Case file · Official inquiry

Tunguska event

A massive airburst flattened ~2,000 km² of Siberian forest.

1908 CE · 60.90, 101.90 · status: explained

The account

The largest impact event in recorded history levelled 80 million trees. No crater was found, feeding decades of exotic speculation.

The sceptical view

Scientific consensus: the airburst of a stony meteoroid or comet fragment — a natural event, not a craft.

The researched reading

One of the best-documented natural catastrophes of the 20th century. The open questions are about the impactor’s make-up, not about whether it was natural.

Explanation	Weight	Why
A known natural phenomenon	88%	Seismographs and barographs as far away as Britain recorded the 30 June 1908 blast, and the radial treefall, the scorched core and the lack of a crater all match the airburst of a stony asteroid or comet fragment tens of metres across, a few kilometres up. Sandia models put the yield at about 3–5 megatons; the same physics was seen on a smaller scale at Chelyabinsk in 2013.
A poorly understood natural phenomenon	7%	What the impactor was made of is still argued (stony, carbonaceous, cometary, or an iron body that skipped back to space), and fringe geophysical ideas such as a methane outburst exist; these change the details, not the natural cause.
Something known, misidentified	1%	Witnesses described a fiery body crossing the sky, which is what a bolide looks like; there is nothing to misidentify.
Perception, memory or mind	1%	The physical record (instruments, flattened forest) does not rest on testimony.
A hoax or fabrication	1%	Recorded on instruments worldwide and surveyed by Kulik from 1927; it cannot have been invented.
Secret human technology	1%	No human technology in 1908 could release megatons; Tesla “death ray” stories are later inventions.
Genuinely anomalous	1%	The crashed-spacecraft idea began as Kazantsev’s 1946 science-fiction story; no evidence beyond the airburst supports it.

Official position: Scientific consensus: the airburst of a small asteroid or comet fragment.

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Sources

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