RUSSIAN ROSWELL - UFO Files - The History Channel

In 1892, an object appeared over Moscow and shot a ‘pillar of light’ down to the ground for 20-25 minutes. It was described as fiery, much like most other Russian UFO reports through the ages. One Russian event dwarfs any reported anywhere in the world.

TUNGUSKA

On June 30th, 1908, a huge fireball raced across the Siberian taiga and exploded over the forest close to the town of Tunguska. Six hundred square miles of tundra was razed to the ground and the shockwave was felt by seismographs around the world.

At first it was thought that a meteor had impacted with the Earth and when the first expeditions arrived twenty years later, they expected to find a huge crater. No crater was found, but the devastation was evident, with trees laid out like matchsticks in a huge, circular swathe from the centre of the blast.

From the pattern of the destruction, it soon became apparent that the object had exploded high above the ground, much like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, but much more powerful in terms of magnitude.

Most researchers outside of Russia, including Stanton Friedman, were convinced that this was a natural event and nothing to do with aliens or UFOs, but Russian ufologists, such as Nikolai Subbotin of the Russian UFO Research Station, were not so sure. Subbotin explained how the object apparently changed course twice before exploding, something a natural object such as a meteorite or comet cannot do.

Then there were unexplained radiation levels in the region and the fact that plant life appears to have been altered because of this radiation.

Stalin himself seemed convinced that the event was related to some sort of weapon, possibly from extraterrestrials, and he set Sergei Korolev, the father of Soviet rocketry, the task of finding answers. Korolev financed a team to travel to Tunguska in fleets of helicopters.

They found radioactive metal fragments and an area that has become known as ‘The Devil’s Graveyard’, an area close to the blast site where no plants will grow and animals tend to die.

Although Korolev is believed to have told Stalin that he thought the blast was caused by an alien spacecraft, his official report put the blame squarely on a meteorite.