0:01

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from

0:03

how Stuff Works dot Com.

0:11

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh

0:13

Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant,

0:15

there's Jerry over there, the trio known

0:18

as Stuff you Should Know the

0:21

trio. Mm hmm,

0:24

Jerry came to our live show. I

0:27

know, I'm still a little giddy

0:30

and um in amazement.

0:33

It's been a while, Jaars.

0:37

I mean, I know it's not personal, but I

0:39

just remember she used to actually go on tour with us where

0:42

she got a family before

0:46

she checked out. Yeah,

0:49

other people more than nuts. I'd also

0:51

like to point out the um fact

0:53

that Jerry is writhing and discomfort right

0:55

now, Chuck. Yeah, you're

0:58

really sticking a tour. No,

1:00

she's fine. Um,

1:02

well, it was a great show,

1:04

probably because Jerry was there and

1:07

everybody, well, I guess you would have heard it by now

1:09

because these are coming out after Christmas.

1:11

Time Warp. Let's do

1:13

the time warp dance, Chuck, and

1:16

everybody's like, gee, she

1:18

would be nice to see some of the things you're talking about.

1:21

What you can do maybe next year you

1:25

mean in person? Yeah, if you

1:27

want to do another live Christmas show, sure,

1:29

Yeah, I'm done with that. I mean, we paid

1:32

money for Christmas decorations. We

1:35

did not to feel like we need to reuse

1:37

those. YEA, hopefully

1:39

everybody has heard it already and now they're

1:41

like, yes, I know exactly what these guys are

1:44

talking about, and I'm enjoying this horribly

1:46

awkward intro diversion. It's

1:49

not awkward. Speaking of intro

1:51

divergence, Chuck, I want to mention

1:53

two things. Okay,

1:56

Um, you know, the Stuff Network

1:58

has a ton of really good shows

2:01

and there's one that I was

2:03

on recently called Behind the Bastards.

2:06

I was on a two parter. It

2:10

was it was nice. So Robert Evans

2:12

is the host, and he basically just does tons of research

2:14

about some of the worst human beings who

2:16

have ever lived, many of whom are celebrated

2:19

in some quarters, and he just kind of tears

2:21

him down to size. Did you do a show on me? No,

2:25

you're just celebrated. There's no tearing you down.

2:28

I'm sure people tear me down. I don't care. The

2:30

ones that I sat in on were,

2:32

Um, we're based on

2:35

scientific racism, history

2:37

of scientific racism and how it's been used

2:39

to justify like colonialism and all sorts

2:41

of stuff and the level of

2:44

of research this cat does is astounding.

2:47

Yeah, it's a good show. It is. It's a great

2:49

show. So, um, I was on that.

2:51

But that's a good maybe a good primer,

2:54

but really any behind the Bastards would

2:56

be a great place to start. Yeah, the show was

2:58

was a and I don't want to say some surprising

3:00

success because Robert's awesome,

3:03

but um, I think everyone was just like,

3:05

wow, look at this thing, Look

3:07

at him, go, look at him. Go. And

3:10

we've got another news show actually

3:12

from our pals that stuff to blow your mind.

3:15

Joe and Robert. Yes, they

3:17

just launched a show called Invention. I

3:20

don't remember if they went with the exclamation point

3:22

or not, but it's just awesome

3:25

because I think no, but that boy, their

3:27

album art is so cool. It's

3:29

it's really great. It's just a cool maze

3:31

where you're just waiting for a minuteur to leap

3:33

out. Yeah. And for the people that are like album

3:36

art, what are you talking about? Did they record an lp

3:39

uh little industry lingo everybody,

3:41

the little icons that you see on your

3:44

podcast players, it's called album

3:46

art in the industry for some reason. Yeah,

3:49

I still haven't figured that one out. I

3:52

think it's just a hold over from um

3:55

iTunes days, I guess,

3:57

But like what, it would be funny if they called

3:59

it like the single art,

4:05

that would be pretty funny. Actually, still never

4:07

bought a single in my life. Oh I

4:09

have. I don't remember what

4:11

they were, but I have. So

4:13

anyway, go check out Invention. You're gonna

4:16

love it. If you're a stuff to blow your mind fan,

4:18

it's Joe and Robert doing their thing but

4:20

on different topics, you're just gonna love it.

4:22

And then if you're not a stuff to blow your mind fan, well

4:25

you're welcome for introducing YouTube to

4:28

awesome podcasts at once. Yeah, those guys

4:30

are great. Ye. So uh

4:33

okay, let's talk about our own thing.

4:35

Okay, let's do our own stuff. Yeah,

4:37

what about us? So we're talking,

4:40

let's get in the way back machine, and we need to

4:42

put on our high temperature

4:45

protective suits that we used

4:47

to hang out on volcanoes sometimes. Well,

4:49

and also our low temperature protective

4:51

suits are in the back. They are we don't need them

4:53

for this one.

5:00

Well, what day are we going to We're going to

5:02

June eight, so sure,

5:05

it's probably about seventies seventy

5:07

degrees actually early in the morning.

5:10

We're going to get there around around

5:12

seven am to give ourselves some time to get

5:14

set up. But seven am

5:16

on June thirtieth, nineteen o eight in

5:19

the Russian wilderness around

5:21

the Pudka Manya

5:23

Tungusca, which means the stony

5:25

Tunguska River. Um,

5:28

it was probably about fifty

5:30

degrees, Will say, okay, yeah, which is

5:33

I mean that is like choice summertime

5:35

weather for the Siberian Plateau. Yeah,

5:37

and this place is gorgeous. So the stony

5:40

Tunguska River is a nice,

5:42

wide, meandering, slow river,

5:45

and it's name stony because the bottom is

5:47

all beautiful pebbles and it just kind

5:49

of its banks are not really well

5:51

defined. It just kind of goes into the land

5:53

and swamp land and then suddenly

5:56

the land rises upward into ridges

5:58

with huge all evergreens

6:01

everywhere. It's just gorgeous.

6:03

I love it here. You know what we call those

6:05

rocks in the South skipping

6:08

rocks. They are skipping rocks.

6:10

They call them that in Russia too. Oh

6:12

really yeah, Skivinski

6:15

rocks. Emily the other day was like, I

6:18

wish I could skip rocks, and I was like, dude,

6:20

you just gotta get the right rocks. That's

6:22

really the key. I mean, this show, there's techniques

6:25

in the wrist and everything, but it

6:27

really is the rock. Although so there

6:29

are people who can skip just about any rock

6:31

you handem well that I'm a pretty

6:33

good skipper, but you still need those good,

6:35

little, smooth, little river rocks.

6:38

It's true. It makes it way easier for sure. So

6:40

in this beautiful place, I also failed

6:42

to mention there's lots of reindeer wandering

6:45

around and they're not wild. They're actually being

6:47

herded by the Evenki

6:49

people also known as the toong goose

6:52

Um, who are basically

6:54

nomadic reindeer herders that

6:56

live in the area. Yeah, these are working deer,

6:59

right. So everything's pretty idyllic

7:02

and sweet and nice. It's the Siberian

7:04

summer. And then all of a sudden,

7:06

there's a streak

7:08

of cloud across the sky, a fireball

7:11

at the tip. It looks like about a spear,

7:14

and then all of a sudden, this is seven seventeen

7:17

am local time, all of a sudden, that fireball

7:19

disappears, and then a huge

7:22

flash of light explodes

7:24

in the sky. And that's followed

7:26

very quickly by a huge burst

7:29

of heat, and then after

7:31

that is followed by a huge

7:34

shock wave, and a

7:36

massive explosion has just taken place, the

7:39

likes of which have never been seen in

7:41

recorded human history. Yeah, where are we?

7:44

Are We dead now? No, we're

7:46

in our protective bubble. Since we're actually

7:48

visiting from another time, we're still in this time.

7:51

We're just kind of visiting as in like a movie.

7:54

I have never really quite wrapped my head around

7:56

the physics of it. But we're safe. We're

7:58

not dead now. If Jerry killed

8:01

us while we were paying attention to um,

8:03

the Tungusco blast in this life,

8:06

we would be dead. Yeah.

8:09

When you talk about explosions, um,

8:11

this was depending on where you look, Uh,

8:14

it was something in the order of a hundred to

8:16

one thousand times more powerful than

8:19

the Hiroshima atomic

8:21

bomb. I did the math. I saw two

8:23

hundred to two thousand times more powerful.

8:26

Yeah. Man, this that's the thing. When you're talking

8:28

about explosions in night. Sure

8:30

it's gonna be arranged, but the thing is, the

8:33

Hiroshima bomb was fifteen killo

8:35

tons fifteen thousand tons of

8:38

t NT yield. Yeah, it was a big

8:40

explosion, so much so and we'll

8:42

get to more details, but supposedly

8:45

you could see the light from this thing as

8:47

far away as London. Yeah,

8:50

there was a lot of worldwide effects

8:53

that happened from it. Yeah, so the

8:55

Hiroshima woman was fifteen kilo tons.

8:57

This is an estimated three to third mega

9:00

tons, million tons of t n

9:03

T. Just an astoundingly greater

9:06

explosive force, and it just

9:08

happened out of the blue, literally

9:10

out of the clear blue sky on

9:13

this day, on June nineteen

9:16

o eight. Yep, that's right.

9:18

And uh, thankfully

9:21

it's not a very populated

9:23

area, but there there are people there,

9:26

and there are you know, native

9:29

tribes people that make their

9:31

way there and they live in huts and they raised

9:33

those reindeer, and while there weren't a

9:35

lot of people there, it created Uh,

9:39

it was. It was an awful thing if you lived

9:41

in the area. Some people died of of shock

9:43

and heart attacks, reindeer

9:45

died, huts were leveled. It really

9:47

kind of wiped out the way of life for these people.

9:50

Yeah, yeah, big time, because I mean, like, if you

9:52

live in Siberia, you're spending your

9:54

summer like preparing for the winter, and

9:57

this blast like just leveled their

9:59

supplies, the deer, the reindeer

10:01

that they depend on. It like had a huge impact

10:03

on them and some people some some

10:06

people did die, although I think um,

10:08

no one died directly like being blown

10:10

to bits by the blast. It was

10:12

like, um, elderly people had heart

10:14

attacks and things like that. Yeah, And it

10:17

ended up it was a very interesting pattern

10:20

that emerged here. So these trees

10:22

were flattened out in a radial pattern

10:25

that pointed away from the center of this explosion

10:29

over an area this was about like close

10:31

to seven seventy five square miles.

10:34

Oh my god, which is a huge, huge

10:36

explosion. Uh. There

10:39

were trees that remains standing, and this is really interesting,

10:42

but there were no branches, no leaves,

10:45

no uh, no needles

10:47

or anything. They were just basically the the

10:49

stem and the trunk of the trees bear

10:52

standing straight up. Yeah. And that that

10:54

was Those trees were right in the middle

10:57

of the blast, the radio blast

10:59

pat Yeah. And the fact that they were

11:01

basically just stripped bear means

11:04

that it was a very huge but

11:07

super fast impact that

11:09

blasted all those branches off without affecting

11:12

the tree itself. Yeah. So

11:14

the this this blast, this explosion

11:17

is very hot, fast, explosion

11:20

actually lit the trees on fire from

11:22

the temperature that formed the leading edge

11:24

of the explosion, and then the shock

11:26

wave that followed that moved the air actually

11:28

put the fire out, so they were like flash

11:31

charred and then immediately extinguished.

11:35

Yeah, there's one quote here from

11:37

uh, I mean because this

11:39

was there's not a lot of direct accounts,

11:42

but they do have a few, and we'll talk about how

11:44

in a minute. But this is one hot

11:46

wind blew past us the ground

11:49

and all the huts trembled, causing the sod packing

11:52

to fall from the ceilings. The glass was blasted

11:54

out of the window frames. Scary

11:58

moment. Yeah, yeah, no, I

12:00

can't even imagine. Supposedly,

12:02

the um the Evenki people believed

12:05

that their god ug Dy who

12:07

is I think the god of either lightning

12:10

or fire or thunder one of those.

12:12

Um. I've seen different accounts of it. Um,

12:16

they that they assumed. So imagine

12:18

this like you're the only people that you're the only people

12:20

are used some reindeer hurting tribes

12:22

people who live in the area. Um,

12:24

and this happens and you have no scientific

12:27

frame of reference for it, and UM,

12:30

you believe your god came to punish

12:32

you wipe out all of your stores and all

12:34

of your reindeer and everything, and then

12:36

that's just what you had to live with. Because

12:38

you were in such a remote area. No

12:41

one knew about this. No one knew

12:43

that this happened for a very long time, actually,

12:46

Like I think some of the local papers began

12:48

to report it by the end of the summer, but

12:50

the larger world had had

12:53

no real ideal what had happened, even

12:55

though there were effects worldwide, but

12:58

no one could no one traced

13:00

it back to this this moment

13:03

in Siberia for decades,

13:05

at least a full decade I think actually

13:08

too. Yeah, And it wasn't like, uh,

13:11

it wasn't like the scientific community just descended

13:13

upon this place ever, really

13:15

like they've and we'll talk about

13:18

some of the superstars of uh,

13:20

particularly this one man that went and investigated.

13:22

But uh, I mean that's

13:24

one of the reasons that we still don't know exactly what

13:27

happened. We have a pretty good idea,

13:30

which will say for later, but there

13:32

aren't Uh. This was a singular event.

13:34

It's not the kind of thing that we could say, well,

13:36

this is like that other thing that happened right

13:39

exactly, Yes, yeah, Yeah, it's it's there's

13:41

nothing like although they they

13:44

think that there was at least one

13:46

other thing that happened like

13:48

it in the twentie century.

13:51

Um. Actually now to two things

13:53

have happened that are similar to it. So

13:55

we're kind of dancing around it a little bit. Um.

13:59

But let me tell you, let me point out one thing

14:01

that has happened. Even though this is considered

14:04

far and away the largest cosmic

14:07

I guess explosion that you that that

14:09

we we have ever recorded, there

14:11

was something else that happened in Brazil in nineteen

14:14

thirty near the Crusa.

14:16

I think I'm saying that right river um

14:20

where there was a very

14:22

similar event, huge explosion in the sky

14:25

um scared the Bejesus

14:27

out of the indigenous tribes living

14:29

there, burned a significant portion

14:32

of the Amazon for a full month. Um

14:35

And there was a Jesuit missionary

14:37

who um came along five

14:40

days after and got a lot of firsthand accounts

14:42

from that one. But they think it was similar

14:45

but much smaller than Tunguska. Yeah.

14:48

And and the mystery of this whole thing has

14:51

led to some weird theories that

14:53

will hit on later that are I mean some of them of

14:55

course, just like aliens and beasts

14:57

and things like that, which is the we

15:00

obviously no, that's not the case, but it

15:03

still remains somewhat of a mystery after

15:06

you know, a hundred plus years right um.

15:09

And then so there's one other that

15:11

this was an unrecorded history as far as

15:13

we consider recorded history typically, but

15:15

there there's evidence that this happened one

15:17

other time and then this time people

15:20

weren't so lucky. At something like about

15:22

thirty years ago around

15:25

the Dead Sea um there

15:28

was a large area

15:31

I think about five hundred square

15:34

kilometers wide, which

15:36

is a pretty significant amount of land that

15:39

was just wiped bear of

15:41

of life, including humans living

15:43

in the area at the time, and that it

15:45

was an explosion from the sky and

15:48

it wiped out one village

15:50

in particular called tall l Hammam

15:53

And get this, chuck, you know what Tall l hamm

15:55

was also called at this time thirty years

15:58

ago. Saw them

16:00

that interesting. So they think that this is where

16:02

the legend of sodom being wiped

16:05

out comes from. That it was actually

16:07

an explosion much like Tungusca. And

16:10

they found shards of um

16:13

like pottery from the time that the

16:15

outsides have been turned to glass some

16:17

of the particles inside have been gasified.

16:20

And for this to have happened without like doing

16:22

anything more to the to the

16:24

pottery means that it happened like in

16:26

an instant, and that the air temperature was suddenly

16:29

about four thousand degrees fahrenheit. And

16:32

the other thing that happened too, and this I think also

16:34

kind of bolstered the Sodom

16:36

legend, was that um a

16:39

lot of the dead sea salts were

16:41

pushed across the land, um

16:44

over this huge amount of land and took like what was

16:46

once fertile and turned it into like

16:48

dead sterile land because it was salted,

16:51

and it took something like six years for the

16:53

area to recover from that. In

16:56

that fascinating let's

16:59

take a break, because so I think you can tell him

17:01

getting a little worked up here. All

17:03

right, Well we'll be right back, everybody with more amazing

17:06

nous, alright,

17:30

dude. So from the outset, some

17:34

scientific minded types were like, well,

17:37

I'm hearing reports of this this weird event

17:40

that happened in eight in Tunguska,

17:43

the Tungusca area, and it sounds to

17:45

me a lot like a meteorite. So I'm gonna go

17:47

check out you know, the whole thing and

17:49

try to find this meteorite. Yeah,

17:52

I mean that was one of the early theories. Uh.

17:54

There were seismographs that did register some

17:56

activity, so some people thought it was an earthquake

17:59

at first. Uh. It lit

18:01

up the sky um and created

18:03

this massive dust plume. So that's

18:06

where people in like London and Germany.

18:09

Um, they said that they could read newspapers

18:11

at midnight even that far away.

18:14

So it was it was causing a little bit of commotion

18:17

in the scientific community. Uh. And

18:19

still you know, consider this as was eight.

18:22

Um. It's hard for a word to get around, so

18:25

you can hardly blame people with you know,

18:27

this event happened kind of in the middle of nowhere in

18:30

nineteen o eight, and it didn't exactly like you

18:32

know, shake the world. But

18:34

there was one man, uh and this was

18:37

uh, this was later on. His name was Leonid

18:40

Kulick, and

18:43

he was He was a scientist. He had a pretty interesting

18:45

life and career. Um. He

18:47

was born in eighteen eighty three in

18:50

Estonia, which was later

18:52

part of the Soviet Union. He studied math and

18:54

he studied science. He fought in both

18:56

World War One and World War Two, which is

18:59

really interesting because

19:02

I'm curious about the number of people who

19:05

were unfortunate enough to experience both

19:07

those wars. Yeah, there were probably a lot, not

19:09

a ton. I mean, if you do the math,

19:11

like, you would have had to have been pretty young and then pretty

19:13

old to

19:16

have fought in both of these. Um.

19:20

But in nineteen uh one

19:23

he had the task of examining meteorites

19:26

within the Soviet Union. And that's where I

19:28

got the impression that the first sort of a

19:30

scientific fire was lit under his his

19:33

butt to uh to get into studying

19:35

meteorites. Yeah, well, no, he

19:37

was already studying meteorites, and he heard

19:40

some he read some of those local

19:42

press clippings that had had been written

19:44

like ten, ten or twelve

19:46

years before, and that that

19:49

he kind of put piece together like, oh, this

19:51

sounds a lot like a meteorite impact. My

19:53

job is already to go fine meteorites

19:56

because they you know, when they strike the

19:58

ground, they have all of this rich interroal

20:00

or with them. So I'm gonna go find it and um

20:03

the government can come mind it, and that's

20:05

my job. So he if if Leonig

20:08

Kulik had not bred

20:11

some of these accounts and then traveled to the

20:13

area. Um, we

20:15

would probably not have anywhere

20:17

near the kind of um understanding

20:20

or awareness of them the

20:23

impact that

20:26

we have today. Yeah. So was

20:29

that the sinct enough for you? Yes? I think so? Okay,

20:31

good? So, like I was saying, in nineteen twenty

20:33

one, he was, uh, he was given

20:36

the task of studying meteor rights in the Soviet

20:38

Union, and so by the time seven

20:40

rolls around, he's got a pretty good

20:43

knowledge bed that he's sleeping on every

20:46

night, right, so he makes

20:48

his first uh, he makes

20:50

eventually three trips here to try and study

20:52

things. The first one unfortunately he

20:54

didn't even find the site because

20:57

there was poor mapping going on. Uh.

20:59

He was really sort of um charting

21:02

new territory, exploring this area,

21:05

and was just getting help from anyone he could. A

21:07

lot of people were scared to go there because

21:09

of you know, they thought it was a judgment

21:12

from the gods. Yeah. Yeah,

21:14

so it was, Um, it was slow

21:17

going, so that that first expedition in nine

21:21

was basically to just say, hey,

21:23

I think I know where this actually happened.

21:25

Like that's how rudimentary things were back

21:28

then. Yeah, he um, he I

21:30

think was so was it the first expedition

21:33

in seven, he didn't make it in Did he also

21:35

make it the same year or was it a different year? Did

21:39

he also make it back there the same year? Yeah?

21:41

Uh, well I saw that he went in twenty seven nine,

21:44

Okay, so what whatever time

21:47

he made it in there, he made it in there at least once

21:49

there one the first time. And

21:52

he knew like pretty much right off

21:54

the bat that he had had found

21:57

the site because all around there

21:59

were trees that were laying on their sides,

22:01

but they were all pointing in the same

22:03

direction, which you just don't see

22:06

very often, Yeah, for sure. And

22:08

then that you know, those at the center

22:10

of those trees standing straight up with with

22:12

nothing there was another pretty good indication.

22:15

Yea. So the thing the thing about Leonid

22:17

Koolik is is that he um, he

22:20

was very very frustrated. Like again, he was a meteor

22:22

hunter, like this is his his thing. Um.

22:25

So he fully expected to find

22:27

an impact crater and hopefully

22:30

the meteorite that that had all sorts

22:32

of iron or whatever or um

22:35

it bore for him to go back and

22:37

tell everybody about. But he couldn't. He could

22:39

not find this. Um. He did find

22:42

those trees standing upright at the center that indicated

22:44

that the reason they weren't blown

22:47

over was because the force

22:49

had blown directly down on top of

22:51

them. So he knew he'd

22:53

found the center, but there was no sign

22:56

of an impact crater. And he suspected

22:58

that there was a swamp

23:01

in the south just south of the um,

23:03

the place where the trees still stood, that

23:06

was hiding the impact crater

23:08

and the meteorite itself. And I think that's

23:10

kind of like what he He went to his grave

23:12

believing that he just could never find it because

23:15

the swamp had basically swallowed it up. Yeah,

23:17

which, you know, you can't blame the guy

23:19

in the in the nineteen twenties. It was

23:22

a pretty decent idea

23:24

because he and again you know he

23:26

had he had no idea that, uh

23:30

well, should we go ahead and say what people think

23:32

happened? Oh okay,

23:34

alright, let's do it. Yeah, he had no idea

23:36

that a meteor could explode

23:40

pre impact, which is basically

23:42

what most people think happened. Now. Yes,

23:45

Yeah, he died in a Nazi sorry,

23:48

a Nazi prison camp in World

23:50

War Two. Uh so he

23:52

would not have been had the benefit of that

23:54

knowledge that came later on. I think starting

23:56

in the fifties they started to really suspect that.

23:59

But at the time um when he came

24:01

back and said, this is definitely like,

24:04

look at these pictures, an explosion

24:07

unlike the kind that we are even remotely

24:09

capable of creating here on Earth. So

24:11

therefore a natural explosion took

24:14

place here. I have photographic evidence

24:16

here. I've interviewed locals

24:18

who were there, so firsthand

24:20

accounts of the experience. I've documented

24:23

all this stuff, and I cannot

24:25

find the meteorite or the impact

24:27

crater. There's this sum total

24:30

of all the info that I can provide, and

24:32

some people took that and pieced it together to

24:34

mean that, well, maybe it was a comet

24:36

impact then, because comets are largely

24:38

icy, they're rocky, and they have minerals and

24:41

stuff as well, but they're not like an

24:43

asteroid or a meteoroid where they're

24:45

they're they're made mostly of rock

24:47

or metal. They're made mostly of ice. So

24:50

when it does explode, it would just kind

24:52

of evaporate, and it might have

24:54

the same kind of impact, but it would

24:57

also not leave a crater or any

24:59

real remnants of self behind. So

25:01

for a very long time and among some quarters

25:04

that still explains the Tunguska event

25:06

that it was a common impact rather than a meteor.

25:09

Yeah, it's like that riddle, Yeah,

25:11

the one where the guys hanging and there's a puddle of water.

25:16

Q. Look, was like, there's a big puddle of water here.

25:19

Actually he thought the swamp swallowed it. But uh,

25:22

you know that didn't explain it. And you

25:25

look, I will say, like, although, like I

25:27

feel bad for the guy that he died. Uh,

25:29

well, obviously he died in prison camp. That's the worst

25:31

thing, but that he died not really getting

25:34

to the bottom of this, but he kind

25:36

of kept that drumbeat going for

25:39

people to study this, took those

25:41

great photographs, interviewed locals, and

25:43

really did a lot of the groundwork for

25:46

other people later to build on. Yeah,

25:48

like if if he hadn't taken

25:51

this expedition on himself and

25:54

really gone in and like piece together the first

25:56

bits of evidence we had fairly shortly.

25:58

I mean, what like this is ninety seven and the thing

26:00

happened in nineteen o eight, So within twenty

26:03

years he really went and documented it

26:05

had enough and for his work, we um

26:08

we would probably not have like any kind of anything

26:11

like the understanding that we have today, and who

26:13

knows, it might have been lost to history as well

26:15

too, maybe, although I doubt

26:18

it, because like you can still see evidence

26:20

of this today, which, uh,

26:22

it's pretty amazing. It is

26:25

for sure, like the fact that that that you can still

26:27

find trees laying on their sides, right or laying

26:29

yeah, on the ground. Yeah, I mean, like the forest

26:31

is grown up around it, but that stuff

26:34

is still there sometimes, you know, in some places. I

26:36

would love to see that, yeah,

26:39

of course in prison. It's just I would definitely go in

26:41

the summer, but um so

26:43

for those two weeks between late June

26:45

and mid July before winter sets

26:48

in and late July. And I

26:50

should also say, yes, I just saw

26:52

it in the way back machine. But you know what

26:54

I mean, Yeah, and this was like, uh,

26:57

it's still not a populated area, so it's

26:59

not like things have built up around

27:01

it. It's it's still largely the same as it

27:04

was back in. Yeah.

27:06

There's a little little little town called

27:10

Vona Vara, and at

27:12

the time it was basically a trading post and

27:14

it's not much bigger now. It's really

27:17

small. They have an airport which is

27:19

basically a strip of concrete that

27:21

has been cleared, and um,

27:24

you can get in and out of it, but it's it's

27:27

it's not an easy place to get to. It requires

27:29

helicopters, horseback, some

27:31

people ride reindeer in on some

27:34

of it. A lot of hiking. There's

27:36

a lot of bears, there's a lot of wolves. But

27:38

the blast site, the epicenter, is preserved

27:41

in a nature preserve in

27:43

Siberia, so you could

27:46

conceivably go study it, and people do. I think the

27:48

most recent expedition was in two thousand

27:50

thirteen. They're still trying to get to the

27:52

bottom of it. Yeah, and and Q look,

27:55

I mean he he took every available

27:57

mode of transportation he could to get there

28:01

over I mean it took him days and days and days

28:03

over these expeditions to reach it. And

28:05

he was he was a brave dude and like very

28:07

determined. So um Culic

28:10

found a couple of other things. He found

28:13

that the ground around the epicenter

28:16

was actually um scrunched

28:18

up like a rug from

28:21

the blast, which must have been astounding to see

28:23

on like a massive scale. But he also

28:25

saw that there were holes, really

28:28

like strange circular holes that

28:31

were just a few yards deep, but

28:33

up to fifty or a hundred feet in diameter,

28:37

and he had no idea what he was looking

28:39

at. He knew that it must have something to do with the explosion,

28:41

but it's just peculiar. He

28:44

hadn't seen those before. There was nothing in the literature

28:47

to explain what he was looking at, and

28:49

so some of the stuff that he documented

28:52

it was great documentation and he was a very

28:54

brave person for going and undertaking this this

28:56

expedition. But he also laid

28:59

the groundwork for basically,

29:01

um, everybody with a theory

29:04

to come along and suggest that their theory

29:06

was what explains the Tunguska event. And

29:08

like you kind of referred to earlier, some

29:10

of them are kind of out there. So let's take

29:13

a little bit of break and we're gonna come back and get

29:16

into some explanations for the Tunguska

29:18

event, including the real one. All

29:44

right, Charles, you've

29:47

heard of this before, right, So,

29:49

like, did you grow up with this was just one of the things

29:51

you're just aware of as a kid. No, it's you

29:53

know, something that became aware of with the Internet.

29:56

I think I heard about it from my time life

29:59

Unsolved Streets books, which

30:02

just God bless those things. Those

30:04

the the set of those books, Um,

30:07

the Uncle John's Bathroom Readers and

30:10

David Letterman Top ten Lists

30:12

from the nineties book. Um,

30:15

probably are the three things that shaped my brain

30:18

more than anything else. Yeah. Yeah,

30:21

it says a lot Mad Magazine

30:23

to you. Oh yeah, I can't forget Mad.

30:25

Sorry, thank you for for for saving

30:27

me on that. Yeah. Uh So here's

30:31

some of the theories that have kind of come and

30:33

gone over the years. Uh. As

30:36

we said that Q looks was that it was

30:38

this meteor was swallowed up by the swamp south

30:41

of the impact zone. Other

30:44

people suggested that it was like

30:47

Chico in Italy and

30:50

that they were just off by their

30:52

their mapping skills were poor, and

30:55

so this was the actual impact creator

30:57

and is now a lake. But now

31:00

we think that they just didn't draw maps well back

31:02

then because that wasn't on previous maps,

31:05

and everyone's like, but now it's here, so that's what it

31:07

is, right right? Yeah? But there, Yeah,

31:09

like you're saying, I think is it was just so remote and people

31:11

weren't drawing maps of it that it just hadn't

31:13

been bothered to be put on exactly,

31:15

which I totally believe. Um, I

31:18

think the comment, I mean are there people that still

31:20

believe it was a comment? Yeah,

31:24

Um, well, let me explain why

31:26

there. There have been surveys of the site

31:29

that UM are looking

31:31

for traces of things that would be telltale

31:33

signs that it was definitely a

31:35

meteor um. Like, there

31:38

are different kinds of meteors, but

31:40

most meteors are either really

31:43

stony rocky that it's basically

31:45

like a chunk of earth, or

31:48

it's like super metallic it's

31:50

basically like a big ball of metal or whatever.

31:53

And there's like different It's a spectrum, right, there's

31:55

like you can fall anywhere in between those

31:57

totally rocky and totally metallic um.

32:01

But the the stuff aboard

32:03

are going to be basically the same things. It's

32:05

just the company the concentration of them.

32:08

But one thing that you would find on like

32:10

a meteorite is something

32:13

like a ridium or osmium. There

32:15

are things you would find in Earth, but you have to go to the

32:17

center of the Earth to find them. Uh, they're

32:19

not on the surface. So if you find those things on the

32:21

surface of Earth, it's strongly suggests

32:24

that a meteorite impacted

32:26

Earth. Well, they've found not not

32:29

much osmium or a ridium

32:32

around the Tunguskas site. So they

32:34

think that actually is kind

32:36

of a thing that it

32:39

suggests that maybe actually it was a comet,

32:41

because a comet would have those things, but

32:43

just not in high concentration, because it would mostly

32:45

be a big ball of ice. So

32:48

that's kind of kept the comet thing alive. Is recently

32:51

is just the last few years. Yeah, Well, they

32:53

did surveys in the fifties and they did find

32:55

uh, space dust is

32:58

probably the best way to say it. They did. It's

33:00

true. Yeah, so, uh they

33:03

found you know what was extraterrestrial

33:06

rock dust. Uh, they found it

33:08

in the area, They found it in the soil. Uh.

33:11

And again it does match the date of the event

33:14

um. So that

33:16

to me means that the leading

33:18

theory is probably correct, which is that a

33:21

meteor exploded about three miles

33:23

above land um, which

33:26

basically just blew it to dust and

33:29

that's why there aren't huge, huge chunks

33:31

of rock laying everywhere. Yeah. So

33:33

that's that's the predominant theory

33:36

right now, is that it was a meteor um

33:38

that blew up, like you said, I think something

33:41

like half a dozen miles

33:43

over over the surface of the Earth in

33:46

the atmosphere, and it blew up

33:48

so with such force that not only

33:50

did it, you know, cause

33:53

the ground to to buckle and bend and

33:55

turn into like a rug and blow eighty

33:57

million trees down over a couple

34:00

a hundred square miles, it also just blew

34:02

itself and every any evidence

34:04

of itself just into smith reeds, into dust,

34:07

and so that dust layer is the only remnants

34:10

of it left. Um. But the

34:13

problem is that they didn't know how that could

34:15

happen. Like that's if you put all

34:17

the evidence together, that's the picture it painted.

34:20

But at the time, and until very recently,

34:22

science was like, we don't know how something like

34:24

that would happen. It seems like that is what

34:26

happened, but how would that even happen? Yeah,

34:29

and it explains the fireball

34:31

in the sky, because that's what you would expect to see

34:34

when a meteor is is trucking towards the earth.

34:37

Uh. This thing was about a hundred and twenty feet

34:39

or larger in diameter, was going about

34:41

thirty three thousand miles an hour. Uh,

34:44

and it was hot, like super

34:47

super hot because of friction. Right.

34:50

So the thing this this huge rock,

34:52

and they got all those numbers just basically reverse

34:55

engineering the force of the explosion.

34:57

Right, So that rock that's traveling

34:59

so fast, what did you say, like thirty four thousand miles

35:01

an hour or something like that. That's at thirty

35:04

three but give or take a thousand miles, all right, who

35:06

cares? At that point? Right when it hits

35:08

the atmosphere, it's suddenly met with that friction

35:11

and gravity and drag and everything, and

35:13

that these forces acting on it all of a sudden

35:15

just destabilize it. And that the

35:18

the pressure that's building up at the front of

35:20

this huge rock is different by

35:23

so much to the pressure behind it that

35:25

the differential just destabilizes

35:28

this rock. And because it's traveling

35:30

so fast and has so much energy and there's so much

35:32

heat associated with it, it doesn't just break

35:35

up. It blows up. Yeah.

35:37

What I'm surprised about it is that this hasn't

35:40

happened more, and it must

35:42

just be a very specific

35:45

combination of size and speed

35:48

and heat. But

35:50

I'm surprised that that doesn't

35:52

happen more. That combination. Well,

35:55

some people are worried that it could

35:57

happen more like one of the predictions

36:00

I saw as that Tungusca like event we

36:03

could expect it to happen over Earth maybe

36:05

once every hundred to three hundred years. Yeah,

36:07

but we haven't seen that. That hasn't played out right.

36:09

No, But um, some somebody

36:12

who wrote an article I read pointed out

36:14

like the like, there's not some some schedule

36:17

that that that rocks follow

36:20

when they're coming into Earth's atmosphere.

36:22

This is not how things work. So, um,

36:24

we hope it's like that, but it's it's probably

36:27

much less predictable than that. And we

36:29

actually did a survey called UM Projects

36:32

Space Guard I think, where

36:34

we surveyed all of the near Earth rocks,

36:37

the big ones, and we found

36:39

that none of the big ones are probably going to come near

36:41

us anytime soon. But we found also

36:43

that we had trouble seeing

36:46

the small ones, and the small ones could

36:48

still create like a Tunguska event, which

36:51

I mean, like you said, it happened over

36:53

a pretty depopulated area and it's

36:55

still affected humans. If it happened

36:58

over a like a city, a major

37:00

city, it would be just lights out

37:02

for that that entire city. So

37:05

the chances are pretty low that it would happen

37:07

over a populated area just by

37:09

you know, virtue of the fact that we tend

37:12

to populate in in dense

37:14

clusters while leaving also huge

37:17

portions of the Earth, especially the oceans,

37:19

unpopulated. Where but

37:22

if it did happen over over a

37:24

populated area, it would be really really bad.

37:27

Yeah. I mean they make movies about, like fictional

37:29

movies about that stuff, right exactly.

37:33

So hopefully it doesn't happen, but it could, is

37:35

the point. Yes, And

37:38

I always wonder, like, man, I'm surprised

37:40

that it hasn't happened over

37:43

like a big city, But like you said

37:45

that, it's we always think like

37:47

others just people everywhere, but that's that's

37:49

not the case. Uh,

37:51

well, like how our settlements

37:54

are. Yeah, like when you think about how large

37:56

the Earth is compared to where the

37:58

people are, it's we're we're

38:01

we're we're not everywhere.

38:04

Water is everywhere, right, that's

38:06

true. So there there. I

38:08

think in two thousand thirteen, Chuck, there was the Cheliabinsk

38:12

meteor. Do you remember that over

38:15

Russia? M M. I don't remember that.

38:17

There was a like it was very well

38:19

documented because everybody has a video

38:22

tape camera on their cell phone these

38:24

days, and um, there

38:27

was a meteor that that basically did the same

38:29

thing into Tunguska, except it was far, far

38:31

smaller. It was something like, um,

38:34

two thousand times more powerful than than

38:37

Hiroshima. Now that doesn't sound right,

38:40

thirty times more powerful. I'm sorry. Well,

38:42

Tunguska was up to two thousand times

38:44

more powerful. But it like blew the

38:46

windows out of places, that knocked people

38:48

down, and it really caught people's attention,

38:51

saying like, hey, everybody, this is a real

38:53

thing that that that like this

38:55

can happen, and if a huge one

38:57

happens over a population center, then we will

39:00

be in trouble. So I think it kind of caught the attention

39:02

of the scientific community that like, this

39:04

is something we need to keep an eye on. Literally,

39:07

Yeah for sure, Yeah, hopefully

39:10

we will. I'm glad

39:12

it's not up to me. Ah,

39:16

you got anything else? I got nothing else? All

39:18

right, Well, if you want to know more about the Tunguska

39:21

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