Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Its been a while since we last mentioned the Tunguska Blast – the 1908 mid-air explosion that happened over Russia and pretty much leveled every single tree that ever existed. Now a scientist has found something at the site – something he says proves that the blast occurred because benevolent aliens threw their spaceship in front of an enormous space-rock to save the earth from total destruction.

The Tunguska Blast happened in 1908 and leveled hundreds of square miles of trees. Some say it was caused by a mini black hole that briefly developed over a forest. Others say the massive devastation was caused by Nikola Tesla doing a practice run of his all-powerful death-ray.

It’s considered one of the great mysteries of the modern era because until now nobody has been 100% sure what happened.  Now somebody is sure though. They’re not necessarily right, mind you, but in their mind they’ve got all the confusion sorted out. He says it was a spaceship throwing itself in front of a meteor to spare human civilisation. His proof is quartz crystals he found at the site that have little etchings on them.

Fox News may clarify things for you:

“Dr. Yuri Labvin, president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, insists that an alien spacecraft sacrificed itself to prevent a gigantic meteor from slamming into the planet above Siberia on June 30, 1908. The result was was the Tunguska event, a massive blast estimated at 15 megatons that downed 80 million trees over nearly 100 square miles. Eyewitnesses reported a bright light and a huge shock wave, but the area was so sparsely populated no one was killed…Labvin thinks quartz slabs with strange markings found at the site are remnants of an alien control panel, which fell to the ground after the UFO slammed into the giant rock.”

And here’s what Labvin told Macedonia Online, – the news source that originally ran the story:

“Aliens downed Tunguska meteorite to protect our planet from devastation, stated Russian scientist Yuriy Lavbin about the 100 year old mystery surrounding the massive Siberian explosion. He showed 10 quartz crystals that he found at the place of the meteorite’s crash. Several of the crystals have holes in between, so they can be united in a chain. What could this chain serve for? Besides, some crystals have strange drawings on them. We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals. We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”

Off the bat let us just say that the ‘ferrum silicate only found in space’ argument is weak. After all – we’re talking about a meteor here – and where do they come from? If you answered Thailand there you’re wrong. The presence of something like that would certainly not indicate a spaceship. Also – ‘Ferrum Silicate’ doesn’t seem to exist. Go ahead – Google it.

Next – the website that originally ran the story, although it’s clearly from Macedonia, is written in English, and is apparently on a strict budget that doesn’t include editors of any sort. It doesn’t seem to us that a low brow and largely unknown website without any kind of financial backing whatsoever would be the first place a scientist of one sort or the other would run with earth-shattering news.

Also – what’s the deal with all those control board crystals having holes drilled in them so they can be united in a chain? Are the aliens plummeting through interstellar space using a caveman calculator as their chief navigational tool? Really?

Lastly, does the great scientist Dr. Yuri Labvin exist anywhere outside of this story? Yeah – Google him too. We couldn’t find anything else. Granted we didn’t look farther than page two of the search results, but still.

Still – the thought of a bunch of aliens on a spaceship yelling something like ‘For the Queen!’ just before throwing themselves in front of sure-death is amusing.

We bet it probably happened. We honestly do.

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The Tunguska Blast may not have been a big deal had Bruce Willis been alive to save the world from it. Well, we say the world, but really we mean over 80 million trees, a bunch of wildlife, and definitely anyone who was out jogging in 1908 Russia miles away from the closest anything at all.

You see, on June 30, 1908 in Russia there was a huge explosion way out in the middle of nowhere. It leveled 2,150 square kilometres (830 square miles) of trees – and for the longest time nobody knew what happened. Even after all this time nobody’s absolutely sure – but science has a pretty good idea. And they don’t think it was a temporary miniature black hole, an exploding alien space ship or Paul Bunyan with something to prove.

The Tunguska Blast was a major catastrophe in Russian history, one that can only be solved with educated scientific guesses and endless hypotheses.

And eyewitness reports like this one from a person named Chuchan of Shanyagir tribe:

“We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, ‘Can you hear all those birds flying overhead?’ We were both in the hut, couldn’t see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down.

“Chekaren and I got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap.

“This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one! “Chekaren and I had some difficulty getting out from under the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees. “We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires.

“Suddenly Chekaren yelled ‘Look up’ and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder. “Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.”

The strangest thing about the blast is there was no resulting crater. There was no impact, there was no ground zero and there was no smoking volcano. Nothing. Nobody – and we do mean nobody, knew what it was. The blast was 100 times more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, yet it had no obvious cause. Confusing, right?

Here’s what a CNN article said of the matter in an article 100 years later:

“Despite countless investigations, the so-called Tunguska Event remains one of the 20th century’s greatest enigmas — seized upon by mystics, UFO enthusiasts and scientists as evidence of angry gods, extraterrestrial life or the impending threat of a cosmic collision.

“But says Stanislav Krivyakov, who has spent the past 35 years investigating the Siberian blast, despite intense interest in the event — which has featured in several episodes of “The X-Files” — no conclusive evidence has been found to support any theory.”

Like it says there – paranormalists have seized on the blast claiming it to be evidence of aliens, teleportation or something worse. Some, however, believe the whole thing was caused far more locally – by Thomas Edison’s rival Nikola Tesla. According to ArmageddonOnline.org:

“It has also been suggested that the Tunguska explosion was the result of an experiment by Nikola Tesla at his Wardenclyffe Tower, performed during Robert Peary’s second North Pole expedition. Tesla had claimed that the tower could be used to transmit electromagnetic energy across large distances. The Wardenclyffe Tower was designed to utilize the largest version of Tesla’s patented magnifying transmitter, popularly known as the Tesla Coil, to transmit electrical power into the earth as well as the upper atmosphere.

“In 1908, Tesla allegedly sent a cryptic communication to the American explorer, Robert E. Peary, advising him to be on the alert and make notes of any unusual auroral phenomena encountered as he attempted to reach the North Pole. Allegedly Tesla fired up his transmitter for a trial run and attempted to generate and direct his ethereal oscillations toward the North Pole in the hope of stimulating the polar aurora and perhaps attracting world attention to his invention. It is alleged that Tesla’s trial run coincided with the Tunguska event in Siberia.”

This theory is quickly discounted by the scientific community, but it seems as good as any other explanation, if you ask us. The point is nobody knows exactly what happened, and no inquiring scientific minds bothered to check it out until years after the explosion occurred.

In a side note – did you know the Tunguska Blast was mentioned in Ghost Busters? Dan Aykroyd refers to the demise of Gozer and all that accompanied it as something like the greatest paranormal event since the Tunguska Blast of 1909.

His quote was a year late. That’s all we remember.