Tunguska meteorite and its younger brothers

... Suddenly, in the north, the sky bifurcated, and a fire appeared in it wide and high above the forest, which covered the entire northern part of the sky. At that moment I felt so hot, as if a shirt had caught fire on me. I wanted to tear and throw off my shirt, but the sky slammed shut, and there was a strong blow. I was thrown from the porch by three fathoms. After the blow, there was such a knock, as if stones had fallen from the sky or shot from guns, the earth was trembling, and when I lay on the ground I pressed my head, fearing that the stones would not break my head. At that moment, when the sky opened, a hot wind swept from the north, like a cannon, which left tracks in the form of tracks on the ground. Then it turned out that many of the glasses in the windows were broken out, and the iron tab for the door lock broke at the barn ...

Thus began the morning of July 17 (old style) in 1908 for residents of the Vanavara trading post in the area of ​​Podkamennaya Tunguska. A second sun flashed in the sky, which in the next instant became a thousand suns! A flash of light blinded and seared with heat, and the next moment a terrible explosion of unprecedented power shook the taiga, dumping the forest on a vast area, raising the plague of Evenks into the air. Evenki lost a lot of deer - some died from the explosion and burned in fire, others fled in horror in the taiga and probably also died. And the blast wave flew further and twice circled the globe, having been noted on the atmospheric pressure records of many weather stations around the world. And in front of her another wave raced - seismic. The Earth’s magnetic field also shuddered and the microscopic dust that formed during the explosion and appeared in the upper atmosphere turned the next few nights into “white nights”, illuminated by unusual bright red dawns, in the light of which a newspaper could be read freely in London. And after them came the brightest silver clouds.

Sandpiper Trail

Nowadays, if they notice the flight of a more or less large car, which could fly to the ground, almost immediately a search for a fallen meteorite is organized. Then they talked about the car and the phenomena it caused, made a noise and ... forgot.

In 1912, in one of the expeditions in the Urals, Academician V.I. Vernadsky hired a local resident, assistant forester, exile Leonid Alekseevich Kulik. Seeing the prospect in him, Vernadsky obtained permission for him to study in St. Petersburg. And in 1913, Kulik, already a student at St. Petersburg University, became an employee of the Mineralogical Museum of the Academy.

One of Kulik’s tasks was the registration and systematization of information about meteorite falls that entered the Academy of Sciences. At that time, she was going through hard times, and she could only dream of organizing an expedition to find them. This dream was destined to be fulfilled only after the revolution - in 1921, on the initiative of Vernadsky, a meteorite department was established, and Kulik managed to do the incredible - to break through to Lunacharsky, interest him and convince him of the need to allocate finances to organize an expedition to replenish the meteorite collection and checking the information that was previously received. Kulik received several million from the People’s Commissariat for Education - still full-fledged, and not what they became a little later: A

dream came true, I became a millionaire,
I own a myriad of zeros ...

And besides these millions - special cars, equipment and food.

Everyone knows about jokes about flying a pack of Belomor. Kulik’s first expedition followed ... a piece of a tear-off calendar. There was a message in this leaflet that the passengers of the train passing the Filimonovo junction near Kansk saw a giant meteorite fall, the explosion of which frightened the driver, forcing him to stop the train. It was impossible to go past this, so this detachment became one of the key points on the path of the Kulik expedition. On the spot it turned out that the car was indeed observed, but it fell somewhere far north. In search of the place of the fall, Kulik traveled all over the Yenisei province, collecting eyewitness reports that they saw and heard and plotting the directions indicated by them. They converged far to the north, in the area of ​​the Podkamennaya Tunguska.

Meanwhile, the time and money allotted for the expedition were over, and the special wagon had to be returned to the People’s Commissariat of Railways. In May 1922, the expedition returned, making a journey of twenty thousand kilometers and with a "catch" in the form of a dozen meteorites to the collection of the Academy of Sciences. And to the data collected by Kulik, information was added about a strange earthquake, the epicenter of which was located in the upper Podkamennaya Tunguska, and the focus was not deep in the bowels of the Earth, but directly on the surface, followed by the arrival of an air wave recorded on the barograph tape. And after them, scientists heard rumors about an unprecedented explosion that shook the Evenks in the same regions, about a giant forest fall of 700 square kilometers.

It was not possible to organize a new expedition - there were no funds, none of the officials this time took its tasks seriously. Only in 1926, in February, did it take place - it consisted of only two people - Kulik and his assistant Alexander Emilievich Gulikh, with whom he had served in the army before the First World War. This time, they had neither a personal carriage, nor assistance mandates, and they literally got under their own power. To Taishet by train, and then horses became the only mode of transport. So we got to Vanavara.
Now they were separated from the cherished place 80 kilometers of virgin snow and ... again, opposition - this time the Evenks. The strange Russian, aspiring to an enchanted place, they really did not like. Even when one of the Evenks agreed to be a guide, he tried his best to slow down the path that he took instead of a couple of days - two weeks. And finally, Kulik and Gulich saw the whole picture of destruction.

Walking here was very dangerous, especially in the first half of the day when the weather was windy. At that time, twenty-meter dead giants, which had rotted at the roots and rotted at the roots, fell on the ground every now and then. It was necessary to keep an eye on dead peaks in order to have time to bounce to the side, and at the same time, do not forget to look at your feet, as the area was teeming with poisonous snakes

So Kulik describes the epicenter of the disaster, where there were dead trees with torn branches and trunks burnt along the entire length. And around the trees were stacked in radii - peaks from the center of the basin. And then, in the basin, there were many funnels. Kulik had no doubt that this was the place where the meteorite fell. But there was no time left for his search - the food was running out, it was necessary to return to Vanavara, and then to Leningrad.

Kulik was sure - he was a stone's throw from the opening. But the scientists of the Academy of Sciences did not share his confidence. The funnels seemed familiar to them and not connected with any meteorites - such are formed when the permafrost thaws. And the forest could burn without any meteorite. Maybe there was no meteorite?

Kulik nevertheless "struck" the expedition. But she brought no result. He did not find any traces of the meteorite. He did not find it in the next expedition, when in the crater, which he considered an unconditional meteorite crater, instead of a meteorite was found ... an old stump. This find clearly testified that the funnel had nothing to do with the meteorite, but Kulik ... ignored it. Instead of leaving the funnel and acting in accordance with the results, he simply banned his assistant, astronomer and meteorite specialist E.L. Krinov, photograph the stump.

Kulik was wrong. And he was unable to admit his mistake. And subsequently, throughout the expedition, he clung stubbornly to this and several funnels, continuing fruitless attempts to clear and drill them (and drilled manually), which made senseless resources, the forces of him and other expedition members, forbidding them to conduct research anywhere none other than these funnels. He did not allow Krinov to examine the swamp, where he believed a meteorite could have fallen, ignored Yankovsky’s discovery of a stone similar to a meteorite (which he still could not be found). All this, of course, did not lead to anything good. As a result of hard work, people fell ill, frostbite (Krinov had their toe amputated), Krinov left, quarreling with Kulik ... To top it off, a drill hut burned down. The expedition broke up. And ultimately she returned to Leningrad, it seemed, without a significant result - apart from yet another confirmation of the fact that the terrible catastrophe over Podkamennaya Tunguska nevertheless took place in 1908, and was not “an ordinary forest fire and cyclone,” as some skeptics claimed. But now we understand that despite all the failures, mistakes and misconceptions, the lion's share of what is known about the Tunguska diva is the results of Kulik’s expeditions. The scale and nature of the destruction were estimated and mapped, many samples were collected (then damaged by storage at KMET at the time when fragments of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite were sawed and polished there), the nature of the injuries, radiation burns on the trees was described in detail. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. without a meaningful result - apart from yet another confirmation of the fact that the terrible catastrophe over Podkamennaya Tunguska nevertheless took place in 1908, and was not “an ordinary forest fire and cyclone,” as some skeptics have stated. But now we understand that despite all the failures, mistakes and misconceptions, the lion's share of what is known about the Tunguska diva is the results of Kulik’s expeditions. The scale and nature of the destruction were estimated and mapped, many samples were collected (then damaged by storage at KMET at the time when fragments of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite were sawed and polished there), the nature of the injuries, radiation burns on the trees was described in detail. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. without a meaningful result - apart from yet another confirmation of the fact that the terrible catastrophe over Podkamennaya Tunguska nevertheless took place in 1908, and was not “an ordinary forest fire and cyclone,” as some skeptics have stated. But now we understand that despite all the failures, mistakes and misconceptions, the lion's share of what is known about the Tunguska diva is the results of Kulik’s expeditions. The scale and nature of the destruction were estimated and mapped, many samples were collected (then damaged by storage at KMET at the time when fragments of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite were sawed and polished there), the nature of the injuries, radiation burns on the trees was described in detail. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. that a terrible catastrophe over the Podkamennaya Tunguska nevertheless took place in 1908, and was not “an ordinary forest fire and cyclone,” as some skeptics claimed. But now we understand that despite all the failures, mistakes and misconceptions, the lion's share of what is known about the Tunguska diva is the results of Kulik’s expeditions. The scale and nature of the destruction were estimated and mapped, many samples were collected (then damaged by storage at KMET at the time when fragments of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite were sawed and polished there), the nature of the injuries, radiation burns on the trees was described in detail. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. that a terrible catastrophe over the Podkamennaya Tunguska nevertheless took place in 1908, and was not “an ordinary forest fire and cyclone,” as some skeptics claimed. But now we understand that despite all the failures, mistakes and misconceptions, the lion's share of what is known about the Tunguska diva is the results of Kulik’s expeditions. The scale and nature of the destruction were estimated and mapped, many samples were collected (then damaged by storage at KMET at the time when fragments of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite were sawed and polished there), the nature of the injuries, radiation burns on the trees was described in detail. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. mistakes and errors, the lion's share of what is known about the Tunguska diva - these are the results of Kulik's expeditions. The scale and nature of the destruction were estimated and mapped, many samples were collected (then damaged by storage at KMET at the time when fragments of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite were sawed and polished there), the nature of the injuries, radiation burns on the trees was described in detail. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. mistakes and errors, the lion's share of what is known about the Tunguska diva - these are the results of Kulik's expeditions. The scale and nature of the destruction were estimated and mapped, many samples were collected (then damaged by storage at KMET at the time when fragments of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite were sawed and polished there), the nature of the injuries, radiation burns on the trees was described in detail. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. radiation burns on trees. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place. radiation burns on trees. And it was also possible to carry out rather extensive magnetic measurements, which showed: there are no large magnetic masses in this place.

Kulik’s dream of finding the Tunguska meteorite was not destined to come true. He only once again returned to the Podkamennaya Tunguska - when under his leadership aerial photography of part of the fall area was carried out, which confirmed the radial nature of the fall of the forest. The new expedition planned in 1940 did not take place, and in 41, Kulik volunteered for the front, was captured and died of typhus there, and they forgot about the meteorite for a long time. In 1947, it was overshadowed by another "meteorite of the century" - Sikhote-Alinsky. However, in 1949 E.L. Krinov published a monograph summarizing the research conducted during the expeditions of Kulik.

Versions and Fantasies

The first to remember the Tunguska diva was the science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev, who noticed the unusual similarity between the very strange earthquake recorded at the Irkutsk Observatory and the seismic waves that were recorded after the "second gift from the Americans of Japan" - the explosion in Nagasaki.

If a scientist neat and cautious in judgments were in place of Kazantsev, he would draw the correct conclusion: the explosion did not occur when it hit the surface, but was air, and he would stop for a while. But Kazantsev was a science fiction writer and fantasy caught him and carried him. This is what happened with the Tunguska meteorite: there was no meteorite, but there was an alien ship that exploded when it approached the Earth. And this explosion was nuclear. And everything becomes clear: and why the careful search for the meteorite did not give any result - the explosion turned into plasma and scattered into space any possible remains and fragments of the ship, and what caused this character of the forest fall, and where did those strange atmospheric phenomena that came from the explosion.

This hypothesis separated from its carrier - a science fiction story, like a satellite from a rocket, and went on an independent flight. She found many supporters who began to consider her as a very serious hypothesis. Especially a lot of them became after the flight of Gagarin.

There were other hypotheses - one more original than the other. Some even denied the cosmic origin of the explosion - for example, it occurred in a giant cloud of a gas-air mixture ignited by lightning. Or it was an explosion of giant ball lightning. In others, a space object was present, but had an exotic nature - a solar plasmoid, a bunch of antimatter, a laser beam from aliens from the 61st Swan, and even a black hole.
Or how is it for you: these are all the experiments of Nikola Tesla with its towers!

The hypothesis, in a humorous form described by the Strugatsky in "Monday ..." about the ship of aliens moving in time in the opposite direction - contraceptives, was quite seriously expressed.


The general direction was correctly set by Kazantsev's assumptions: no one really doubted that the explosion had occurred at high altitude. This was evidenced by the absence of a crater and a standing forest at the epicenter. But the fantastic part played a bad joke with the researchers of the Tunguska meteorite: fictional data on Evenks supposedly ill with radiation sickness, about the high level of radioactivity in these places, about the mushroom cloud - are still found in quite serious sources.

Search continues

Meanwhile, the expeditions resumed at the end of the fifties (the expedition led by K.P. Florensky in 1958, the Integrated Amateur Expedition of 1959, etc.) to Podkamennaya Tunguska confirmed the complete absence of any traces of meteorite material - even in microscopic form. Previously, a large number of iron-nickel particles of meteorite origin were found in Kulik's samples, from which it was concluded that the meteorite was iron. However, all samples of the magnetic fraction, which were analyzed immediately on the spot, invariably showed the absence of nickel - that is, they had nothing to do with the space substance (nickel in meteorites is always a satellite of iron). There was no meteorite iron in the samples left by Kulik at the capture on Khushma. The reason for this paradox was understood later. These samples were stored in CMET, in the same place, where there were many iron meteorites, where they were sawed, polished, polished, poisoned and tormented by all possible means. After the fall of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite, the fragments of which collected tens of tons, and all of them had to be characterized and described most intensively. Under these conditions, it was difficult to avoid contamination of the samples with an extraneous meteorite.

All this indicated that the Tunguska body was not an iron meteorite. Even if it had exploded in the air and completely evaporated, it would have settled on the ground with a mass of magnetite and hematite balls and dust particles of micron and submicron sizes. And these balls would inevitably contain several percent nickel.


Also, maps of forest fall over its entire area, which far exceeded the part explored by Kulik's expeditions, were constructed in detail. It became clear that the contour of the fall resembles the shape of a butterfly, the axis of symmetry of which coincides or is close to the direction of the probable trajectory of the car. Other effects were mapped: radiation burns, forest fire borders. Based on these data, it was possible to estimate the scale of energy release - 10 ¹⁷ J.
In addition to everything else, I had to deal with the “legacy” of Kazantsev. For this, samples were taken for measurements of radioactivity - and these measurements yielded a negative result. They did not find radioactivity in the Evenki skeletons raised from the graves, and no mention of anything similar to radiation sickness in medical archives.

The expeditions continued. The expeditions of the Academy of Sciences and KSE regularly went to the place of the Tunguska catastrophe. A complex amateur expedition, which had turned from that time from an amateur hobby of enthusiastic people into a serious scientific team, was able to do what neither Kulik nor Florensky managed to do - to find the substance of the Tunguska meteorite! For this, sphagnum was applied. It is characterized by slow and very stable growth rate and its ability to capture solid particles from the environment during growth. These particles are fixed and then transferred to peat, a layer of which grows in the Podkamennaya Tunguska basin at a rate of 2 mm per year. Knowing this speed (if necessary, it can be clarified, for example, by lead-210, or by botanical signs of a disaster), a layer of a certain age can be found in the peat column.

For many years, an cosmochemical survey was conducted with enviable persistence, consisting in the selection of sphagnum columns throughout the region with the subsequent release of balls of cosmic matter from each of the layers of the columns. From 1963 to 1977, 500 of these columns were selected. It was found that, along the entire profile of the column, single silicate and magnetite balls are observed associated with the precipitation of meteors burnt in the upper atmosphere. However, in a thin layer at a depth of 27-40 cm, the number of balls jumped sharply to thousands! These balls were mostly silicate. The richest balls were located in a strip along the flight path of the Tunguska body, and also formed a train directed northwest of the epicenter.

Not only in the form of silicate balls was cosmic matter found. It manifested itself in anomalies in the chemical and isotopic composition of the catastrophic layer. In particular, this layer was sharply enriched with carbon-14, associated not with balls, but with acute-angle silicate fragments. This would be an argument in favor of the hypothesis of a nuclear explosion (in nuclear explosions, neutrons turn atmospheric nitrogen-14 into carbon-14), but the origin of this radiocarbon is different: the spallation reaction. A high-energy cosmic-ray particle can split the core of silicon-32, and one of the fragments is carbon-14, which remains where it was - in place of silicon in the crystal lattice. And this indicator proved the cosmic origin of not only balls, but also many acute-angled particles, and also made it possible to determine the total mass of silicate substance, since the balls as it turned out, they were only an insignificant part of it, including those submicroscopic particles that were not preserved in peat or were not extracted from it by conventional methods. The total amount of silicate substance deposited after the explosion was estimated at 4000 tons.

On the contrary, in the organic fraction of the catastrophic layer, the carbon-14 content is reduced. It can be explained by the drift of a large amount of carbon of non-biological, extraterrestrial origin.

Other geochemical anomalies were also found at the site of the fall. However, their interpretation is complicated by the fact that the shell fell into the funnel. The fact is that the depression of the Southern Swamp, which Kulik and some subsequent researchers stubbornly accepted as a possible meteorite crater, is a vent of a paleovolcano, and an anomaly of this volcano is superimposed on the anomaly of the Tunguska meteorite. Nevertheless, a thorough analysis of the data allowed us to separate them from each other, which allowed us to make an important conclusion: the chemical composition of the space substance of the catastrophic layer resembles carbonaceous chondrites of type I, but is enriched in comparison with volatile elements - alkali metals, bromine, lead, zinc, tin, molybdenum, and vice versa - is depleted in iron, nickel and cobalt. A similar elemental composition was determined from the spectra of meteors of the Draconid stream,

New hypotheses

Kazantsev’s main conclusion was confirmed by that series of expeditions: the explosion occurred in the air. And for his similarity with nuclear explosions, he did not need its nuclear nature at all - energy release of a “nuclear” scale was enough.

In my previous article, I mentioned the work of K. P. Stanyukovich and V. V. Fedynsky “On the destructive effect of meteorite impacts,” where it was shown that when a meteoroid, with speeds above several kilometers per second, collides with the surface of the planet, the projectile instantly and target rocks in a state of very hot and very compressed steam, followed by an explosion forming a crater. The energy source for this explosion is only the kinetic energy of the meteoroid. And this kinetic energy, even with a mass of the incident body of several tons and a speed of 50 km / s, is comparable to the energy release of a small nuclear explosion.

However, there was no crater on Podkamennaya Tunguska. The explosion was in the air. What caused it?
Unlike science fiction writers and inventors of homegrown hypotheses, scientists did not need to look for a source of explosion energy. But it was necessary to find a mechanism that makes the meteoroid in the air instantly, explosively slow down. Such a mechanism was known at that time - the progressive fragmentation of the body by the oncoming air stream. At the same time, both the drag and the discontinuous forces on each of the fragments increase in an avalanche, which should ultimately lead to the transformation of the meteoroid into a swarm of particles, which is immediately braked, releasing kinetic energy in the form of heat. This effect was already a little familiar to scientists on the destruction of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite, where it did not go so far. Apparently, the Tunguska body was much less durable and its fragmentation was much more intense than that of the iron Sikhote-Alin.

Discarding fantastic hypotheses, it was necessary to answer a bunch of questions. What was the Tunguska body? Carbon Chondritis? The icy core of a comet? A loose "snowball" with a very low density? What was the mechanism of explosive destruction and why did the shock wave form a butterfly outline? What was the exact trajectory of the Tunguska body upon entering the atmosphere and its orbit?

The issue with the butterfly was solved simply - by experiment. Researchers used the Wood method - to understand how the bomb was built and where it was planted, which blew up the old Buick, you need to go to a car dump with dynamite and detonate several old Buicks. Similarly, M. A. Tsikulin and I. T. Zotkin acted, who decided to simulate the simultaneous effect of the explosion wave and the ballistic wave on the model of the forest, which they made from matches. And they created shock waves with explosives. A ballistic wave from a Tunguska body flying at hypersonic speed was simulated by a shock wave from a detonation cord initiated from one of the ends (in this case, a detonation wave propagates along the cord, traveling along the cord at a speed of several kilometers per second, and emerging into the air as a shock cone, resembling Mach cone) and at the end of the cord there was a charge of TNT, which gave a spherical blast wave in the final. And with a certain tilt of the cord over the forest from matches, the same figure turned out in the form of a butterfly and the “dead forest" from standing matches in the epicenter. One riddle has become less. Then, of course, we used a computer and simulated the process of tree felling by the action of two shock waves - and this allowed us to quantify the energy of the explosion and the slope of the trajectory by the shape of the collapse.
Finding and analysis of the substance of the Tunguska body made it possible not to make unsubstantiated assumptions about the nature of the body, but to make a reasonable assumption about its cometary nature, which has by now become almost universally accepted. The popular model of “loose snow” at one point was rejected - it did not correspond to the data on the nature of cometary nuclei and such a “snowball” would have collapsed too early — already in the stratosphere, if it could even “survive” before a collision with the Earth’s atmosphere.

The explosive destruction mechanism also could not resist the theoretical physicists. And again, their calculations pointed to the cometary nucleus, which entered the atmosphere at a speed of 30 km / s.
So, is there no longer any secret of the Tunguska meteorite? No, he still poses many riddles. There are still disputes over its trajectory - different observations and calculations contradict each other (this can partially be explained by the possible complex shape of the cometary nucleus, because of which this nucleus could “maneuver”, flying first along a gentle trajectory, and then “pecking” "At an angle of 40 °, corresponding to the nature of the collapse). But there are strange things. For example, the nature of the sharp increase in the growth of surviving trees in the disaster zone is incomprehensible. The reason for the abnormally increased frequency of mutations is unclear - the last argument for which, like a straw, adherents of the hypothesis of a nuclear or annihilation explosion clung.

Younger brothers of the Tunguska meteorite

And the most important discovery of recent times is that the Tunguska meteorite, in general, is not such a unique phenomenon. Similar fireballs, the path of which ends in a powerful explosion, have been observed repeatedly during the “post-Tunguska” time.

This was helped by the so-called Prairie Fireball Observation Network in the USA, which showed that “Tunguska meteorites” of various calibers fall almost every year, without producing such a resonance just because their explosion occurs too high or outside populated areas. Of course, fragments of the cometary substance of the “Tunguska caliber” are rare, and those “younger brothers” that fall annually are much smaller and produce an incomparable effect.
However, the Vitim car had an effect very similar to the Tunguska one (only much smaller) - a similar fall of the forest in the shape of a “butterfly”, despite the very modest size and weight of the original body. And the recent Chelyabinsk meteorite, although it is more likely the “cousin” of Tungusky - it was not the nucleus of a comet and after the explosion we can hold its non-vaporized remnants in our hands - it exploded and led to rather serious consequences. And not surprisingly - the strength of his explosion was about half a megaton. There was a Borovsky car in 1934, which also exploded over the Kaluga region with great force. So fireballs ending their journey with powerful, "nuclear" scale explosions are not a rare exception. Perhaps they are more frequent than those that end in the fall of meteorites.
A trace similar to the Tunguska "butterfly" was found on ... Mars. True, the scale of this trace is incommensurably larger. This is the North Ocean, which, according to some scientists, was formed during a gigantic air blast, the shock wave from which washed the crust of Mars, erasing the ancient relief elements from it. But for this, Mars had to have a powerful and extended atmosphere. Similar assumptions exist regarding the heart of Pluto. However, these are marginal hypotheses.

* * *

The problem of the Tunguska meteorite has worried and continues to worry for several generations of researchers, enthusiasts and just lovers of everything mysterious and unknown. But scientific hypotheses and research results should be distinguished from the thick, like deposits on the ocean floor, sediment layer of fantastic fabrications. Its presence should always be remembered by those who decided to dive into this topic.

At the CPDV, a painting by Sergei Krasnov “Tunguska meteorite”. Illustration with a butterfly from a book: V. Bronshten Meteors, meteorites, meteoroids. M .: Science. 1987. Drawing with the unfortunate Photonchik from "Monday" - Evgeny Migunov.