Speaker 1: We need only look up at the Moon to its
Speaker 1: violently pock marked surface to be reminded of the sheer
Speaker 1: number of loose celestial bodies that are hurtling through space
Speaker 1: at any one time, liable to collide with us at
Speaker 1: any moment. The number of craters covering the Moon's exposed
Speaker 1: silvery crust is estimated to be nine thousand, one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty seven, with many clearly visible to the naked
Speaker 1: eye and many others long since buried by later impacts.
Speaker 1: Considering the Moon's surface is only seven point four percent
Speaker 1: the size of the Earths, that gives you some indication
Speaker 1: of just how many comets, asteroids, and more often meteorites
Speaker 1: are likely to have collided with this planet since it
Speaker 1: was first formed over four point five billion years ago.
Speaker 1: Back in October seventeen, astronomer Robert Werick of the University
Speaker 1: of Hawaii was stationed at the Haliakala Observatory on the
Speaker 1: summit of the Island of Maui's Haliakala Volcano when he
Speaker 1: spotted something unusual close to the Sun. The observatory utilizes
Speaker 1: a panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system known as
Speaker 1: the pan Star's one telescope to scan the Solar System
Speaker 1: for any dangerously large celestial bodies that stray a little
Speaker 1: too close for comfort through it. On that extraordinary day
Speaker 1: in October, Werick observed a small trail of light moving
Speaker 1: away from the Sun, which he immediately assumed at first
Speaker 1: was simply a passing comet. However, when he checked back
Speaker 1: at the previous night's data, something was amiss. The object,
Speaker 1: which was moving at a speed of one hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety six thousand miles per hour, wasn't where it should
Speaker 1: have been according to the data. Jumping onto the Werick
Speaker 1: contacted his friend Marco mcklly at the European Space Agency
Speaker 1: and explained his predicament. A few days later, with the
Speaker 1: help of the essay's optical ground station telescope in Tenerif,
Speaker 1: the pair began to watch the object more closely, and
Speaker 1: the rest, as they say, is history. The object, first
Speaker 1: named Rama after the Arthur C. Clark novel Rendezvous with Rama,
Speaker 1: was later named a Muamua, a Hawaiian word that translates
Speaker 1: to English as the first messenger or scout from the
Speaker 1: distant past to reach out. Because what Werick had discovered
Speaker 1: was the first known object to ever have entered our
Speaker 1: Solar System from deep interstellar space. But that wasn't all with.
Speaker 1: Though Muamua found to be accelerating away from the through
Speaker 1: some kind of non gravitational propulsion, astronomers first classified it
Speaker 1: as a comet, since, unlike an asteroid, a comet is
Speaker 1: comprised partly of frozen gas. The frozen gas helps to
Speaker 1: propel the object through space when it gets released by
Speaker 1: the heat of any star it happens to be passing,
Speaker 1: which in turn creates the comet's distinctive tail and coma,
Speaker 1: the fuzzy glow made of ice and dust that forms
Speaker 1: around its nucleus when it's heated up. Only when the
Speaker 1: astronomers were able to get a closer look at a Muamua,
Speaker 1: they were surprised to find it didn't have a tail
Speaker 1: or a coma, resulting in it being reclassified as an asteroid. However,
Speaker 1: it didn't quite fit the characteristics of the average asteroid either,
Speaker 1: being oddly long and flat in shape, while its unusual
Speaker 1: trajectory and rate of acceleration was also difficult to reconcile
Speaker 1: with this new classification. In the end, it was given
Speaker 1: an entirely new designation, with astronomers agreeing to call it
Speaker 1: simply an interstellar object. The following year, two Harvard University
Speaker 1: researchers shmoy Or Biali and Abraham Loebe made a startling suggestion.
Speaker 1: Could it be? They thought that the reason scientists were
Speaker 1: struggling to account for the object's peculiar behavior was because,
Speaker 1: unlike the celestial bodies they were seeking to compare it to,
Speaker 1: this one was entirely artificial in nature. In other words,
Speaker 1: as they put it, maybe umu Amoah wasn't either a
Speaker 1: comet or an asteroid, but rather a fully operational probe
Speaker 1: deliberately sent to the vicinity of Earth by an alien civilization.
Speaker 1: It certainly makes you wonder about some of the many
Speaker 1: things that have fallen to Earth over the years. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McClane smith. Right at
Speaker 1: the far eastern fringes of Russia, in the Primorsky Kraie region,
Speaker 1: close to the Sea of Japan, lies the sparse mining
Speaker 1: town of down A, Gorsk. Just like the name implies,
Speaker 1: which translates in English to far in the mountains, the
Speaker 1: town sits at the bottom of a narrow valley formed
Speaker 1: by the Rudnaya River, surrounded on all sides by sprawling
Speaker 1: forests of Korean pine and vast stretches of low lying
Speaker 1: pyramid shaped mountains, having first been established as a small
Speaker 1: mining settlement in eighteen ninety seven due to the rich
Speaker 1: concentration of lead and zinc in the area. Today it
Speaker 1: is home to just under forty thousand people, many of
Speaker 1: whom serve the commercial mining industry, and it was there
Speaker 1: late one clear night in January nineteen eighty six that
Speaker 1: an object was seen moving across the sky at speed
Speaker 1: before smashing in the side of isfest Kovaya Mountain, a
Speaker 1: large peak that overshadows the town to the north, also
Speaker 1: known locally as Height six one one on account of
Speaker 1: its height in meters. The object, described by witnesses as
Speaker 1: being a near perfect sphere with a reddish hue like
Speaker 1: burning steel, was said to have moved completely silently through
Speaker 1: the air as it veered toward the mountain, only for
Speaker 1: it to jerk up suddenly, then stop before dropping out
Speaker 1: of the sky. Two girls who saw it from the
Speaker 1: street described hearing a thud as it crashed into the
Speaker 1: mountain's dense forest covering then watched with alarm as a
Speaker 1: small fire blossom out of the darkness at the base
Speaker 1: of a cliff on the mountain's southern side. As news
Speaker 1: of the event began to spread around the region, it
Speaker 1: eventually made its way to doctor Valerie Vardzilni from what
Speaker 1: was then known as the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences
Speaker 1: Far East Department of the Investigation Committee for Anomalous Aerial Phenomena.
Speaker 1: Five days later, Dvardzilney arrived in down A Gorsk to investigate.
Speaker 1: Setting off on the morning of February third, vards Vilney's
Speaker 1: team headed up into the snow covered mountains with only
Speaker 1: a vague sense of where exactly the object had crashed.
Speaker 1: It wasn't long before one of the team spotted a
Speaker 1: large area of exposed rock and dirt surrounded by an
Speaker 1: otherwise thick carpet of snow, where something had clearly been burning.
Speaker 1: And Scattered throughout the area were multiple metallic looking fragments
Speaker 1: of something reported to have appeared artificial that had recently
Speaker 1: smashed on the ground. Some of the fragments were said
Speaker 1: to resemble splintered pieces of silica, while others were little
Speaker 1: balls of a dull, silvery metal. Most peculiar of all
Speaker 1: were the pieces of some kind of bire netting comprised
Speaker 1: of tiny metallic fibers. On the edge of the site,
Speaker 1: they found a tree stump that had a potent chemical
Speaker 1: odor that appeared to be coated in varnish. It was
Speaker 1: only when they got closer that they saw the stump
Speaker 1: had in fact melted something that wasn't possible at less
Speaker 1: than three thousand degrees celsius. A pile of light gray
Speaker 1: ash was also found in the middle of the site,
Speaker 1: which was bagged up along with the rest of the material.
Speaker 1: After taking numerous pictures of their discovery, Dward Zilney had
Speaker 1: all of it flown six thousand kilometers to the Siberian
Speaker 1: branch of the Academy of Sciences in Omsk for further analysis.
Speaker 1: According to Paul Stonehill, who wrote about the incident along
Speaker 1: with fellow UFO researcher Philip Mantel in their twenty seventeen
Speaker 1: book Russia's Roswell Incident, what the scientists found left them
Speaker 1: completely baffled. Looking first at the metal spheres, they found
Speaker 1: them to be comprised of a combination of iron, manganese, nickel, chromium, tungsten, cobalt,
Speaker 1: silica dioxide, and molybdenum. Though not especially startling in and
Speaker 1: of itself, the combination of materials revealed the objects to
Speaker 1: be an alloy that had most likely been manufactured. Next,
Speaker 1: they turned to the strange mesh like material. After placing
Speaker 1: it under the microscope, it was found to be comprised
Speaker 1: of a series of threads, each measuring at mere seventeen
Speaker 1: microns wide, that had been platted together, a micron being
Speaker 1: equivalent to one thousandth of a millimeter. Within many of
Speaker 1: the threads, a single gold wire was found, said to
Speaker 1: have a concentration of one thousand, one hundred grams permetric ton,
Speaker 1: far higher than anything found in the region, where a
Speaker 1: concentration of only four grams per metric ton is considered
Speaker 1: enough to make gold deposits economically viable. Other materials said
Speaker 1: to have been found in the threads were silver, nickel,
Speaker 1: alpha titanium, molybdenum, and marillium. According to Stonehill, when placed
Speaker 1: in a vacuum and melted, some of the elements are
Speaker 1: reported to have completely disappeared, leaving only molybdenum, which had
Speaker 1: not been present in the chamber. At the beginning of
Speaker 1: the experiment, one scientist, doctor Kulikoff of the Academy of
Speaker 1: Sciences Chemistry Institute, is said to have described the nature
Speaker 1: of the mesh as being impossible to understand, with another,
Speaker 1: doctor Vizzotski, allegedly stating he was convinced the fibers had
Speaker 1: not been manufactured on Earth. The strange pile of ash
Speaker 1: was also analyzed to be the remains of an unidentified
Speaker 1: animal that has thought to have been incinerated when the
Speaker 1: object crashed into the mountain, or, perhaps, as others have suggested,
Speaker 1: it was the remains of something that had been traveling
Speaker 1: inside the object when it crashed. A few days after
Speaker 1: of a. Zilne's expedition, doctor Skovinsky of the Academy of
Speaker 1: Science's Institute of Geology and Geophysics led a follow up
Speaker 1: expedition to the apparent crash site on Height six one one.
Speaker 1: According to UFO investigator Leonard Stringfield, Skovinsky's team made yet
Speaker 1: another startling discovery, a remarkable similarity between the composition of
Speaker 1: steel alloy and iron fragments found at the site and
Speaker 1: material found in Peat in the aftermath of one of
Speaker 1: Siberia and the world's most mysterious events involving the impact
Speaker 1: of something falling to Earth from space. It was early
Speaker 1: in the morning of June thirtieth, nineteen o eight, when
Speaker 1: residents of a village in North Krolinski in central Siberia
Speaker 1: looked up to see a bright, bluish white cylindrical object
Speaker 1: falling from the sky. Together they watched it in awe
Speaker 1: as over the course of almost ten minutes, it fell
Speaker 1: steadily closer and closer to the ground. Four hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: to the northwest, at a trading post in Vanavara, surrounded
Speaker 1: by huge swathes of forest, local farmer Semen Semenoff was
Speaker 1: sitting outside his house eating breakfast. Moments later, he looked
Speaker 1: up in horror when, high above the trees to the north,
Speaker 1: the sky appeared to rip in two, and a great
Speaker 1: fire emerged from within it. The rip in the sky
Speaker 1: grew larger until it seemed as though the entire northern
Speaker 1: side of it was on fire. Just then, a great
Speaker 1: surge of heat tore through the air and a tremendous
Speaker 1: thump was hurt, after which the tear in the sky
Speaker 1: appeared to close up. This was followed by a second
Speaker 1: blast of hot air, lifting Semenov off his feet and
Speaker 1: throwing him back against the front of the house, knocking
Speaker 1: him out cold. Semenov came round to find his wife
Speaker 1: anxiously looking over him. After quickly hauling him up from
Speaker 1: the floor, she just managed to get him inside when
Speaker 1: they were suddenly pummeled by a deafening sound, as if
Speaker 1: a whole barrage of cannons were firing down on them
Speaker 1: from above. As the ground then began to shake, the
Speaker 1: couple threw themselves to the floor, fearing an imminent hail
Speaker 1: of projectiles that never came. Moments later it was over.
Speaker 1: Getting back to their feet, the couple stepped from their
Speaker 1: cabin in a daze, looking about at all the glass
Speaker 1: that had been completely blown from the windows, and at
Speaker 1: the peculiar streaks of flattened crops that had suddenly appeared
Speaker 1: in the fields around them. Some who also witnessed the
Speaker 1: extraordinary event are said to run into the streets in
Speaker 1: wild panic, believing the end of the world was upon them.
Speaker 1: It is said that for days after, an eerie, purplish
Speaker 1: glow lingered in the sky, with many across western Siberia
Speaker 1: and even Europe observing it even as far as London
Speaker 1: in England. The glow was so bright the use of
Speaker 1: street lights was completely unnecessary for the next three days.
Speaker 1: In a Kutzk, eight hundred kilometers to the south at
Speaker 1: the town's observatory, observatory director dogged Arcady Voznisenski registered the
Speaker 1: violent event as an earthquake and placed its epicenter at
Speaker 1: somewhere between the Nizniaya and Podkomenia Tunguska rivers. Though he
Speaker 1: may have been right about the epicenter, whatever it was
Speaker 1: that had taken place was no earthquake. In nineteen fourteen, Russia,
Speaker 1: Czar Nicholas the Second took Russia into the First World War.
Speaker 1: The conflict caught the already weakening Czarist regime on the
Speaker 1: back foot, and with deaths mounting and food shortages back home,
Speaker 1: many of the people began to revolt. In March nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: with many in the army by then also turning on
Speaker 1: the ruling powers. A revolution had begun that quickly descended
Speaker 1: into civil war. Due to this political upheaval and the
Speaker 1: sheer remoteness of where the peculiar blast had occurred, an
Speaker 1: area that was also surrounded by miles of forest and swamplant.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be until nineteen twenty one that an expedition
Speaker 1: was finally put together in the hope of establishing what
Speaker 1: had actually taken place. The expedition was led by famed
Speaker 1: Russian mineralogist Lenoid Kulik. Though his team were unable to
Speaker 1: reach the blasts epicenter, after collating a number of eyewitness accounts,
Speaker 1: he was left in no doubt that a meteor had
Speaker 1: smashed into the region, believing they would find the impact
Speaker 1: crater somewhere nearby to prove it. It would be another
Speaker 1: six years, however, before the government to what was then
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union allowed him to return to the region.
Speaker 1: Helped by hunters and trackers from the local Yvank tribe,
Speaker 1: Kulik's expedition was able to venture much further than they
Speaker 1: had before, and soon they came across a harrowing site.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of scorched and fallen trees flattened outwards, surrounding a
Speaker 1: central area comprised of more trees that, despite being blackened
Speaker 1: and completely stripped of branches, had somehow been left standing
Speaker 1: like telegraph poles. As Kulik described it, Kulik knew instinctively
Speaker 1: they'd found the epicenter of the blast, only there was
Speaker 1: no crater to be seen anywhere. In its absence, Kulik
Speaker 1: maintained his original theory, suggesting that the swampy environment had
Speaker 1: been too soft for a crater to form in it.
Speaker 1: Kulik named the peculiar incident the Philiminovo meteorite. However, today
Speaker 1: it is more widely known as the Tunguska event. Without
Speaker 1: an impact crater to back up the meteorite theory, however,
Speaker 1: scientists were left scratching their heads as to what exactly
Speaker 1: took place, and as more and more eyewitness accounts began
Speaker 1: to emerge, things only seemed to get murkier. While some
Speaker 1: described the object as being cylindrical, others claimed it was
Speaker 1: oval shaped. Some also claimed they'd seen the object not
Speaker 1: only changed trajectory during its fall, but also slowed down
Speaker 1: prior to the explosion. Some saw it as a white,
Speaker 1: bluish thing that moved slowly east to west, others that
Speaker 1: it was reddish in color and moving at incredible speed
Speaker 1: from south to north. The many discrepancies in the eyewitness
Speaker 1: accounts has led some to speculate that the main fact
Speaker 1: have been not one object involved, but two. Then, in
Speaker 1: the aftermath of the devastating nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima
Speaker 1: and Nagasaki in Japan in nineteen forty five, writer Alexander
Speaker 1: Katzantsev went as far as to suggest that the Tunguska
Speaker 1: blast was actually a UFO crash, or perhaps the detonation
Speaker 1: of some kind of interplanetary weapon. In an intriguing twist,
Speaker 1: geomagnetic recordings made at Urkut's observatory of the event were
Speaker 1: found to be similar to what you might find after
Speaker 1: a nuclear blast. But perhaps even more startling was an
Speaker 1: idea proposed in nineteen seventy three that the event was
Speaker 1: the result of matter and antimatter colliding, a theoretically calamitous
Speaker 1: possibility which some belief could result in an explosion of
Speaker 1: such magnitude. In the nineteen sixties, the size of the
Speaker 1: impacted area was estimated to have covered eight hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty square miles of forest and was shaped in an
Speaker 1: unusual pattern similar to a huge pair of butterfly wings,
Speaker 1: with somewhere in the region of eighty million trees having
Speaker 1: been flattened. Today, most scientists believed the Tunguska event was
Speaker 1: caused by some form of cosmic body entering the atmosphere
Speaker 1: that disintegrated before impact, although some have suggested that whatever
Speaker 1: it was possibly came in at such a shallow angle
Speaker 1: that had veered back off into space. Either way, over
Speaker 1: a hundred years after the event, there remains no definitive
Speaker 1: explanation for it. Back and down a Gorsk, things were
Speaker 1: getting even stranger with echoes of the Stragatsky Brothers story
Speaker 1: Roadside Picnic, in which a strange, anomalous zone is created
Speaker 1: on Earth in the wake of a mysterious visitation from
Speaker 1: an alien species. The area around the apparent crash site
Speaker 1: at height six one one also developed a peculiar reputation.
Speaker 1: It was said that no insects populated the area in
Speaker 1: the wake of the crash, and that anyone who ventured
Speaker 1: there was quickly overwhelmed by a stifling sense of dread,
Speaker 1: causing their heart rate to increase and a near total
Speaker 1: loss of coordination or Mechanical and electronic equipment used there
Speaker 1: was said to fail. Members of one expedition team who
Speaker 1: went there apparently reported that all their tortures failed to
Speaker 1: work the moment they arrived, only discovering later when they
Speaker 1: returned home, that many of the wires inside had been damaged.
Speaker 1: When the results of the tests conducted on the strange
Speaker 1: material found at the site began to circulate, one journalist
Speaker 1: suggested there was nothing unusual about it at all, believing
Speaker 1: it was simply a top secret spy probe or space
Speaker 1: junk that had been manufactured in the USSR with regular
Speaker 1: materials that had long been known to exist. Others speculated
Speaker 1: it actually belonged to the United States government. However, in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Colonel Jerry Felder of the USA's Space
Speaker 1: Command at Peterson Air Force Space in Colorado, irresponding to
Speaker 1: a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the materials, stated
Speaker 1: that no large objects with ground paths were found to
Speaker 1: have crossed eastern USSR near down A Gorsk at the
Speaker 1: time in question. One other explanation for the event was
Speaker 1: that the object was a fragment of the Space Shuttle
Speaker 1: Challenger that had exploded high up in the atmosphere only
Speaker 1: the day before. Despite the extraordinary coincidence, this theory has
Speaker 1: been dismissed since the Challenger shuttle disintegrated at forty six
Speaker 1: thousand feet above the Atlantic. For any piece of it
Speaker 1: to have made it as far as down a Gorsk,
Speaker 1: over eleven thousand kilometers away, it is estimated it would
Speaker 1: have to have reached sixty five thousand feet in height.
Speaker 1: After a series of subsequent UFO sightings in the region
Speaker 1: following the nineteen eighty six incident, in two thousand, Russian
Speaker 1: newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that Russian Air Force generals were
Speaker 1: so alarmed by the growing number of sightings they invited
Speaker 1: UFO researchers to work with them in trying to establish
Speaker 1: what was going on. In twenty twelve, at the National
Speaker 1: Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, an affiliate at the
Speaker 1: Smithsonian Institute, a number of mysterious items were put on display,
Speaker 1: said to have been taken from the crash site. At
Speaker 1: height six one one inside a large glass case where
Speaker 1: a series of glassy looking metallic spheres and pieces of
Speaker 1: metal in vials. A description read. Three Soviet academic centers
Speaker 1: and eleven research institutes analyzed the objects from this UFO crash.
Speaker 1: The distance between atoms is different from ordinary iron radar
Speaker 1: cannot be reflected from the material elements in the material
Speaker 1: may disappear and new ones appear after heating. One piece
Speaker 1: disappeared completely in front of four witnesses. The core of
Speaker 1: the material is composed of a substance with anti gravitational properties.
Speaker 1: Despite pieces of the material being examined at institutions from
Speaker 1: Vladivostok to Munich and Liage, their true provenance is a
Speaker 1: mystery that remains to this day unexplained. If you enjoy
Speaker 1: Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now
Speaker 1: do so via Patreon. To receive access to add free episodes,
Speaker 1: just go to patron dot com, forward Slash Unexplained Pod
Speaker 1: to sign up, or if you'd like to make a
Speaker 1: one time donation, you can go to Unexplained podcast dot
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Speaker 1: or small, are greatly appreciated. Unexplained. The book and audiobook,
Speaker 1: featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on
Speaker 1: the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can
Speaker 1: purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores.
Speaker 1: All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced
Speaker 1: by me Richard McClane smith. Please subscribe and rate the
Speaker 1: show wherever you listen to podcasts and feel free to
Speaker 1: get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the
Speaker 1: stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an
Speaker 1: explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can
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