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Speaker 1: We need only look up at the Moon to its

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Speaker 1: violently pock marked surface to be reminded of the sheer

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Speaker 1: number of loose celestial bodies that are hurtling through space

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Speaker 1: at any one time, liable to collide with us at

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Speaker 1: any moment. The number of craters covering the Moon's exposed

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Speaker 1: silvery crust is estimated to be nine thousand, one hundred

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Speaker 1: and thirty seven, with many clearly visible to the naked

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Speaker 1: eye and many others long since buried by later impacts.

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Speaker 1: Considering the Moon's surface is only seven point four percent

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Speaker 1: the size of the Earths, that gives you some indication

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Speaker 1: of just how many comets, asteroids, and more often meteorites

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Speaker 1: are likely to have collided with this planet since it

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Speaker 1: was first formed over four point five billion years ago.

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Speaker 1: Back in October seventeen, astronomer Robert Werick of the University

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Speaker 1: of Hawaii was stationed at the Haliakala Observatory on the

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Speaker 1: summit of the Island of Maui's Haliakala Volcano when he

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Speaker 1: spotted something unusual close to the Sun. The observatory utilizes

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Speaker 1: a panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system known as

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Speaker 1: the pan Star's one telescope to scan the Solar System

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Speaker 1: for any dangerously large celestial bodies that stray a little

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Speaker 1: too close for comfort through it. On that extraordinary day

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Speaker 1: in October, Werick observed a small trail of light moving

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Speaker 1: away from the Sun, which he immediately assumed at first

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Speaker 1: was simply a passing comet. However, when he checked back

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Speaker 1: at the previous night's data, something was amiss. The object,

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Speaker 1: which was moving at a speed of one hundred and

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Speaker 1: ninety six thousand miles per hour, wasn't where it should

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Speaker 1: have been according to the data. Jumping onto the Werick

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Speaker 1: contacted his friend Marco mcklly at the European Space Agency

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Speaker 1: and explained his predicament. A few days later, with the

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Speaker 1: help of the essay's optical ground station telescope in Tenerif,

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Speaker 1: the pair began to watch the object more closely, and

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Speaker 1: the rest, as they say, is history. The object, first

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Speaker 1: named Rama after the Arthur C. Clark novel Rendezvous with Rama,

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Speaker 1: was later named a Muamua, a Hawaiian word that translates

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Speaker 1: to English as the first messenger or scout from the

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Speaker 1: distant past to reach out. Because what Werick had discovered

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Speaker 1: was the first known object to ever have entered our

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Speaker 1: Solar System from deep interstellar space. But that wasn't all with.

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Speaker 1: Though Muamua found to be accelerating away from the through

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Speaker 1: some kind of non gravitational propulsion, astronomers first classified it

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Speaker 1: as a comet, since, unlike an asteroid, a comet is

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Speaker 1: comprised partly of frozen gas. The frozen gas helps to

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Speaker 1: propel the object through space when it gets released by

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Speaker 1: the heat of any star it happens to be passing,

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Speaker 1: which in turn creates the comet's distinctive tail and coma,

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Speaker 1: the fuzzy glow made of ice and dust that forms

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Speaker 1: around its nucleus when it's heated up. Only when the

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Speaker 1: astronomers were able to get a closer look at a Muamua,

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Speaker 1: they were surprised to find it didn't have a tail

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Speaker 1: or a coma, resulting in it being reclassified as an asteroid. However,

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Speaker 1: it didn't quite fit the characteristics of the average asteroid either,

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Speaker 1: being oddly long and flat in shape, while its unusual

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Speaker 1: trajectory and rate of acceleration was also difficult to reconcile

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Speaker 1: with this new classification. In the end, it was given

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Speaker 1: an entirely new designation, with astronomers agreeing to call it

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Speaker 1: simply an interstellar object. The following year, two Harvard University

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Speaker 1: researchers shmoy Or Biali and Abraham Loebe made a startling suggestion.

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Speaker 1: Could it be? They thought that the reason scientists were

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Speaker 1: struggling to account for the object's peculiar behavior was because,

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Speaker 1: unlike the celestial bodies they were seeking to compare it to,

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Speaker 1: this one was entirely artificial in nature. In other words,

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Speaker 1: as they put it, maybe umu Amoah wasn't either a

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Speaker 1: comet or an asteroid, but rather a fully operational probe

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Speaker 1: deliberately sent to the vicinity of Earth by an alien civilization.

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Speaker 1: It certainly makes you wonder about some of the many

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Speaker 1: things that have fallen to Earth over the years. You're

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Speaker 1: listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McClane smith. Right at

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Speaker 1: the far eastern fringes of Russia, in the Primorsky Kraie region,

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Speaker 1: close to the Sea of Japan, lies the sparse mining

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Speaker 1: town of down A, Gorsk. Just like the name implies,

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Speaker 1: which translates in English to far in the mountains, the

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Speaker 1: town sits at the bottom of a narrow valley formed

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Speaker 1: by the Rudnaya River, surrounded on all sides by sprawling

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Speaker 1: forests of Korean pine and vast stretches of low lying

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Speaker 1: pyramid shaped mountains, having first been established as a small

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Speaker 1: mining settlement in eighteen ninety seven due to the rich

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Speaker 1: concentration of lead and zinc in the area. Today it

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Speaker 1: is home to just under forty thousand people, many of

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Speaker 1: whom serve the commercial mining industry, and it was there

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Speaker 1: late one clear night in January nineteen eighty six that

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Speaker 1: an object was seen moving across the sky at speed

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Speaker 1: before smashing in the side of isfest Kovaya Mountain, a

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Speaker 1: large peak that overshadows the town to the north, also

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Speaker 1: known locally as Height six one one on account of

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Speaker 1: its height in meters. The object, described by witnesses as

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Speaker 1: being a near perfect sphere with a reddish hue like

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Speaker 1: burning steel, was said to have moved completely silently through

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Speaker 1: the air as it veered toward the mountain, only for

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Speaker 1: it to jerk up suddenly, then stop before dropping out

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Speaker 1: of the sky. Two girls who saw it from the

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Speaker 1: street described hearing a thud as it crashed into the

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Speaker 1: mountain's dense forest covering then watched with alarm as a

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Speaker 1: small fire blossom out of the darkness at the base

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Speaker 1: of a cliff on the mountain's southern side. As news

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Speaker 1: of the event began to spread around the region, it

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Speaker 1: eventually made its way to doctor Valerie Vardzilni from what

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Speaker 1: was then known as the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences

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Speaker 1: Far East Department of the Investigation Committee for Anomalous Aerial Phenomena.

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Speaker 1: Five days later, Dvardzilney arrived in down A Gorsk to investigate.

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Speaker 1: Setting off on the morning of February third, vards Vilney's

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Speaker 1: team headed up into the snow covered mountains with only

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Speaker 1: a vague sense of where exactly the object had crashed.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't long before one of the team spotted a

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Speaker 1: large area of exposed rock and dirt surrounded by an

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Speaker 1: otherwise thick carpet of snow, where something had clearly been burning.

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Speaker 1: And Scattered throughout the area were multiple metallic looking fragments

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Speaker 1: of something reported to have appeared artificial that had recently

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Speaker 1: smashed on the ground. Some of the fragments were said

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Speaker 1: to resemble splintered pieces of silica, while others were little

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Speaker 1: balls of a dull, silvery metal. Most peculiar of all

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Speaker 1: were the pieces of some kind of bire netting comprised

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Speaker 1: of tiny metallic fibers. On the edge of the site,

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Speaker 1: they found a tree stump that had a potent chemical

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Speaker 1: odor that appeared to be coated in varnish. It was

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Speaker 1: only when they got closer that they saw the stump

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Speaker 1: had in fact melted something that wasn't possible at less

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Speaker 1: than three thousand degrees celsius. A pile of light gray

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Speaker 1: ash was also found in the middle of the site,

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Speaker 1: which was bagged up along with the rest of the material.

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Speaker 1: After taking numerous pictures of their discovery, Dward Zilney had

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Speaker 1: all of it flown six thousand kilometers to the Siberian

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Speaker 1: branch of the Academy of Sciences in Omsk for further analysis.

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Speaker 1: According to Paul Stonehill, who wrote about the incident along

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Speaker 1: with fellow UFO researcher Philip Mantel in their twenty seventeen

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Speaker 1: book Russia's Roswell Incident, what the scientists found left them

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Speaker 1: completely baffled. Looking first at the metal spheres, they found

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Speaker 1: them to be comprised of a combination of iron, manganese, nickel, chromium, tungsten, cobalt,

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Speaker 1: silica dioxide, and molybdenum. Though not especially startling in and

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Speaker 1: of itself, the combination of materials revealed the objects to

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Speaker 1: be an alloy that had most likely been manufactured. Next,

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Speaker 1: they turned to the strange mesh like material. After placing

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Speaker 1: it under the microscope, it was found to be comprised

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Speaker 1: of a series of threads, each measuring at mere seventeen

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Speaker 1: microns wide, that had been platted together, a micron being

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Speaker 1: equivalent to one thousandth of a millimeter. Within many of

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Speaker 1: the threads, a single gold wire was found, said to

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Speaker 1: have a concentration of one thousand, one hundred grams permetric ton,

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Speaker 1: far higher than anything found in the region, where a

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Speaker 1: concentration of only four grams per metric ton is considered

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Speaker 1: enough to make gold deposits economically viable. Other materials said

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Speaker 1: to have been found in the threads were silver, nickel,

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Speaker 1: alpha titanium, molybdenum, and marillium. According to Stonehill, when placed

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Speaker 1: in a vacuum and melted, some of the elements are

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Speaker 1: reported to have completely disappeared, leaving only molybdenum, which had

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Speaker 1: not been present in the chamber. At the beginning of

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Speaker 1: the experiment, one scientist, doctor Kulikoff of the Academy of

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Speaker 1: Sciences Chemistry Institute, is said to have described the nature

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Speaker 1: of the mesh as being impossible to understand, with another,

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Speaker 1: doctor Vizzotski, allegedly stating he was convinced the fibers had

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Speaker 1: not been manufactured on Earth. The strange pile of ash

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Speaker 1: was also analyzed to be the remains of an unidentified

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Speaker 1: animal that has thought to have been incinerated when the

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Speaker 1: object crashed into the mountain, or, perhaps, as others have suggested,

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Speaker 1: it was the remains of something that had been traveling

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Speaker 1: inside the object when it crashed. A few days after

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Speaker 1: of a. Zilne's expedition, doctor Skovinsky of the Academy of

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Speaker 1: Science's Institute of Geology and Geophysics led a follow up

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Speaker 1: expedition to the apparent crash site on Height six one one.

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Speaker 1: According to UFO investigator Leonard Stringfield, Skovinsky's team made yet

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Speaker 1: another startling discovery, a remarkable similarity between the composition of

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Speaker 1: steel alloy and iron fragments found at the site and

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Speaker 1: material found in Peat in the aftermath of one of

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Speaker 1: Siberia and the world's most mysterious events involving the impact

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Speaker 1: of something falling to Earth from space. It was early

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Speaker 1: in the morning of June thirtieth, nineteen o eight, when

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Speaker 1: residents of a village in North Krolinski in central Siberia

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Speaker 1: looked up to see a bright, bluish white cylindrical object

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Speaker 1: falling from the sky. Together they watched it in awe

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Speaker 1: as over the course of almost ten minutes, it fell

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Speaker 1: steadily closer and closer to the ground. Four hundred kilometers

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Speaker 1: to the northwest, at a trading post in Vanavara, surrounded

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Speaker 1: by huge swathes of forest, local farmer Semen Semenoff was

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Speaker 1: sitting outside his house eating breakfast. Moments later, he looked

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Speaker 1: up in horror when, high above the trees to the north,

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Speaker 1: the sky appeared to rip in two, and a great

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Speaker 1: fire emerged from within it. The rip in the sky

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Speaker 1: grew larger until it seemed as though the entire northern

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Speaker 1: side of it was on fire. Just then, a great

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Speaker 1: surge of heat tore through the air and a tremendous

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Speaker 1: thump was hurt, after which the tear in the sky

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Speaker 1: appeared to close up. This was followed by a second

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Speaker 1: blast of hot air, lifting Semenov off his feet and

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Speaker 1: throwing him back against the front of the house, knocking

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Speaker 1: him out cold. Semenov came round to find his wife

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Speaker 1: anxiously looking over him. After quickly hauling him up from

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Speaker 1: the floor, she just managed to get him inside when

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Speaker 1: they were suddenly pummeled by a deafening sound, as if

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Speaker 1: a whole barrage of cannons were firing down on them

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Speaker 1: from above. As the ground then began to shake, the

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Speaker 1: couple threw themselves to the floor, fearing an imminent hail

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Speaker 1: of projectiles that never came. Moments later it was over.

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Speaker 1: Getting back to their feet, the couple stepped from their

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Speaker 1: cabin in a daze, looking about at all the glass

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Speaker 1: that had been completely blown from the windows, and at

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Speaker 1: the peculiar streaks of flattened crops that had suddenly appeared

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Speaker 1: in the fields around them. Some who also witnessed the

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Speaker 1: extraordinary event are said to run into the streets in

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Speaker 1: wild panic, believing the end of the world was upon them.

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Speaker 1: It is said that for days after, an eerie, purplish

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Speaker 1: glow lingered in the sky, with many across western Siberia

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Speaker 1: and even Europe observing it even as far as London

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Speaker 1: in England. The glow was so bright the use of

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Speaker 1: street lights was completely unnecessary for the next three days.

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Speaker 1: In a Kutzk, eight hundred kilometers to the south at

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Speaker 1: the town's observatory, observatory director dogged Arcady Voznisenski registered the

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Speaker 1: violent event as an earthquake and placed its epicenter at

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Speaker 1: somewhere between the Nizniaya and Podkomenia Tunguska rivers. Though he

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Speaker 1: may have been right about the epicenter, whatever it was

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Speaker 1: that had taken place was no earthquake. In nineteen fourteen, Russia,

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Speaker 1: Czar Nicholas the Second took Russia into the First World War.

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Speaker 1: The conflict caught the already weakening Czarist regime on the

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Speaker 1: back foot, and with deaths mounting and food shortages back home,

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Speaker 1: many of the people began to revolt. In March nineteen seventeen,

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Speaker 1: with many in the army by then also turning on

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Speaker 1: the ruling powers. A revolution had begun that quickly descended

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Speaker 1: into civil war. Due to this political upheaval and the

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Speaker 1: sheer remoteness of where the peculiar blast had occurred, an

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Speaker 1: area that was also surrounded by miles of forest and swamplant.

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Speaker 1: It wouldn't be until nineteen twenty one that an expedition

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Speaker 1: was finally put together in the hope of establishing what

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Speaker 1: had actually taken place. The expedition was led by famed

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Speaker 1: Russian mineralogist Lenoid Kulik. Though his team were unable to

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Speaker 1: reach the blasts epicenter, after collating a number of eyewitness accounts,

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Speaker 1: he was left in no doubt that a meteor had

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Speaker 1: smashed into the region, believing they would find the impact

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Speaker 1: crater somewhere nearby to prove it. It would be another

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Speaker 1: six years, however, before the government to what was then

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Speaker 1: the Soviet Union allowed him to return to the region.

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Speaker 1: Helped by hunters and trackers from the local Yvank tribe,

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Speaker 1: Kulik's expedition was able to venture much further than they

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Speaker 1: had before, and soon they came across a harrowing site.

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Speaker 1: Hundreds of scorched and fallen trees flattened outwards, surrounding a

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Speaker 1: central area comprised of more trees that, despite being blackened

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Speaker 1: and completely stripped of branches, had somehow been left standing

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Speaker 1: like telegraph poles. As Kulik described it, Kulik knew instinctively

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Speaker 1: they'd found the epicenter of the blast, only there was

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Speaker 1: no crater to be seen anywhere. In its absence, Kulik

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Speaker 1: maintained his original theory, suggesting that the swampy environment had

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Speaker 1: been too soft for a crater to form in it.

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Speaker 1: Kulik named the peculiar incident the Philiminovo meteorite. However, today

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Speaker 1: it is more widely known as the Tunguska event. Without

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Speaker 1: an impact crater to back up the meteorite theory, however,

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Speaker 1: scientists were left scratching their heads as to what exactly

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Speaker 1: took place, and as more and more eyewitness accounts began

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Speaker 1: to emerge, things only seemed to get murkier. While some

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Speaker 1: described the object as being cylindrical, others claimed it was

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Speaker 1: oval shaped. Some also claimed they'd seen the object not

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Speaker 1: only changed trajectory during its fall, but also slowed down

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Speaker 1: prior to the explosion. Some saw it as a white,

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Speaker 1: bluish thing that moved slowly east to west, others that

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Speaker 1: it was reddish in color and moving at incredible speed

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Speaker 1: from south to north. The many discrepancies in the eyewitness

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Speaker 1: accounts has led some to speculate that the main fact

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Speaker 1: have been not one object involved, but two. Then, in

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Speaker 1: the aftermath of the devastating nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima

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Speaker 1: and Nagasaki in Japan in nineteen forty five, writer Alexander

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Speaker 1: Katzantsev went as far as to suggest that the Tunguska

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Speaker 1: blast was actually a UFO crash, or perhaps the detonation

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Speaker 1: of some kind of interplanetary weapon. In an intriguing twist,

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Speaker 1: geomagnetic recordings made at Urkut's observatory of the event were

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Speaker 1: found to be similar to what you might find after

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Speaker 1: a nuclear blast. But perhaps even more startling was an

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Speaker 1: idea proposed in nineteen seventy three that the event was

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Speaker 1: the result of matter and antimatter colliding, a theoretically calamitous

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Speaker 1: possibility which some belief could result in an explosion of

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Speaker 1: such magnitude. In the nineteen sixties, the size of the

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Speaker 1: impacted area was estimated to have covered eight hundred and

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Speaker 1: thirty square miles of forest and was shaped in an

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Speaker 1: unusual pattern similar to a huge pair of butterfly wings,

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Speaker 1: with somewhere in the region of eighty million trees having

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Speaker 1: been flattened. Today, most scientists believed the Tunguska event was

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Speaker 1: caused by some form of cosmic body entering the atmosphere

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Speaker 1: that disintegrated before impact, although some have suggested that whatever

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Speaker 1: it was possibly came in at such a shallow angle

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Speaker 1: that had veered back off into space. Either way, over

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Speaker 1: a hundred years after the event, there remains no definitive

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Speaker 1: explanation for it. Back and down a Gorsk, things were

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Speaker 1: getting even stranger with echoes of the Stragatsky Brothers story

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Speaker 1: Roadside Picnic, in which a strange, anomalous zone is created

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Speaker 1: on Earth in the wake of a mysterious visitation from

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Speaker 1: an alien species. The area around the apparent crash site

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00:20:35,560 --> 00:20:39,439
Speaker 1: at height six one one also developed a peculiar reputation.

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Speaker 1: It was said that no insects populated the area in

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00:20:43,520 --> 00:20:46,520
Speaker 1: the wake of the crash, and that anyone who ventured

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00:20:46,560 --> 00:20:50,320
Speaker 1: there was quickly overwhelmed by a stifling sense of dread,

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00:20:50,800 --> 00:20:54,080
Speaker 1: causing their heart rate to increase and a near total

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00:20:54,359 --> 00:20:59,680
Speaker 1: loss of coordination or Mechanical and electronic equipment used there

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00:21:00,240 --> 00:21:03,840
Speaker 1: was said to fail. Members of one expedition team who

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00:21:03,920 --> 00:21:07,280
Speaker 1: went there apparently reported that all their tortures failed to

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00:21:07,320 --> 00:21:11,440
Speaker 1: work the moment they arrived, only discovering later when they

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Speaker 1: returned home, that many of the wires inside had been damaged.

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Speaker 1: When the results of the tests conducted on the strange

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Speaker 1: material found at the site began to circulate, one journalist

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00:21:24,080 --> 00:21:27,760
Speaker 1: suggested there was nothing unusual about it at all, believing

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Speaker 1: it was simply a top secret spy probe or space

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Speaker 1: junk that had been manufactured in the USSR with regular

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Speaker 1: materials that had long been known to exist. Others speculated

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00:21:39,480 --> 00:21:43,359
Speaker 1: it actually belonged to the United States government. However, in

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Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Colonel Jerry Felder of the USA's Space

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Speaker 1: Command at Peterson Air Force Space in Colorado, irresponding to

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Speaker 1: a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the materials, stated

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Speaker 1: that no large objects with ground paths were found to

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Speaker 1: have crossed eastern USSR near down A Gorsk at the

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00:22:04,359 --> 00:22:08,879
Speaker 1: time in question. One other explanation for the event was

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Speaker 1: that the object was a fragment of the Space Shuttle

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Speaker 1: Challenger that had exploded high up in the atmosphere only

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Speaker 1: the day before. Despite the extraordinary coincidence, this theory has

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Speaker 1: been dismissed since the Challenger shuttle disintegrated at forty six

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Speaker 1: thousand feet above the Atlantic. For any piece of it

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Speaker 1: to have made it as far as down a Gorsk,

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Speaker 1: over eleven thousand kilometers away, it is estimated it would

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Speaker 1: have to have reached sixty five thousand feet in height.

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Speaker 1: After a series of subsequent UFO sightings in the region

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Speaker 1: following the nineteen eighty six incident, in two thousand, Russian

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Speaker 1: newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that Russian Air Force generals were

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Speaker 1: so alarmed by the growing number of sightings they invited

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Speaker 1: UFO researchers to work with them in trying to establish

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Speaker 1: what was going on. In twenty twelve, at the National

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Speaker 1: Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, an affiliate at the

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Speaker 1: Smithsonian Institute, a number of mysterious items were put on display,

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Speaker 1: said to have been taken from the crash site. At

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Speaker 1: height six one one inside a large glass case where

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Speaker 1: a series of glassy looking metallic spheres and pieces of

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Speaker 1: metal in vials. A description read. Three Soviet academic centers

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Speaker 1: and eleven research institutes analyzed the objects from this UFO crash.

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Speaker 1: The distance between atoms is different from ordinary iron radar

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Speaker 1: cannot be reflected from the material elements in the material

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00:23:50,040 --> 00:23:55,040
Speaker 1: may disappear and new ones appear after heating. One piece

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Speaker 1: disappeared completely in front of four witnesses. The core of

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Speaker 1: the material is composed of a substance with anti gravitational properties.

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Speaker 1: Despite pieces of the material being examined at institutions from

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Speaker 1: Vladivostok to Munich and Liage, their true provenance is a

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Speaker 1: mystery that remains to this day unexplained. If you enjoy

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Speaker 1: Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now

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Speaker 1: com forward Slash Support. All donations, no matter how large

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Speaker 1: featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on

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Speaker 1: by me Richard McClane smith. Please subscribe and rate the

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