Speaker 1: I want you to try a little visualization with me,
just for a second. Close your eyes unless you're driving,
of course, then please don't, but block out the room
you're in. I want you to imagine you're in the
middle of the Siberian Taiga. It's the morning of June thirtieth,
nineteen oh eight. It's quiet, yeah, you know, ancient, the
kind of silence you only get hundreds of miles from
anything Man made.
Speaker 2: A very peaceful image, a landscape that I mean, it
hasn't changed in thousands of years exactly.
Speaker 1: It's serene. You can smell the pine, the damp earth.
Maybe you hear wind in the trees, a twig snapping
right until at seven seventeen am, the sky literally splits
in two wow. And I don't mean a crack of thunder.
I mean the heaven's tear open. There is an explosion
so violent, so blindingly powerful, releases the energy of what
was it one hundred and eighty five Hiroshima bombs simultaneously.
Speaker 2: It's that is a terrifying number to even comprehend.
Speaker 1: The heat is so intense that if you were standing
thirty miles away, it would feel like your skin was.
Speaker 2: On fire, like a shirt made of flame, just wrapped
around you.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: And then comes the shockwave. It flattens eighty million trees.
It smashes them flat against the permafrost like they're just toothpicks.
We're talking about a forest the size.
Speaker 2: Of a major city, like a New York or a London.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just wiped clean, wiped off the map in a
single breath. It sounds like a movie, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It sounds like the opening scene of some high budget
apocalypse film.
Speaker 3: It does.
Speaker 1: But here's the hook, here's the thing that has kept
people up at night for over a century. When the
dust finally settles and the smoke clears, and the first
brave souls trek into that wasteland to find the weapon,
to find the crater.
Speaker 2: There isn't one.
Speaker 1: There isn't one nothing zero, no crater, no asteroid fragment,
no bomb casing, just eight hundred square miles of flattened
forests and a silence that is just screaming Welcome to
thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: It is great to be here. And that visualization is
it's hauntingly accurate. You've basically described the ultimate locker room mystery, right,
except the room is the size of a small country,
and the victim is the landscape itself.
Speaker 3: That is the perfect way to put it.
Speaker 1: Today we are pulling out a thread that starts in
you know, the frozen swamps of Russia, and it ends
incredibly in a living room in Newfoundland, Canada, seventy years.
Speaker 2: Later, the seventy year gap.
Speaker 1: We are dissecting the Tenguska event. It's widely called Russia's
greatest unsolved explosion.
Speaker 2: And unsolved really is the key word there. In physics,
we love cause and effect. It's the basis of everything. Sure,
you see a bruise, you look for the fist. See
a shattered window, you look for the baseball, see a crater,
you look for the rock from space.
Speaker 3: But Tagiska gives us the bruise.
Speaker 2: Oh, it gives you a massive planetary scale bruise. But
the fist is just gone, it vanished.
Speaker 1: So to help us navigate this hole maze, we're looking
at transcripts regarding the Unexplained series. Our mission today is
to try and figure out how the laws of physics
just seem to have taken a vacation that day. We're
going to talk about trees that disappeared blue fire shooting
out of wall sockets, and a theory that connects it
all in a way I.
Speaker 3: Never saw coming.
Speaker 2: It's a journey that really forces us to confront the
limits of what we actually understand about our own planet,
our own atmosphere. How so well we think we know
how weather works, right, we think we know how space works.
Taguska suggests we might be missing a page in the manual.
Speaker 1: I have to admit, reading through the source material, I
felt this mix of like excitement and just genuine fear.
I can see that because the reality of this story,
it just feels like sci fi. It feels like something
that shouldn't actually be possible.
Speaker 2: It does. And my job today is to, you know,
try and keep us grounded in the physics of it all. Okay,
fair enough, because as strange as it all seems, there
are scientific principles at play here, even if they're extreme outliers.
We aren't dealing with magic, but we are dealing with
forces on a scale that humans just go a west
we really get to witness.
Speaker 3: So let's go back in time. Let's set the scene properly.
Speaker 1: Take us back the morning of June thirtieth, nineteen oh eight,
where are we exactly.
Speaker 2: We're deep in Siberia, specifically the podkam and I at
Tagusca River basin. The transcripts describe it as an inhospitable landscape.
Speaker 1: That sounds like an understatement.
Speaker 2: It is. It's a polite way of saying it's incredibly
difficult to survive there. We are talking about over two
million square miles of forest.
Speaker 1: The source calls it the largest forest on Earth. I mean,
that's hard to even wrap your head around this. I
think when we hear forest, we picture a state park.
You know, you hike for a few hours and you
hit a road. This is this is a whole different beast.
Speaker 2: Completely different. This is the Taiga. It's an ocean of trees.
It is vast, it's swampy in the summer, frozen solid
in the winter. And in nineteen oh eight it was
so incredibly remote, no roads, no real infrastructure.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't completely empty, was it.
Speaker 2: No, And this part is crucial to the whole story.
The area was inhabited by the iven Tp people.
Speaker 1: The even Key Okay, I want to focus on them
for a minute. These are the indigenous people of the area,
and they're the only reason we really know what it
felt like to be there exactly.
Speaker 2: They're traditional reindeer herders. They've lived in harmony with this
incredibly harsh environment for generations. They know this land, they
know the weather patterns.
Speaker 3: They know what normal looks like.
Speaker 2: They are experts in reading the sky in the wind.
So these are not people who would be easily spooked
by a thunderstorm.
Speaker 3: Far from it.
Speaker 2: They live outdoors, they know what a storm is. But
on June thirtieth, nineteen oh eight, they experienced something that
was just completely outside the realm of normal.
Speaker 1: The source notes that some of them are actually pretty
close to what we now call ground.
Speaker 2: Zero, terrifyingly close.
Speaker 1: I just can't even imagine what that must have been like.
So what did they see? What did they actually report?
Speaker 2: This is where the accounts get truly harrowing, and we
have to rely on oral histories, on interviews conducted years later.
Of course, the Evening Khaki witnesses all describe seeing a
bright object in the sky. But bright is It's just
such an understatement. They described it being brighter than the sun.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just pause on that. Brighter than the sun.
The sun is our absolute biological baseline for too bright. Right,
If you look at the sun, your body forces you
to look away.
Speaker 3: It hurts.
Speaker 1: Imagine looking up and seeing something that overpowers the actual sun.
Speaker 2: It would be completely visually overwhelming. It would almost certainly
cause temporary blindness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2: One of the experts in the source, Ben McGee. He
describes the Evenki account as just nightmarish. He says, suddenly
another sun appears in the sky.
Speaker 3: Another sun.
Speaker 1: That phrase just kiss me chills. It's so primal, it's
almost biblical.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: It feels like the laws of the universe just shattered.
You wake up, you're tending your reindeer, and suddenly the
sky has betrayed you.
Speaker 2: And that visual horror was immediately followed by a physical one.
First the light, then the sound. They heard these loud booms.
Speaker 3: They compared them to gunshots, didn't They Yes.
Speaker 2: Like artillery fire or massive gunshots, but louder, much much louder.
And then the air itself attacked them, the shockwave shockwave.
The transcripts mentioned that people were physically blasted off their feet,
thrown the distance throne.
Speaker 1: Imagine that you're standing on solid ground and an invisible
wall of air just picks you up and hurls you
across a clearing. The amount of pressure that requires is
just it's immense.
Speaker 2: It is. And remember the context here, This is nineteen
oh eight, right.
Speaker 3: I keep coming back to that.
Speaker 1: If this happened today, our first thought is nuclear bomb,
we have that cultural reference point.
Speaker 2: But in nineteen oh eight, the atomic bomb wouldn't be
invented for another thirty seven years. Aerial bombardment from planes
was barely even a concept for the Avinki. There was
no technological frame of reference at.
Speaker 1: All, so they couldn't say, oh, a missile silo must
have blown up.
Speaker 2: No, so their interpretation it had to be supernatural.
Speaker 3: So how did they explain it?
Speaker 2: Many believed it was their god Ogdi coming down to
punish the land. It was really the only way to
makes sense of a violent, incomprehensible assault by the sky itself.
Speaker 1: And then the source says it just it ends. It
fades away almost as fast as it started. The second
sun vanishes, the boom stop, and you're just left there,
ringing ears, total confusion.
Speaker 3: Just what happened?
Speaker 2: And that question what happened is what we are still
asking over a century later, because once that initial shockwave
passed the true scale of the destruction became visible, and
it was it was catastrophic.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into the numbers here, because they are
just staggering.
Speaker 3: We talked about the forest.
Speaker 1: The blast didn't just you know, knock over a few
trees or break some branches. No.
Speaker 2: According to Tony McMahon and the source material, the explosion
flattened approximately eighty million trees.
Speaker 3: See eighty million. That is, that's roughly the population in Germany.
If every single person was a tree.
Speaker 2: It's a good comparison. Oh, it helps visualize it. And
this destruction covered an area of roughly eight hundred square miles.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's try to picture that eight hundred square miles else.
That is bigger than the city of London. It's bigger
than all five burrows of New York City put together. Right.
Imagine getting in your car and driving for an hour,
and for that entire hour you see nothing but flattened,
apocalyptic devastation on both sides of the road.
Speaker 3: That's the scale we're talking about.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't chaotic destruction either. That's a really key
detail mentioned by Paul Grond in the transcripts.
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
Speaker 2: He notes, that every single one of those eighty million
trees was flattened in the exact same direction.
Speaker 1: That's such a haunting visual. It's not like a tornado
where things are just twisted and thrown everywhere. This was uniform,
like a giant hand just came down from the sky
and swept the board clean.
Speaker 2: Precisely. It creates what's called a radial pattern when you
see it from above. They call it the butterfly. All
the trees point away from a central epicenter.
Speaker 3: So it proves it was one single blast.
Speaker 2: A singular directional blast wave of immense power, all coming
from a specific point in the sky.
Speaker 1: And the condition of the trees themselves that's also telling, right.
They weren't just knocked over, correct, They.
Speaker 2: Were completely scorched, devoid of branches, devoid of leaves, just
bare trunks laid out flat on the ground.
Speaker 3: So there was intense heat.
Speaker 2: An intense pulse of thermal radiation that must have accompanied
the blast wave.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a graveyard of telephone poles, just miles
and miles of dead, scorched wood. The source poses the question,
what kind of explosive force had the power to annihilate
an eight hundred square.
Speaker 2: Mile area and they give an estimate that just it's
hard to process.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it broke my brain a little.
Speaker 2: The energy equivalent of one thousand atomic bombs.
Speaker 1: One thousand, not one, not ten a thousand.
Speaker 2: No, we had to be a little careful with that comparison.
Atomic bombs vary in yields. Yeah, okay, but usually when
that metric is used in this context, we're comparing it
to the Hiroshma bomb, which is about fifteen kilotons, So we're.
Speaker 1: Talking about what ten to fifteen megatons of T and T.
Speaker 2: It's a colossal amount of energy. It puts the Tunguska
event in the same range as the largest thermonuclear devices
ever tested by humans decades later.
Speaker 1: But this happened naturally in nineteen oh eight, in nineteen
oh eight, and again, the only reason this isn't the
most famous, most terrifying day in human history is its location.
If this had happened over London or Paris.
Speaker 2: Or millions would have died instantly. History would be completely different.
The only reason it remains this fascinating mystery and not
a global tragedy is because it happened over the empty Tie.
Speaker 3: Guess so naturally.
Speaker 1: The early twentieth century scientists, they put.
Speaker 3: On their detective hats.
Speaker 1: They look at the evidence, a massive explosion, fire from
the sky, shock wave, and they say.
Speaker 2: Okay, we know what this is. It seemed obvious a
meteor The scientific consensus at the time was that a
massive physical object from space had struck the Earth, a meteor,
a meteorite.
Speaker 1: It makes sense, big boom fire from the sky, rock
hits ground case closed.
Speaker 2: Right, That was absolutely the assumption.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 2: But because of all the political turmoil in Russia at
the time, you have World War One, the Russian Revolution,
the Civil War, science basically had to wait.
Speaker 3: That explains the delay.
Speaker 1: I was wondering why nobody just rushed out there immediately.
They were a little busy with the complete collapse of
their government.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it wasn't until nineteen twenty seven, nearly twenty years
after the event, that an expedition was finally mounted.
Speaker 3: Under Leonid Kulick. And I feel for this guy.
Speaker 1: He is the protagonist of the first act of this mystery,
and frankly, he's kind of a tragic figure.
Speaker 2: He really is. Kulik was a mineralogist with the Soviet
Academy of Sciences. He was obsessed with Tenguska.
Speaker 3: He'd heard the stories, We'd.
Speaker 2: Heard the stories, and he fought for funding, he fought
for resources. He was completely convinced that a massive iron
meteorite had hit Siberia.
Speaker 1: And we should stress this wasn't a weekend camping trip.
This is nineteen twenty seven Siberia.
Speaker 2: No GPS, no satellite phones.
Speaker 1: No helicopters, just dropping you in. This was a serious track.
Speaker 2: An incredibly difficult journey. They had to travel by river
and trek overland through these mosquito infested swamps. They had
to hire local guides, the even Dankees, who were terrified
to go anywhere near there. Why they believe the land
was cursed by the god Ogdy, of.
Speaker 3: Course, so Koolik had to push them, keep them going.
Speaker 2: He did, and he was driven by this one very
specific expectation. As the source material notes, the thinking in
the late nineteen twenties was that this had to be
one of the largest meteorite events in modern history.
Speaker 1: So he went there expecting to find a massive crater.
Speaker 2: He was probably already imagining the museum exhibit in his head.
He thought he was going to find a big chunk
of metal, a meteorite he could bring back to Moscow.
Speaker 1: And become famous, a smoking gun.
Speaker 2: He expected a hole in the ground, maybe a mile wide,
with a mountain of iron sitting in the middle.
Speaker 1: So he gets there after this brutal journey, he crusts
the final ridge. He sees the devastation, the flattened trees,
all pointing away from the center. He knows he's close.
He rushes to the epicenter and what does he find?
Speaker 2: Nothing?
Speaker 3: The ultimate anti climax.
Speaker 2: He found no crater, found no mediorite, He found no metal.
Speaker 1: And this is the twist with a capital T. How
is that possible? We just talked about one thousand atomic
bombs worth of force, We talked about a second Sun
in the sky. How does that leave zero physical trace
of the object itself?
Speaker 2: That is the enigma that the source describes so well.
How do you have the damage of an asteroid impact
without the asteroid. Usually when a rock from space hits
the Earth, it leaves a very clear.
Speaker 1: Signature, like meteor Crater in Arizona.
Speaker 3: I've been there.
Speaker 1: It's huge. You can't miss it, as a giant hole
in the desert.
Speaker 2: Exactly the transcripts used meteor crater as the perfect counter example.
When a kinetic impact or a rock hits the ground,
it displaces earth, it throws up debris, it leaves a crater.
Speaker 3: And Tungeska defies that.
Speaker 2: Tunguska defies that classic physics. Kulik found peat bogs. He
found some standing trees that had been stripped of their branches.
They called them the telegraph poles, right at the very center.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, standing trees at the center. I thought everything
was flattened.
Speaker 2: That's actually consistent with an explosion direct overhead. If the
blast wave comes straight down, the trees don't get pushed over,
They just get their branches sheared off. H Okay, But
the complete lack of a crater that just broke Coolick.
Speaker 1: So he's standing there in the mud, completely baffled.
Speaker 2: He spent years trying to drain the swamps. He was
convinced the meteorite was just buried really, really deep. He
couldn't accept the possibility that there was no rock to find.
Speaker 1: It's like a phantom punch. You see the knockout, but
you never saw the fist connect.
Speaker 2: And that absence of evidence, that void, as the source
calls It is what drove scientists and Culick absolutely crazy
because the damage is so real. The trees are flat,
but the cause is it's missing.
Speaker 1: So we've got a crime scene with eighty million victims
the trees, but the murder weapon has completely vanished into
thin air.
Speaker 2: Vanished might be the right word, because even today, as
the source highlights, no material that can be clearly traced
to a cosmic origin from nineteen oh eight has been
definitively found at the site.
Speaker 1: Now, before we get to the threads part of Thrilling Threads,
I want to ask about the prevailing theory, because surely
scientists didn't just shrug and give up. If it wasn't
a classic crater forming impact, what do most scientists think
it was.
Speaker 2: Well, the leading theory for decades has been the air
burst air burst. The idea is that a stony meteor
or maybe a comet entered the atmosphere, but the atmospheric
pressure was so intense, the friction was so great that
it exploded before it hit the ground, like a.
Speaker 3: Bomb going off at a high altitude.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it explodes maybe three to six miles up. That
creates the shockwave and the thermal pulse but because the
object itself vaporizes into dust, there's no big rock to
find on the ground.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense, that seems logical. But if it vaporized,
wouldn't there be you know, dust, wouldn't there be chemical
traces in the soil.
Speaker 2: There should be, And that is the nagging problem with
the theory. We have found microscopic spheres in the soil,
some with extraterrestrial signatures, but connecting them definitively to the
nineteen oh eight event has been incredibly difficult. It's not
the slam dunk evidence you'd.
Speaker 1: Want, so they're still wiggle room, a lot of wiggleroom.
And this void of hard evidence is where things get really,
really wild. And I love this about human nature. When
science can't give us a simple answer like here is
the rock, our brains just go okay, let's get weird
with it.
Speaker 2: We abhor a vacuum. If the simple meteorite theory doesn't
fit perfectly, we try to shove other, more complex theories
into that hole. The source mentioned some of the more
creative explanations.
Speaker 1: At a popcast were They're fantastic. The transcripts mentioned black holes,
the theory that a tiny microscopic black hole just passed
straight through the Earth.
Speaker 2: Which was actually proposed by legitimate physicists in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3: Serious.
Speaker 2: Yes, the idea was that a primordial black hole entered
through Siberia and exited somewhere in the Atlantic. It would
explain the lack of debris it just passed right through.
Speaker 1: But wouldn't that, I don't know, destroy the entire planet.
Speaker 2: Well, at the very least, it would create a massive
exit wound, which we never found, so that theory kind
of died out.
Speaker 3: Okay, what else?
Speaker 1: Then there's the WMD theory weapons of mass destruction, which
is anachronistic.
Speaker 2: Of course, in nineteen oh eight we barely had airplanes.
The Wright brothers had only flown a few years earlier.
But in the Cold War era, looking back, people started
to wonder was it some secret test? Was it something
man made that we don't know about?
Speaker 1: And of course, the one that's always implied by the
unexplained source context aliens UFOs.
Speaker 2: The unnatural event framing always leads there, doesn't it. If
it wasn't a rock and it wasn't a human bomb,
maybe it was a crashing starship, a nuclear drive exploding again,
it's an attempt to solve that locked room mystery of Tenguska.
Speaker 1: If the physics don't make sense, maybe the physics were
alien exactly.
Speaker 3: It really is the perfect mystery.
Speaker 1: We have the explosion, we have the eyewitnesses, we have
the Flatten Forest, but the culprit.
Speaker 3: Just ghosted us.
Speaker 2: And so for seventy years that's where the thread just dangled,
a giant loose end in Siberia, a question mark carved
into the forest floor.
Speaker 1: Until nineteen seventy eight. And this is where the story
takes a turn. I just did not see coming. We're
leaving the swamps of Siberia and we're jumping across the
globe to Newfoundland.
Speaker 2: Canada, specifically to a small community called Bell Island, right
on the edge of the Atlantic.
Speaker 1: Okay, set the scene for US. April two, nineteen seventy eight.
Disco is big, bell bottoms are in. What happens on
Bell Island?
Speaker 2: It's quiet morning, but suddenly about five thousand residents witnessed
something that echoes those even d accounts from nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 3: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: They see an enormous spontaneous flash.
Speaker 3: Of light lultureflight Okay, followed by.
Speaker 2: An explosion a boom so loud it was heard eighty
to ninety miles away.
Speaker 1: Eighty to ninety miles that's a serious boom. That is
not a car backfiring. That's earthshaking.
Speaker 2: It absolutely was. The explosion caused damage to almost every
single building in the town, every building, almost everyone. We're
talking structural damage, broken windows, cracked foundations, livestock work killed
in the fields. It was a violent, destructive event.
Speaker 1: But there was one specific detail in the transcripts that
I know caught your eye.
Speaker 2: Oh you know it did gouts of.
Speaker 1: Blue fire erupt from power outlets. Yes, that is straight
out of a horror movie. You're sitting in your living room,
maybe watching TV, and suddenly blue fire shoots out of
the wall socket at you.
Speaker 3: That's terrifying.
Speaker 2: It is terrifying, and it's also highly specific. It creates
a kind of forensic signature.
Speaker 3: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2: If a bomb goes off down the street, fire doesn't
shoot out of your electrical sockets. That detail strongly suggests
a massive electrical phenomenon. It implies that a huge electrical
surge was induced in the power lines across the island.
Speaker 1: So naturally, the people of Bell Island are freaking out.
They investigate, they look around, and what do they find.
Speaker 2: Well, initially, just like in Teagasca seventy years prior, the
immediate thought was meteor impact. Something must have hit the island.
Speaker 1: Let me guess.
Speaker 2: No crater, of course not, and no impact to breathe nothing.
Speaker 1: The plot thickens exactly.
Speaker 2: You have a massive explosion, blinding flash of light, widespread
structural damage, and no rock. The parallels to Tenguska were
immediately apparent to researchers who looked into it.
Speaker 1: It's like a mini Tumbuska, a pocket Tenguska, if you will,
in a way.
Speaker 2: Yes, And because it happened in nineteen seventy eight in
a populated area with modern infrastructure like power lines, we
had more data points. Right That blue fire from the
outlets was a clue that the even Key in nineteen
oh eight couldn't possibly have given us because they didn't
have electrical outlets.
Speaker 3: WHOA, That is a fantastic point.
Speaker 1: If the Evenki had had electricity, would they have seen
bluefire too.
Speaker 2: It's a very very strong possibility if there had been
an electrical grid anywhere near the Tunguska epicenter in nineteen
oh eight, it almost certainly would have been completely fried.
Speaker 1: So this leads us to the scientific theory that ties
these two threads together, the one the source calls the.
Speaker 2: Super bolt the super bolt.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a superhero name, or maybe a gatorade flavor,
But I have a feeling it's a lot more dangerous
than that. What exactly is a super bowlt And how's
it different from just regular lightning?
Speaker 2: We need to be clear here. We are not just
talking about a big lightning bolt. A standard bolt of lightning,
the kind you see in a summer storm is usually
negatively charged. Okay, it travels from the bottom of the
cloud down to the ground. It's powerful, for sure, about
a billion wants of power.
Speaker 3: A billion watts is nothing to sneeze at.
Speaker 2: No, it is not. But a super bolt is a
different beast entirely. They are often what we call positive lightning.
They originate from the very top of the storm cloud,
where all the positive charge builds.
Speaker 3: Up, so they have to travel much farther to reach
the ground.
Speaker 2: Sow way farther, and because of that immense distance, the
voltage required to make that jump is exponentially higher.
Speaker 1: So It's like stretching a rubber band until it's just
about to snap, but the rubber band is made of
pure electricity.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. And when it finally snaps, it
releases trillions of watts of energy instantaneously, trillions, trillions with
a t It is one of the most powerful natural
phenomena on Earth. They are very rare, but when they happen,
they are catastrophic.
Speaker 1: So the theory is that Bell Island wasn't hit by
a bomb, It wasn't hit by a rock, It was
hit by a monster lightning bolt from the heaven.
Speaker 2: Correct. And this solves the void evidence problem.
Speaker 1: Perfectly, because lightning doesn't leave a crater exactly.
Speaker 2: Lightning strikes, it releases immense heat. It superheats the air
around it to fifty thousand degrees fahrenheit, which is hotter
than the surface of the sun wo and that rapid
heating creates a massive shockwave. That's what thunder is. Thunder
is just the sound of the air exploding from the
intense heat of lightning.
Speaker 1: So a superbolt creates.
Speaker 2: A a shockwave capable of knocking down buildings, or if
it's big enough, flattening eighty million trees. But once that
energy dissipates, there's no rock, there's no metal, just scorched
earth and maybe some magnetic anomolies in the soil.
Speaker 1: And it fits the blue fire detail too perfectly. If
you get hit by a massive electrical surve from the atmosphere,
your man made electrical grid is going to overload to
hence fire shooting out of the socket.
Speaker 2: Pcisely, it explains the electromagnetic effects that were reported at
Bell Island. It all clicks into place.
Speaker 1: So scientists looked at Bell Island and said, Okay, if
a super bolt caused this boom and this damage without
leaving a crater, could a massive, historic scale atmospheric electrical
event explain Tunguska?
Speaker 2: Could tung Guska have been the mother of all super bowlts,
the biggest one ever recorded?
Speaker 1: I mean, could it is lightning really capable of equaling
one thousand atomic bombs? That seems like a huge jump
even from what happened at Bell Island.
Speaker 2: And that is the main criticism of the theory. Scaling
it up that high is very difficult. But we have
to remember we've only been scientifically measuring lightning for tiny,
tiny fraction of Earth's history. We simply do not know
the absolute upper limits of what the atmosphere is capable
of doing.
Speaker 3: So, if the conditions were just perfect.
Speaker 2: If the atmospheric charge built up to an unprecedented level
over that spar Pacific part of Siberia, yes, it creates
a very compelling synthesis.
Speaker 1: It takes all the boxes it does.
Speaker 2: It explains the flash brighter than the sun. It explains
the loud booms, It explains the scorching of the trees
from the intense heat. It explains the shockwave, which is
just thunder on a massive scale. And most importantly, it
explains why poor Landed Kulick spent years wading through swamps
and never ever found a.
Speaker 1: Rock, because there never was a rock to begin with.
It was pure energy.
Speaker 2: It shifts the culprit from geology a rock from space
to meteorology a storm.
Speaker 1: That is fascinating and also slightly more terrifying. How so
well we can track asteroids. We have telescopes and nassas
watching the sky. If a big rock is coming our way,
we might get some warning, that's true, But a super
Bowl that feels like it could just happen out.
Speaker 2: Of nowhere it certainly as a layer of unpredictability to nature,
doesn't it It suggests that our atmosphere is capable of
releasing energy on a scale that rivals our most destructive
weapons completely without warning.
Speaker 1: It definitely puts the thrilling in thrilling threads, that's for sure.
It's the idea that the sky isn't just a backdrop,
it's a loaded gun.
Speaker 2: That's a very poetic and a very frightening way to
put it.
Speaker 1: So let's just recap this journey, because we have covered
a lot of ground. We started in the remote Siberian
wilderness of nineteen oh eight. We stood with the even
Key herders as they watched the second Son literally tear
the sky apart.
Speaker 2: We walked through the eight hundred square miles of flattened forest,
eighty million trees wiped out by what seemed to be
a ghost.
Speaker 1: We followed the heartbroken Leonid Koulik, who searched for a
crater that didn't exist, finding only mud and just questions.
Speaker 2: And then we fast forwarded seventy years to Bell Island, Canada,
where bluefire and a massive boon gave us the potential
key to unlock the whole mystery the super bowlt It.
Speaker 3: Connects all the dots.
Speaker 1: It moves us from these wild theories about aliens or
black holes to a plausible, albeit terrifying, natural phenomenon.
Speaker 2: It offers a solution that respects the physics of the
damage while perfectly accounting for the lack of debris.
Speaker 1: But, and there's always a but, do we have definitive proof?
Can we say case closed? Timgusca was lightning and.
Speaker 2: That's the beauty and I guess the frustration of science
and history. We have a very very strong theory. The
super Bowl fits the facts better than anything else. But
without a time machine, can we say with one hundred
percent certainty that Tunguska wasn't just a very strange icy
comet that completely melted and vaporized on entry. So not entirely,
Not entirely, But the Bell Island connection makes the electrical
theory much much stronger than it ever was before.
Speaker 3: It shows us that nature can do this.
Speaker 1: We've seen it happen on a smaller scale exactly.
Speaker 2: It validates the mechanism. Anomalies like Bell Island are so
crucial because they help us solve the cold cases of history.
They give us a modern Rosetta stone to help translate
the events of the past.
Speaker 3: I love that using the present to solve the past.
Speaker 2: It really helps create a complete picture of what's possible.
Speaker 1: This has been on it's been mind blowing. The idea
that the sky can just decide to drop one thousand
atomic bombs worth of electricity on us is something I'm
going to be thinking about for a long long time.
Speaker 2: It's a humbling reminder of how powerful our planet really is.
We live in a very dynamic system. We often feel
like we've tamed nature, but events like this come along
and remind us that we are just guests here.
Speaker 3: We certainly are.
Speaker 1: And now we want to turn this thread over to you,
the listener. We've laid out the evidence we have, the
missing crater, the Flatten trees, the nightmarish reports from the
even Key, and that blue fire connection to Canada.
Speaker 2: So the question we have for you is what do
you think happened in Tinguska.
Speaker 1: Are you team Asteroid believing a rock just completely vaporized.
Are you team super Bowl thinking the sky itself attacked?
Or do you have another theory entirely? Maybe you're on
team Mini black Hole, or you want to argue for
the UFO angle, we want to hear it.
Speaker 2: Leave a comment, let us know what your theory is.
Critical thinking is all about weighing the evidence, so tell
us how you weigh it.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us on this.
Speaker 1: It's been a wild ride from Siberia to Canada and
back again. Keep pulling at the loose ends everyone, You
never know what you might unravel. Goodbye for now, see
you next time on thrilling Threads.