The most famous of all reported UFO incidents may be the Roswell Incident, but another incident which many consider to be just as interesting is the Tunguska incident.

Approximately at 7am on the 30 June, 1908, a massive explosion occurred near the lower Tunguska River, Siberia, Russia. The explosion caused damage 400 miles away, and was heard even further away than that. Even the heat that came out from the explosion was felt hundreds of miles away. The shockwave had been reportedly felt as far away as London. Quite an explosion that.

The sky was brightened up across all of northern Europe by the blast for several weeks. It was assumed that a massive meteorite had collided with the earth. At least this was the first assumption.

Explanations

The area which was devastated is extremely remote and hard to get to, which is the reason why it wasn't until 1927 that an expedition was assembled and went into the Tunguska area to investigate the crash site. The only people to visit the site up until now had been a few residents. The expedition did not find any piece of evidence of a meteorite of any kind. This made the scientists a little bit confused and puzzled. An explosion this big had to come from a rather large meteorite.

One other thing which was strange was the fact that trees on the outskirts of the blast had fell in an outward motion, but the trees in and near the centre were still standing, although naked because the bark and branches had been destroyed.

Eighteen years later, in 1945, the USA dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devastation left behind from these bombs was photographed from the air. These photos were examined and compared to aerial photos from the Tunguska blast area and they were extremely similar.

Various scientists became convinced that the Tunguska explosion was a result of a nuclear explosion of some kind. This would explain the mystery of the trees which were still standing and how those that did fall actually fell. Since no nation or person was able to create any nuclear device or bomb in 1908 the conclusion these scientists came up with was that an alien nuclear-powered spaceship must have crashed at Tunguska.

Other scientists were not so convinced about the alien theory. More scientific explanations were put forward, for example anti-matter explosions and local black holes.

Is the Truth Out There?

Of course this incident has some witnesses. They claim to have seen a saucer-like craft moving at low speed across the sky in a changing pattern. The credibility of these claims is very hard to assess as it is almost 100 years ago this incident occurred. No official claims from the then Soviet Union or today's Russia have been put forward yet. How much the KGB actually knew about all this is not known.

Most people today believe that what hit Tunguska was simply a meteorite, but the alien craft theory still has a lot of credibility. As with most of these cases that occurred long ago, we shall probably never know for sure.