SUN STREAK PROJECT S2 SESSION NUMBER: 01 CRV VIEWER: 032

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00789R001300100003-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 2, 1998
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: August 29, 1988
• Content Type: REQ

Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789Rp013001000031
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PROJECT NUMBER: 1:32 7'1\4`:1 SESSION NU1u1FgEF s 1.
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Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001300100003-4
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BANG IN RECORDED HISTORY?
Shortly after 7 A.M. on June 30, 1908,
early rising farmers, herdsmen, and
trappers in the sparsely settled
vastness of the central Siberia Plateau
watched in awe as a cylindrical object,
glowing with an intense bluish-white
light and trailing a fiery tail, rived
across a clear blue sky toward the
northern horizon. At 7:17, over it. dce -
olate region of bogs and low, phie.
covered hills traversed by the Stony
Tunguska River, it disappeared; in?
y.
stantly, a "pillar of fire" leaped 'Ay.
ward, so high it was seen hundit'A of
miles away; the earth shuddered uu,h t
the impact of a titanic explosion, tiff
air was wracked by thunderous cl,p,
and a superheated wind rushttl t*ua
ward, setting parts of the taiga tit, tote
At a trading post forty miles front ttw
blast, a man sitting on the steps id Its;
house saw the blinding flash anti i ,,
ered his eyes; he felt scorched, At ti' alit
shirt on his back were burning,. , t 0-
next moment he was hurled fr,? -t aftc
steps by a shock wave and knot i :.1 a _
conscious. Four hundred milt=
south the ground heaved un
tracks of the recently col"t
Trans-Siberian Railway, threats
derail an express. And aho , ,a?.
Tunguska region a mass of
clouds, piling up to a height of tt.. its
miles, dumprd a shower of "hlo ' n.
on the < ounit yside --dirt anti
sucked up by the explosion = l,:u
rumblings like heavy artillery
verherared throughout central lat?,.t
Since seismographs and baiti=u-ap
everywhere had recorded thin r, i
the entire world knew. that sosot=i --is.
extraordinary had occurred in it i 5.:
ber`.n wilderness, But kvhare St tr
i..
conjectured that a_ giant rncit-.!
must have fallen, exploding fr+att: t!.
intense heat its impac genersltt at r 1i
hitting the ground, sueca a body -,`.
theoretically, have -blown out i< f ,
crater like the one in (Arizona, +c, t
quarters of a mile square, left bt a t,,
teorite that fell fifty thousand it ago, but the Siberian "impact sift
turned out to be a dismal swanip, -,th
no trace of a meteorite to be iri'ti
Nevertheless, for want of a better ex-
planation, scientists continued to
ascribe the cataclysm to a meteorite,
and Leonid Kulik, a mineralogist who
headed government-sponsored ex-
peditions to the Tunguska in the early
1920s and again in 1938-39, searched
for evidence to support this view.
Although this search proved fruit-
less, Kulik uncovered a wealth of in-
formation about the blast. Near the
swamp into which the meteorite had
supposedly plummeted, scorched
trees, striped of branches, still stood,
but around this weird "'telegraph-pole"
forest, except where intervening hills
had shielded them, every tree within
fifty miles had been 'blown flat, its
:,rink pointing away from the swamp.
I?aorn this-and from his failure to find
, t en a small impact crater- Kulik con-
t'uded that the meteorite had never
j, itched the ground but had exploded
tt'.-o or three miles up in the air. The
iesr*'nony of local herdsmen yielded
bomb was detonated).
Could the Siberian blast have been
atomic? In 1958 a Russian engineer-
turned-writer, Aleksander Kazantsev,
published a story-article pinning that
disaster on Martians killed on their
way to Earth by cosmic rays or meteor-
ite bombardment; their ship, with no
one at the controls, hurtles into our at-
mosphere at unreduced speed and
burns up from friction, triggering a
chain reaction in its atomic fuel that
sets off the explosion. Few informed
readers by then still accepted the me-
teorite theory, and some, particularly
younger men and women, found Ka-
zantsev's hypothesis persuasive, but
others rejected it in favor of an earlier
alternate explanation, according to
which the head of a comet had pene-
trated the atmosphere at such high ve-
locity that the heat thus generated had
caused the comet to blowup. (Skeptics
pointed out, however, that a comet
could hardly have approached Earth
,cher -curious details: the blast's in- without being seen.)
a,--tse heat had melted the permafrost, Two further t.xf'~.arions involving
musing water trapped underground natural causes he keen advanced.
M,tr tens of thousands of years to gush The first is that a tot "black hole" -a
,rth in fountains, and those reindeer
t; at had not been killed had developed
Mysterious blisters and scabs on their
t isles. Stranger still, examination of the
es that had been germinating in
'08 revealed that they had then
own at several times the normal rate.
During World War II Kulik was
-ptured by the Germans and died a
prisoner. The riddle he had worked to
t 'lve was forgotten. In August 1945,
t,owever, certain Russian scientists
ere abruptly reminded of it by the
om-bombings of Hiroshima and
l agasaki, events which seemed uncan-
,.ly familiar in both their manifesta-_
t,,tns (the fireball, the searing thermal
a atrrent, the towering "mushroom".
s)ud) -and their effects (the -instanta-
rous and near-total destruction, the
chunk of mait