Thread by @MarkBoslough

The title of the paper I’m critiquing is "A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea." I’m tagging it #TEHburst to help keep track of these threads. To understand the paper, we need talk about #Tunguska.

At this juncture I would like to invite any of my colleagues who are experts in any of the fields I’m talking about to jump in with comments. If I make more mistakes, get something wrong, or forget a detail that you know, please correct me.

I attended the "100 years of the Tunguska phenomenon: past, present, future” conference in Moscow on June, 2008. I learned a lot of science, but I also learned a lot of backstory about the history of the “Tunguska phenomenon,” which is what the Russians call it.

The event seems to be strongly embedded in Russian culture, as a matter of pride, identity, and fascination. So as the 100th anniversary approached, Russian media ramped up coverage, with TV and newspapers doing stories.

My new Italian friend, Luca Gasperini who was the lead author on a paper claiming that Lake Cheko was actually an impact crater, was interviewed on a TV show that referred to him as “man of the day.”

Our conference was held at the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences, with bizarre architecture that could have been designed by MC Escher. Very cool, but not very functional. We had a Russian/English interpreter but the audio didn’t always work.

One of the speakers was Georgy Grechko, a Soviet-era cosmonaut and national hero who held records for duration in outer space. Cosmonauts of that time have almost god-like status in Russia, as suggested by the monument to Yuri Gagarin outside the Academy building.

Grechko gave a long & rambling talk in Russian. I had no idea what he was saying because the interpreter’s feed was out. But he showed a lot of slides of cross sections of trees, and held up pieces of them. They were from near the epicenter of Tunguska, and had healed burn scars.

I was having with my Italian friends & Grechko came by. The Italians were star-struck & got autographs. I didn’t really know his significance at the time, but he’d also done research on Tunguska before he went to space, including on Lake Cheko that they'd just published about.

The Italian group’s senior leader was Giuseppe Longo, who I’d met in Bologna at a workshop he’d organized in 1996. As far as I know, he was the first westerner to do extensive field research at the site of the 1908 event (more on this in another thread someday, I hope).

I’ve used Longo’s maps for years to compare to the output of my airburst simulations. Here’s a slide from my presentation that week, based on an earlier version of the same simulation that the #TEHburst group used to argue for a Sodom-smiting airburst at #TallElHammam .

One our way to Tunguska, we laid over in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, which was celebrating the 100th anniversary with events and seminars. We went to the local library, which was hosting speakers and had a live interpreter.

One of the speakers was named Florenskiy, who (if I remember right) was the nephew of a prominent Soviet-era Tunguska researcher whose work is still widely cited. He shared recollections about his (I think) uncle during that time. defendgaia.org/bobk/tungmet.h…

The most fascinating talk was by a Siberian historian, whose name I wish I could remember. He gave a very long talk (by American standards) about the impact of the Tunguska phenomenon on Russian culture, which I learned was very significant and enduring.

I remember him explaining that Russian science doesn't traditionally have the strong separation between science & pseudoscience that western science does. Most of the early Tunguska research was driven by what westerners think of as pseudoscience & these notions persist.

I also earned that Sergei Korolev—the national hero who led the Soviet rocket program during the space race and was Werner von Braun’s counterpart—was an ardent UFO believer. This is still a mainstream notion among many Russians.

He was convinced that the Tunguska phenomenon was a UFO event and sent young cosmonauts (including Georgy Grechko) to train there, just as American astronauts were trained at Meteor Crater and the Ries Crater by Gene Shoemaker.

Maybe Russians call it “Tunguska phenomenon” to avoid taking a position. Due to the language barrier, I was unable to speak to many of the Russians who were at Kulik’s Tunguska camp. Our interactions mostly involved music & vodka. I suspect many were UFO believers.

Next thread: Tunguska fieldwork.

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