SUN STREAK PROJECT 0227 SESSION NUMBER: 01 CRV VIEWER: 052

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060008-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 1, 1998
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: March 2, 1990
• Content Type: REQ

Approved For Release 2001103/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R0012000600Q8
SECRET / NOFFORN
PROJEE?" #" SUN STREAK
NAE?N:cNB NOTICE: INTELLIGENCE SOURCES AND METHODS INVOLVED
F'F(JJFE1? T NUN[3ER 0227 (Trig)
i:;:"f : OF SE S8:I: ON ? 02 MAR 90
Ek:>S I UN NUMBER:
:L
DATE OF' REPORT-
4")5 MAR 901
t:i. ? (j907 N D. 0922
].. (;/Si"t3) MISSION: To describe the target site (They air-- explosion in
L'?!nc~t..t~;L::a, ii.iir.:r i.a) in Stage 2 terminci].ogy.
"S/01,D) ~. ...
,.iIL:IP.im.R 1?ASV:ING: Encrypted coordinates not :mot e wr7 ?.ar?rae3??
number" was used. No other cueing given.
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COMMENT `a: No -'t'tYsa.Cal I. r1c::Lc~YieriG::a.ea . 052 ck'> E?ci the site
quickly in Stage 1 and proceeded through Stage '. gt_{ic:1?::1y and ef+L?ic?.ient.ly.
0;.2 has had pr?(:bie!ms getting sound Hie=r"c::eption> in the past, but i?.hi h:;
evidently he::?5r-i I -e. aol yr ci (i . " ' . ' ) . nee(h..-, a 'little mut'e' pr?"::S{:"?(::L ce? i n' d rrien{S7. C7na7--?.,
pe::ercerpt.ions, an ?I will. be ready to proceed into Stage 3 training.
(S/STf) E.VAL.11ATIOI\3:
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HANDLE VIA STIPPLE CHANNELS ONLY
SECRET/ NOFORN
CL.ASSIFI:EU c:+Y: DIA (DTi
DECLASS I F -Y : O)DRi
Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060008-5
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 Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789
WHAT SET OFF THE BIGGEST
BANG IN RECORDED HISTORY?
Shortly after 7 A.M. on June 30,'.1908 '.?.=Nevertheless-'for want of a `better ex- omb was detonated).
early rising farmers, herdsmen, and --planation, scientists continued to - Could the Siberian blast have been
trappers in the sparsely settled ascribe the cataclysm to - a meteorite, atomic?' In 1958 a Russian engineer-
,-vastness of the central Siberia Plateau and Leonid Kulik,'a-mineralogist .who turned-writer, Aleksander Kazantsev,
watched in awe as a cylindrical object,
glowing with an intense bluish-white
light and trailing a fiery tail, raced,
across a clear blue sky toward the
northern horizon. At 7:17, over a des-
olate region of bogs and low, pine-
covered hills traversed by the Stony
Tunguska River, it disappeared; in-
stantly, a "pillar of fire" leaped sky-
ward, so high it was seen hundreds of
miles away; the earth shuddered under
the impact of a titanic explosion; the
air was wracked by thunderous claps;
and a superheated wind rushed out-
ward, setting parts of the taiga on fire.
At a trading post forty miles from the
blast, a man sitting on the steps of his
house saw the blinding flash and cov-
ered his eyes; he felt scorched, as if the
shirt on his back were burning, and the
next moment he was hurled from the
steps by a shock wave and knocked un-
conscious. Four hundred miles to- the
south the ground heaved under the-
tracks of the recently completed
Trans-Siberian Railway, threatening- to
derail an express. And above the
Tunguska region a mass of black
clouds, piling up to a height of twelve
miles, dumped a shower of "black rain"
on the countryside-dirt and debris
headed -:government-sponsored. -ex - published a story-article pinning that
peditions to the Tunguska 'in the early disaster on Martians killed on their
-1926s and again in 1938-39,.searched way to Earth by cosmic rays or meteor-
for evidence -to support this view. ite bombardment; their ship, with no
Although this search-proved fruit- one at the controls, hurtles into our at-
less, Kulik uncovered a wealth of in- mosphere at unreduced speed and
formation about the blast. Near the burns up from friction, triggering a
swamp into which the meteorite had chain reaction in its atomic fuel that
supposedly plummeted, scorched sets off the explosion. Few informed
trees, striped of branches, still stood, readers by then still accepted the me-
but around this weird "telegraph-pole" teorite theory, and some, particularly
forest, except where .intervening hills younger men and women, found Ka-
had shielded them, every tree within zancsev's hypothesis persuasive, but
fifty miles had been 'blown flat, its others rejected it in favor of an earlier
trunk pointing away from the swamp. alternate explanation, according to
From this-and from his failure to find which the head of a comet had pene-
even a small impact crater- Kulik con- trated the atmosphere at such high ve-
cluded that the meteorite had never locity that the heat thus generated had
reached the ground but had exploded. caused the comet to blowup. (Skeptics
two or three miles up in the air. The pointed out, however, that a comet
testimony of local herdsmen yielded could hardly have approached Earth
other -curious details: the blast's in- without being seen.)
tense heat had melted the permafrost,'-) - Two further explanations involving
causing water trapped underground .-.natural causes have - been advanced.
for tens of thousands of years to- gush ? The first is that a tiny "black hole" -a
forth in fountains, and those `reindeer -. chunk of matter collapsed to minuscule
.that had not been killed had developed dimensions and so dense that its grav-
mysterious blisters and scabs on their ity sucks up even light--hit Siberia and
hides. Stranger still, examination of the passed in an instant through Earth,
trees that had been germinating in emerging in the North Atlantic. The
1908 revealed that they had then second asserts that an "anti-rock" of
sucked up by the explosion -while .grown at several times the normal rate.
rumblings like heavy artillery fire re- During World War lI Kulik was
verberated throughout central-Russia.. captured by the Germans and died a
Since seismographs and barographs -prisoner. The riddle he had worked to
everywhere had recorded the event, solve was forgotten. In August 1945,
the entire world knew that something however, certain Russian scientists.
extraordinary had occurred in the Si- were abruptly reminded of it by the
ber''.n wilderness. But what? Scientists atom-bombings of Hiroshima and
conjectured that a giant meteorite Nagasaki, events which seemed uncan-
intense heat its impact -generated;' On tions (the fireball, the searing thermal may never know. But today, fewer
hitting the ground, such a body would, current, the towering "mushroom".: =.-scientists than at any time in the past
-theoretically, have blown out a huge: - -cloud) and their effects (the -.instanta- ;would be astounded to receive a mes-
crater like the one in Arizona, three = neous:and -near -total :destruction,.the.. ,_ sage beamed from-some corner of the
quarters?ofa milesquare;cleft by a me'- -radiation flesh,-the.-ac- universe inquiring into the fate of
teorite that fell fifty thousand years celerated::;growth of -new, plant: -life,: certain space voyagers who vanished
ago; :but the Siberian impact site even the ?.telegraph; pole'nappearan[e ,: on .our planet in what we call the year
antimatter plunged into the atmos-
phere and exploded on contact with
atoms of ordinary matter, producing a
fireball of gamma rays. While this
would account for the absence of
residual material at the site, it is not,
most experts say, compatible with ob-
servable physical effects of the blast.
In the' end, we do not know what
must have fallen, exploding from the nily familiar in both their manifesta-. ' caused the cataclysm in Siberia. We
--turned.outto bea-dismal -swamp,-with of scorched and branchless trees stand 1908.;
no trace of a meteorite to be =seen. -ing below the point at which an. atom
 P.S. A Guest from
the Universe?
a charred and smoking world; he was scorched and penai-
less, btu alive.
Approyed For ReJb0 06 0 7 ?1 RD 9&,AA 89R
The stage was being set for a world-shaking drama that
was rushing to its fiery climax near the cold and sluggish
Yenesei River of Siberia.
The date: June 30, 1908.
Out in space, miles from the earth, a gigantic object
was rushing to destruction, headed for a thinly populated
area near the YeneseL Its speed was probably in excess of
thirty thousand miles an hour. It was only seconds from
destruction, trailing long streams of fire behind it as it en-
tered the atmosphere.
On the river a fisherman tugged at the ropes leading to
his nets. He paused in his work long enough to return the
waAe of a friend who sat on the shore, sheltered fortu-
nately by a steep overhang. His friend on the bank was the
last thing the fisherman would ever see.
He had less than five seconds to live.
A few miles from the river a herdsman, driving several
hundred reindeer across the grassy Hats, paused'to fill his
leather water bag at a shallow well. The bag fell into the
'water and he climbed down to retrieve it.
It was the luckiest move of his life.
Across the river, at the edge of a small grove of trees,
a woodchopper and his two grown sons took time out from
their labors to smoke their pipes, their axes leaning against
the log on which they were sitting.
The stage was set.
The gigantic thing that was plunging to earth exploded
with a fury that was recorded around the globe. Of those
in the immediate area, only the herdsman in the well and
the man sheltered by the river bank survived. The fisher-
man was swept away. The woodchoppers were never found;
but one of their axes was finally picked up a mile and a
half from where they bad been smoking their pipes. The
herd of reindeer vanished in the twinkling of an eye. When
the bewildered herdsman climbed out of the shallow well
that had saved his life, he found himself in the midst of
thousands of tons had exploded into a great ball of seething
fire that climbed into the clouds in a matter of minutes,
leaving below- it a stunned earth that sent its quivers to
seismographs in many lands.
World War I spread even greater havoc of a digerent
sort and scientists almost forgot the strange explosion in
Siberia, which they had assumed to be some sort of huge
meteorite. It was not until 1927 that a scientific study group
reached the scene. They found a scorched and barren spot
that showed plainly the effects of incalculable heat and pres-
sure; trees brushed flat to earth for miles around the center
of the blast, their trunks charred by its remarkable temper-
ature. They found a few witnesses, including the herds-
man and the man on the river bank, and some villagers
who had seen the catastrophe from a vantage point miles
away. After examining the scene and interviewing the wit-
nesses, the scientists went away. They had determined that
something from outer space had struck in those lonely
reaches of the Yenesei, something that scorched and blasted
-but something that left no craters in the earth to mark
its collision. For want of a better name it went down in the
records as the Tunguska Meteorite, and there it remained
for more than thirty years.
A Russian scientist, Dr. Alexander Kazentsev, was a mem-
ber of the Soviet team that spent considerable time investi-
gating the scene of the Tunguska explosion. Like their prede-
cessors, they were puzzled by what they found and puz-
zled even more by what they did not find. No craters. No
logical, acceptable explanation for the recorded fury of the
explosion.
Fortunately for science, Dr. Kazentsev was also a mem-
ber of the Russian team that went to Hiroshima to study the
effects of the atomic bomb which had obliterated that hap-
less city and most of its people.
Dr. Kazentsev was particularly impressed by a peculi-
arity of the blast; directly beneath the center of the air-
borne explosion the tops of the trees had been snapped off,
while the trees remained standing. Somewhere, he had seen
something like that before-but where?
Suddenly he remembered. At the scene of the "Tunguska
Meteorite" in Siberial Tree tops snapped off in one area,
01 a~ while for ~~ rpp gimd the trees were brushed flat to earth,
Wd6o-5t Hiroshimal But that phenomenon was
known to be a characteristic of only nuclear devices. Did it
mean that a nuclear explosion had taken place over that
lonely Siberian terrain almost half a century before?
There was a relatively simple way to check the suspicion.
If the explosion had been nuclear, there would be radio-
activity in measurable quantities in the earth. And Ka-
zentsev knew that when Professor Kulik had made the orig-
inal investigation of the Tunguska blast in 1927, no check
had been made for radioactivity; he also knew that Kulik
hid been disturbed by the complete absence of meteoric
fragments.
A new expedition, headed by Professor Liapunov and in-
cluding Dr. Kazentsev, was dispatched to the scene of the
so-called Tunguska Meteorite. They spent months tracking
out the radioactive pattern in the soil that sent their Geiger
counters chattering; they interviewed an eyewitness who
still recalled vividly the great ball of fire that rolled into
the heavens and the strange mushroom cloud from which
it stemmed. They dug up tons of soil to collect a scant hand-
ful of metal fragments. Then they went home to evaluate
and study what they had found.
Dr. Kazentsev and most of his colleagues came t6 the
conclusion that some sort of atomic-powered device of tre-
mendous size had exploded over the earth at an altitude of
1.2 miles on the morning of June 30, 1908. He calls it a
space ship.
In his official report filed with the Soviet government
agency which directed the expedition, Dr. Kazentsev says
that the blast damage and the radioactivity charts enabled
the scientists to locate the point directly beneath the blast
and to trace out the familiar atomic cone. Sifting the soil
around the edges of this "cone" produced tiny bits of metal,
some of which were not of any known meteoric nature and
some of which seemed to be alloyed. 'I .e eyewitness ac-
counts all agreed on the seething fireball and the mush-
room cloud, which we now know to be characteristic of
nuclear explosions. And exhumation of some of the long-
dead residents of the area indicated that they had died of a
"strange malady" indeed, for they were victims of excessive
radioactivity.
Says Kazentsev, "The weight of evidence clearly places
the explosion slightly more than (a mile) above the center of
the destruction. The damage is identical to that produced
by man-made atomic devices under similar conditions. The
lingering radioactivity, the mixed metals, the descriptions
of the explosion itself all coincide with an atomic explosion.
CPYRGHT
Approved For Release 2001/03107 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060008-5