Message #19213

[Bianca]

The Energy Pillar and the Red Glow


A few minutes before the first explosion, the complex began to disgorge the "terminators". Here are some eyewitness accounts.
Yevgeny Yarygin was on duty at the electrical distribution centre in the settlement of Muskovit:
...I was on duty in the switchboard room whose window faces south. The weather was cloudy, rainy, and it was drizzling. We were sitting and chatting. A glow appeared outside the window. Shadows appeared. The light was coming from the window. Through the windows we could see a bright hemispherical glow beginning to rise from behind the hills to the southeast [at a bearing of roughly 160–170 degrees; VU]. The light was white, like you get in welding. The white light seemed to rise upwards and behind it the light began to shift into the red and maroon [a red pillar was seen by the bus passengers before the Chulym explosion, and also by witnesses to the Tunguska explosion—VU]. Little "rays" were visible above the ascending hemisphere. The glow spread over the whole sky. The light was even and unbroken; we could not see any flying objects. The parting of the Yermikhi stream, above the watershed of which the glow was rising, was brightly lit. Then everything began to dim and went out. The glow lasted around 10 seconds.
I went out onto the landing outside, went to the fence and opened the door. By then about 30 seconds had passed after the disappearance of the glow. There was a penetrating report, an explosion, a very sharp bang. It made your ears ring and even made you weak at the knees. Plaster came down in the building. Everything moved and shook. There was a single bang. That was at seven minutes to two. But a distant noise had appeared even before the beginning of the glow—something like the roar from an aircraft [witnesses to the Tunguska explosion compared this noise with a three-inch shell in flight—VU]. The sound came from the same quarter as the glow, but the bang came from the opposite side, where the glow had been heading. I heard that someone was sitting in an armchair at home and the chair moved under them...


Victor Vedeshin, questioned by telephone on 22 October 2002, said:

...I was on duty that night at the boat station. A strong wind blew and at the same time a strong glow appeared in the sky. It was white, with a greenish tinge to it, bright like a welding spark or lightning, making your eyes hurt to look at it. Right then a shining flying sphere appeared. It flew beyond the horizon in the direction of Maximikhi...


Vitaly Valiuk, who worked at the town hall in Bodaibo, noted:
 
Eight minutes to two in the morning. Dense cumulus clouds in the sky. I was standing and smoking. Suddenly there was a flash. I thought it was lightning. But the glow grew as if someone was turning on one bulb after another. It became as bright as day. Some object flew from the southwest to the northeast... You couldn't tell if it was a sphere or not. It had a turquoise glow around it. It was perhaps the size of the lunar disc. And it had a tail behind it—reddish like the sparks from a bonfire. The angle of fall was about 60 degrees. The speed of the object was very high. While it all flew past, I had time to finish my cigarette and 30 seconds later there came a rumble, like a distant explosion...


Marina Kovaleva reported:

It was five to two. The light was strong. That light lasted a few seconds, then everything turned pink, then it got darker and darker and darker, becoming a reddish light. Then there was a rumbling. You got the impression, well, I don't know, like something below the ground, not clear but dull [a subterranean rumble from the working complex was also noted by witnesses to the Tunguska explosion who compared it to the rumble of train wheels—VU]. And after that rumble the window panes rattled...

The glow was visible in the settlements of Kropotkin and Mama, located around 140 kilometres on either side of the bolide's presumed crash site. One of the witnesses stated:
Out of the blue my dog began to whine for no apparent reason. Suddenly we heard a strange noise—some kind of hum. Two or three seconds later there was a flash—white at first, then blue, then red and white again. And then, about three minutes later, there was a terrific bang. The china all fell off the table...



Just over three minutes before the explosion, the first "terminator" was delivered to a waiting position for a final reconnaissance before striking. The object detected by the American military satellite was not a meteorite or bolide. Its instruments recorded the flight of the first terminator as it plunged down to intercept the Vitim meteorite, which gets its name from the place above which it exploded. A blinding flash lit up the taiga for a few instants with a bright light, like daylight, after which there came an explosion of such force that the blast wave, coming from a height of 32 kilometres, left all the dwellings for dozens of kilometres around without glass in the windows.
The researchers who made their way to the explosion site indicated by the US satellite saw pines on the way with their tops and branches torn off. Yet when the instruments indicated they had reached their destination, they could not find a meteorite crater or even anything remotely resembling one. There was no large-scale uprooting of trees at the site because the first explosion took place much higher up than that at Tunguska and successfully deflected the meteorite away from inhabited settlements. However, significant uprooting of trees was observed, especially at the top of hills, by hunters Dmitry Sasun and Piotr Fiodorchuk to the southeast of the place visited by the researchers.