The Tunguska Explosion of 1908 was a powerful explosion that occurred near the Lower Stony Tunguska River in what is now part of Russia (Krasnoyarsk Krai, now Russia’s second largest Federal subject), at around 7:14 a.m. on June 30, 1908. Legendary for its destructive power, the cause of the explosion has been debated for decades, which was said to have caused the sky throughout Western Europe to glow green after impact. Recent scientific data seems to lend to the common theory that the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment as much as 6 miles above the Earth’s surface was the cause of the destruction, but does evidence exist of a stranger, more out-of-this-world theory as to its cause?

ABOVE: Scorched trees at “ground zero” of the Tunguska blast site, circa 1927. 

According to Dr. Yuri Labvin, “an alien spacecraft sacrificed itself to prevent a gigantic meteor from slamming into the planet above Siberia on June 30, 1908.”

Labvin is president of the Siberian Public State funded Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, which sent an expedition to the famous blast site in August 2004. Using metal detectors, the expedition and its members examined areas near the Poligus township, where they claimed to have observed evidence of “a technogenic catastrophe”, with the presence of metallic debris discovered via satellite imagry. In 2004, Labvin told the press that “the only real explanation can be linked with powerful electromagnetic phenomena.”

New data being released by Labvin, dealing primarily with quartz slabs bearing “strange markings” found at the site, are believed to be evidence of artifacts from the control panel of an alien ship. “We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals,” Labvin said in a recent interview with the Macedonian International News Agency. “We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”

The picture Labvin paints is rather extraordinary. His theory is essentially this; a gigantic meteor was headed toward Earth on the date of the blast, bearing tremendous destructive power, perhaps capable of wiping out life on planet Earth. However, before the object could slam into Siberian permafrost, noble “Space Brothers”–benign aliens watching over Earth at the time–ended up taking desperate measures to prevent the impact, colliding their own ship with the meteor and sparring mankind from ultimate doom.

Similar theories were first introduced in the fiction of Soviet engineer Alexander Kazantsev in 1946, with the publication of his story A Visitor From Outer Space. In this story, the narrator begins to compare the blast at Tunguska with that of explosions of atomic bombs at Alamagordo, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima  (the latter of which Kazantsev had visited prior to writing the story). The end result is the revelation that a nuclear-powered Martian UFO had been hovering over Siberia, seeking fresh water from nearby Lake Baikal (the largest freshwater lake on Earth) when it subsequently detonated in mid-air. Interestingly, recent images taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station circling 220 miles above Earth depict an odd “ice ring” in the center of Lake Baikal. Could it be that Kazantsev’s UFO actually arrived, perhaps 100 years too late, stopping in from a cosmic expedition to leave its circular impression against the ice as it gathered water before heading off into space?

ABOVE: Strange “Ice Ring” photographed in the center of Lake Baikal, Siberia (image courtesy of NASA). 

I say this in jest, of course, though the question of expeditions in the area–of the terrestrial kind–are indeed where we begin piecing together the anomalous elements of this strange story. The earliest recorded expedition to nearby inhabited areas occurred in 1921, lead by Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, serving as a portion of a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Their official scientific explanation was that, based on local eyewitness accounts, the explosion had to have been caused by a giant meteorite impact. Kulik was successful in persuading the Soviet government to fund a more thorough expedition to the Tunguska region, taking into consideration that meteoric iron might be present, and savagable to the benefit of the Soviet industries.

Kulik and his party reached the blast site in 1927 where, strangely, no evidence of a crater was found. A vast region of flattened trees, scorched and stripped of bark, covered an area about 30 miles across, with a few naked trunks remaining upright at the site just below the presumed aerial blast’s epicenter. By 1938 Kulik had commisioned a series of aerial photographs to be made of the area. Proponents of lore surrounding the “Mothman” sightings in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia half a century later, which dealt with an alleged winged-harbinger of misfortune, might find it chilling to note that the photographic survey revealed that trees were flattened in a huge butterfly-shaped pattern. However, four decades later, Soviet experiments using model forests made of match-sticks subjected to small explosive charges from above produced similar butterfly-shaped blast patterns.

In recent years, not only have newer scientific revelations continued to support the meteor-blast hypothesis, but also the discovery of the bowl-shaped Lake Cheko nearby suggests that a portion of a large meteor might have broken off, resulting in a slightly-misplaced impact site somewhat removed from the initial ground-zero area, though such theories aren’t as widely accepted. Of course, Dr. Yuri Labvin’s latest hypothesis likely won’t be regarded as the most feasible among the scientific community, either. Still, what could be the origin of the curious quartz slabs described by he and his team, discovered at the site of the Tunguska blast? Are they elements from some advanced spacecraft, artifacts from some lost culture, or something else altogether?

Whatever the case, the fact that the cause of the blast was “other-worldly” can’t really be debated; the only point of contention between these two theories involves whether the extraterrestrial object responsible for the blast was natural or technological, the latter indicative of an alien race within close proximity to Earth a century ago. Perhaps the findings of Dr. Labvin will only lend further question to the mysterious cause of one of the most destructive Earth impacts in modern times.