In 1908 hundreds of square miles of Siberian forest were charred and flattened by a mysterious fireball that exploded 5-miles above the surface of the earth, near the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia. The mystery of Tunguska has attracted many theories, some quite reasonable and others far less so. One theory has it that an exploding meterite caused the devastation. Another was that it was a gaseous comet.

"The results of even a cursory examination exceeded all the tales of eyewitnesses and my wildest expectations," wrote Leonid Kulik, the first Soviet scientist to led an expedition to region in 1927. Instead of finding a giant crater, Kulik found a standing forest of what looked like telephone poles. Each trunk stood straight and tall, but charred and stripped of its branches.

Kulik managed to lead two more expeditions to the blast zone, one in 1929 and another in 1938, but he was never able to establish conclusively what caused the blast. Sadly Kulik died of typhus in a Nazi prison camp on April 24th, 1942.

Aleksander Kazansev was the first Soviet scientists to evaluate the effects of both the Hiroshima blast and Tunguska. He quickly found connections between the two events. Just as Kulik had found a standing forest of trees, stripped of their branches, at Tunguska, Kazanev found the same effects in the Hiroshima forest.

The atomic bomb had exploded at a high altitude and the downward rushing blast left the trees directly beneath it standing while flattening trees, and houses, further out in a circular pattern. Kazantsev became the first scientist to suggest that the Tunguska event may have been caused by an exploding flying saucer.