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Welcome to Interesting If True, the show that’s here to teach you something, but we won’t guarantee it’s worthwhile. I'm your host this week, Jenn and with me are all three of the Stooges: I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that Russia is basically Europe’s less-responsible Florida. I'm Shea, and this week I learned that you see Lesbian parents, and you see Gay parents but you don’t really see transparents. I'm Steve, and all trucks have beds, but not all beds are for sleeping… Camping is harder once you reach a certain age. Another rousing story of weird... history...eee! That’s right, I’m back and I need some Aaron-Russian-accent and possible pan-dimensional destruction. So with that in mind, June 30th of 1908 was a total blast in Eastern Europe. Don’t believe me? Just ask the thousands of people in the roughly 900 mile radius who witnessed a giant fireball and explosion. Well, they’re dead now, but we have over 700 first person accounts to check out. Of course, as you may know, I’m talking about the massive Siberian boom known as the Tunguska Event. (Named for the Stony Tunguska River, the area where it was centralized was so remote that the first scientists didn’t reach it until 1927.) It had the estimated explosive power 650 - 1,000x greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and flattened roughly 80 million trees. http://bit.ly/2KDaEgr http://bit.ly/2NsG1YI http://bit.ly/2NuBKEk This story has been making the rounds of ‘craziest unsolved mysteries’ for decades, and a lot of brains better than mine, this is still one of those stories without a real ending. Despite it being generally agreed upon a massive space rock was involved, even today there is no scientific consensus on what exactly happened. Farmer Sergei Semenov was having breakfast that morning only about 40mi from the epicenter: ‘‘I was sitting in the porch of the house at the trading station of Vanovara at 7 a.m. and looking towards the north . . . suddenly the sky appeared like it was split in two, high above the forest, the whole northern sky appeared to be completely covered with blazing fire. At that moment I felt a great wave of heat as if my shirt had caught fire… after a minute, there was a loud bang in the sky, and I could hear a mighty crash. Subsequently, I was fiercely thrown to the ground about 5-6 meters away from the house and for a minute or two I lost my consciousness.” The closest seismic recorders were over 600 miles away but picked up strong readings for over an hour. This same type of equipment registered tremors as far away as England (where the luminosity created from the event kept the skies so bright a person supposedly could ‘read a newspaper’ at midnight). More first hand reports describe a fireball in the sky, larger or similar to the size of the sun, a series of explosions “with a frightful sound”, followed by shaking of the ground as “the earth seemed to get opened wide and everything would fall in the abyss. Terrible strokes were heard from somewhere, which shook the air.” The indigenous Evenks and Yakuts believed a god or shaman had sent the fireball to destroy the world. Various meteorological stations in Europe recorded both seismic and atmospheric waves. Days later strange phenomena were observed in the sky of Russia and Europe, such as glowing clouds, colorful sunsets and a strange luminescence in the night. Luchetkan, a member of the indigenous Tungus people of the region, whose relative herded reindeer in the area of the blast, recalled, “Of some reindeer they found the charred carcasses; the others they did not find at all. Of the sheds nothing remained; everything was burned up and melted to pieces—clothes, utensils, reindeer equipment, dishes, and samovars…” Even today the area where the explosion itself happened, despite no actual impact crater, hasn’t fully recovered: So what exactly happened? There are a lot of good, and not so good,