazis and Aliens and all that crap for two good reasons: [1] If they had anything, after 60 years of the Cold War, they would have learnt to use it and to let the Soviets know they had it, not still be farting around; [2] If I were a devious alien I’d want alliance with a secretive controlled society with a science obsession and no risk of intrusive journalists or change of government; I’d go to the USSR or China, never the USA!
Or North Korea? And teach them how to make longer range missiles?
They didn’t find any large fragments… the circa 1960 expedition found lots of tiny melted fragments of both metal and stony meteorite material, distributed over the region around the explosion site. The theory was that this was residue inside that icy comet, although it could have been left over from a more solid body as well.
What no one mentions isthat Leonid Alexeyevich kulik, the guy who investigated the site in the late 1920s and 1930s, claimed to have found a fist-sized chunk of meteorite near the end of his explorations. Nobody mentions this, and I don’t know if they just aren’t aware of it, or if it was proven to be non-meteoric. Or if they just suspect it was non-meteoric.