On the morning of June 30, 1908, something exploded over the Siberian taiga with a force of 10 to 15 megatons—about a thousand Hiroshimas. It flattened 80 million trees across 830 square miles, knocked people off their feet 40 miles away, and registered on seismographs across Eurasia. For nights afterward, the sky over Europe glowed bright enough to read by at midnight.

No crater was ever found.

The first scientific expedition didn’t arrive until 1927. Leonid Kulik expected a crater and meteorite fragments. Instead he found trees flattened in a butterfly pattern radiating from a center point—where the trees still stood upright, stripped of their branches. That pattern means an airburst: the explosion happened in the sky, not on the ground.

The accepted explanation: a stony asteroid or comet fragment, 50 to 80 meters across, disintegrated explosively at 5 to 10 kilometers altitude. Computer models of airbursts match the damage pattern convincingly. An icy comet nucleus would explain why no fragments were recovered—it vaporized.

The alternatives have included a miniature black hole, an antimatter event, and Tesla’s directed-energy weapon. That last one has no supporting evidence whatsoever. I’ll note that plainly and then admit I link Tunguska to Tesla anyway in the Area 51 series—along with a tale about what the Russians really found there. That’s the difference between fiction and history: in fiction, I get to pick.

The sobering part is real. The object was too small to detect until it arrived. Over a city, it kills millions. The taiga absorbed what civilization could not have survived.

One of 100 entries in The Little Black Book of Ancient Mysteries. https://amzn.to/4pSLpH6