The Tunguska Blast
Astronomically Explosive, Electric Evidence
Photo: Trees flattened and scorched by the 1908 explosion at Tunguska.
June 30th, 1908, a massive explosion rocked Tunguska, in Siberia, Russia. (Тунгуска, в Сиби́рь, Россия). The explosion, referred to as the Tunguska event, is estimated to have been equivalent to 3-5 million tons of TNT. It flattened about 830 square miles of forest (an area about 2/3 the size of Rhode Island). The shockwave knocked eye witnesses off of their feet.
For size comparison, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in early August of 1945, yielded explosions equivalent to approximately 16 to 20 thousand tons of TNT.
An asteroid (or comet), about 150-200 ft in diameter, is believed to have caused the explosion at Tunguska. However, the asteroid exploded several miles above the ground, and did not leave an impact crater.
Conventional scientific theory fails to explain how such an energetic explosion could be generated in midair, by a rock containing no explosives.
Spacecrafts re-entering Earth’s atmosphere experience tremendous heating due to their high speed. For example, NASA’s now-retired Space Shuttle re-entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at about 17,000 miles per hour. Its speed generated temperatures up to 3,000℉, prompting engineers to design the shuttle with a ‘skin’ of ceramic tiles, capable of withstanding such heat.
When traveling at high speeds, solid objects compress fluids (gases or liquids) ahead of them. If you’ve ever fallen when wakeboarding, tubing, etc. behind a boat, or have done a belly flop, you’re familiar with this phenomenon—the water didn’t feel so soft. Liquids are not completely incompressible, as they’re generally regarded to be. Because the temperature of a gas is proportional to its pressure, compression of atmospheric gases heats them, and also allows the air to generate tremendous friction on a spacecraft.
This compressive-heating and friction phenomenon is used to explain why a meteorite burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. Nonetheless, the concept fails to explain the Tunguska event. What could cause such a blast, about 200 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan?
Studying comets can shed light on this mystery. In the 18th-century (1700s), scientists began hypothesizing electrical explanations for cometary phenomena. In the early 20th century, eight-time Nobel Prize nominee Kristian Birkeland, who famously elucidated the electrical cause of the aurorae (the Northern and Southern Lights), and whose image is memorialized on the Norwegian 200-kroner bank note, further advanced these electrical cometary hypotheses.
Kristian Birkeland creating a “zodiacal-light ring” in his 1.18-inch-thick-glass terrella vacuum box (high voltage applied without magnetization in this image).
Aurorae-like Birkeland currents in Birkeland’s high-voltage terrella device, here magnetized.
Based on his laboratory experiments, Birkeland proposed that comets interact with electrically energetic “corpuscle rays” from the Sun, causing them to produce explosive jets of eroded material. Herein lies our first clue to the nature of the mysterious Tunguska event.
Although Birkeland was on the right track in explaining comets’ tails, science often takes one step forward and then two steps back: More recently, the predominate scientific explanation has been the unpredictive theory (i.e. failing to make accurate predictions) that comets are ‘dirty snowballs.’ These are said to essentially melt, and sublimate (ice turning directly into gas) when approaching the Sun, thereby producing their tails.
Regarding the prevailing ‘snowball’ theory, well-known English mathematician and astronomer Raymond A. Lyttleton, who wrote The Comets and Their Origin (1953), said:
“The remarkable properties of comets are not even remotely explicable by any of the numerous ad hoc assumptions of ‘modern’ comet theory.”
The extreme luminosity of some comets is one glaring problem (duh-dun, tssss) confounding the ‘snowball’ idea. How could such a small body in space glow so brightly as to be seen illuminating the night sky? One such example is the Great Comet of 1811-1812, referred to by Tolstoy (Толстой) in War and Peace (Война и мир). Pierre Bezukhov (Пьер Безу́хов) gazes at the comet pensively, having just fallen in love with Natasha Rostova (Наташа Ростова):
“It was clear and frosty. A dark, starlit heaven looked down on the black roofs and the dirty, dusky streets. Only by looking up at the sky could Pierre distance himself from the disgusting squalor of all earthly things as compared with the heights to which his soul had now been taken. As he drove into the Arbat a vast firmament of darkness and stars opened out before Pierre's eyes. And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world [Tolstoy relays how people speculated that Napoleon was the Antichrist]. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre's eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre's newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life.”
—Leo Tolstoy, Volume 2, Part V, Chapter 22, War and Peace (1868-1869), Anthony Briggs’ translation, Penguin Classics, 2005.
Interestingly, in William H. Smyth’s drawing of the Great Comet of 1811-1812 (below), he depicted glowing material ahead of the comet’s body.
Drawing of the Great Comet of 1811-1812, by astronomer William H. Smyth (1788-1865). Note the emphatically protruding coma ahead of the comet’s nucleus. The comet was visible for 505 days, so surely, being an astronomer, Smyth drew it accurately.
Sublimated material reflecting sunlight seems to fall short as an explanation for brightness described by the master Tolstoy as a “radiant star.” It is also insufficient to explain an astronomer’s depiction of the Great Comet with a well-defined projection of material ahead of it.
Skeptics will argue that ice is very reflective, and that the planets sometimes look like stars; but the question is still worthy of serious consideration, especially considering that comets are not made of ice. When the Rosetta spacecraft completed its observation of comet 67P in 2014, it revealed* a rocky surface, visibly no different than an asteroid (*see linked images here; I’ll show more evidence of the rocky nature of comets).
Venus is referred to as the “Morning Star,” and is the brightest planet in the Solar System. In writings and art depicting historical events that occurred prior to 1600 BC, there is no record of Venus existing. In ancient times, Venus was described as a giant comet, and to this day sometimes displays a cometary tail. For example, the European Space Agency’s [ESA] Venus Express spacecraft observed Venus producing a tail at least twice as long as the diameter of the planet. And although mainstream science is still reluctant to admit the shortcomings of prevailing cometary theory, it is notable that the ESA refers to comets’ “ion tails”—not water vapor tails, but ion tails—as in the ions of a plasma (lightning is an example of a plasma, as is the surface of the Sun):
“…Venus Express saw the planet’s ionosphere balloon outwards on the planet’s ‘downwind’ nightside, much like the shape of the ion tail seen streaming from a comet …”—ESA
The gas giants Jupiter and Saturn may be considered to be, or to once have been, brown dwarf stars. So, two more of the brightest planets, that may be mistaken for stars, actually produce their own light! This is important for understanding the electrical nature of comets, and thereby understanding the Tunguska event.
Here is a profound quote regarding Jupiter, from the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences:
“The inner planets do not emit any of their own light. Instead, they are visible because they reflect sunlight. This is not strictly true for Jupiter. [I would argue its not true for Venus either, as we’ve briefly examined.] If you measure how much total light it emits, it is more than the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet. Like the persistence of the Great Red Spot, which suggests some internal mechanism is providing energy to the cloud layers, the fact that Jupiter is giving off more light than it receives also suggests there is some internal energy generation.”
Is it “internal energy generation,” or is the energy supplied by external means other than sunlight?
Regarding Saturn, Chris Deziel, writing for sciencing.com, tells us:
“The planet Saturn not only reflects sunlight better than most of the terrestrial planets in the solar system, but it radiates with its own light. …Although Saturn reflects sunlight, it also produces from two to three times as much energy as it receives from the sun, which is even more energy than Jupiter produces.”
Likewise, although Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye, Britannica says:
“As a result of processes not fully understood, Neptune emits more than twice the energy that it receives from the Sun.”
Uranus, on the other hand, to our knowledge, does not radiate energy in excess of that which it receives from sunlight. Might this be related to its unique sideways tilt?
And could the reason that these “processes [are] not fully understood” (as stated by Britannica above) be that most scientists are looking at the Universe through the blinding lens of a failed paradigm? Is it not naïve to view planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and small bodies like asteroids and comets, as isolated bodies?
By the way, Mars might also be mistaken for a star, but you may have already observed that of the planets I’ve mentioned, when viewed with the naked eye or low magnification, Mars is the one that is most obviously not a star, albeit bright. It looks more like a tiny reddish moon.
Let’s consider that bodies in space are not isolated. Images from probe spacecrafts, showing counterrotating currents and an anomalous hexagon at the poles of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, are strong evidence for the view that Birkeland currents (named for Kristian Birkeland) entering the planets’ poles, power these planets from without, not from within. From this electrical perspective, the Earth is likewise powered by the Sun, thereby generating Earth’s aurorae, and internal thermal energy and magnetic field (in-fact, the timing of earthquakes and volcano eruptions is associated with intense solar activity); the Sun is powered by larger-scale Birkeland currents from our Solar System’s arm of the Milky Way; and the Milky Way is powered by even larger, intergalactic Birkeland currents, which all galaxies are positioned upon, and which comprise the ‘cosmic web.’
GIF: Counterrotation visible at the North Pole of Jupiter. Watch in the bottom right quadrant for a dark spot on a counterrotating ring.
GIFs: Mysterious hexagon and rotation at the North Pole of Saturn, possibly resulting from Birkeland currents. It’s apparent that Birkeland currents exist ubiquitously, at all scales. Could this hexagon shape arise in a way related to the way the hexagonal shape formed by a snowflake or a fruit arises?
Electrical currents exist in the air. It was recently discovered that spiders use these currents to fly. It is not unreasonable to think these currents are likely involved in the organization of matter—after all, protons and electrons are charged particles.
Furthermore electric fields ***were shown in this study*** to influence cellular division. And I’ve noticed an uncanny resemblance between the spindle apparatus, involved in lining up chromosomes during cell division, and magnetic field lines (see images below).
By the way, magnetic fields and electric fields always coexist. This is the principle behind a generator or an electric guitar (see my article Amazing Megaliths and the Beautiful Cosmos). Mainstream scientists acknowledge that planets have magnetic fields, but most ignore the fact that that necessarily implies the presence of electricity penetrating the poles of Earth and other planets.
Image (above): Cell division of animal cell (during metaphase), showing the spindle apparatus (green), chromosomes in blue. The spindle apparatus looks exactly like the magnetic field lines showed by iron filings in the image below. To me, this implies that cell division involves polarization of the cell, in the same orientation as the N and S poles of the bar magnet’s signature below.
I’ve somewhat strayed from my theme, but not without adding support for the ubiquitous nature of electromagnetism, which is key to my argument. Recognizing that electromagnetism is the most important force in nature is critical to shift science into a much-needed new paradigm. This ‘new’ paradigm will be retro in some respects, leaning on ideas that arose before the pollution that is relativity. Relativity is worse than a big step backwards—it has led us astray. I believe the primary reason for relativity’s persistence is the funding problem pervading modern science: Simply put, saying that Einstein was wrong is the best way to lose, or not receive, scientific funding. It’s a cult of personality, based on bogus ‘mathemagics,’ as Stephen Crothers refers to relativistic ‘math.’ (In the presentation linked here, Crothers quips, “We get people saying things like, ‘See that part you can’t see? That’s a black hole.’”)
Image: Birkeland currents of the cosmic web, as seen by modern x-ray imaging. X-ray imaging allows us to see plasma that, unlike lightning, is not fully ionized. Because it is not fully ionized, it is not in ‘glow mode,’ but is still highly conductive, especially in the absolute-zero cold of space. The bright spots in the image are distant galaxies. All galaxies are positioned along these currents like beads on a string. The currents’ electromagnetism is what causes galaxies to all rotate at the same speed, regardless of their size. Electromagnetism is 10^36 times more powerful than gravity, but most scientists are unfamiliar with these concepts and still insist that undetectable ‘black holes,’ with nonsensical ‘infinite density’ and ‘infinite gravity’ are what allow the outer arms of massive galaxies to rotate at speeds inexplicable from a gravitational perspective using real math.
In his controversial book Worlds in Collision (1949), ‘heretic’ against scientism Dr. Immanuel Velikovskyy (Иммануи́л Велико́вский) first proposed that Venus entered our Solar System as a giant comet, around 1600 BC. This provides a partial explanation for why Venus orbits around the Sun in the opposite direction of the other planets.
Velikovsky believed that electromagnetics play a primary role in astronomical phenomena. He was too brilliant and ahead of his time, and his ideas were largely rejected. Velikovsky was born in the Russian Empire, and was educated in Moscow, Montpellier, Edinburgh, and Vienna. He worked as a psychiatrist, psychologist, and general practitioner of medicine, and was a historian with extraordinarily broad scientific knowledge. Velikovsky commissioned Albert Einstein to work with him on a compilation of scientific papers called the Scripta that were pivotal in the establishment of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and interestingly, Worlds in Collision was the only book open on Einstein’s desk when he died.
Raymond A. Lyttleton, who as I mentioned, decried modern cometary theory, also called the hypothesis of the so-called ‘Oort Cloud’ “a piece of trash.” The unfounded ‘Oort Cloud,’ which is matter-of-factly claimed to be the origin of comets, is said to be located in the outer reaches of the Solar System. As noted by the late Wal Thornhill (1942-2023), Lyttleton’s assessments were unfortunately ignored. Thornhill was an independently-thinking gladiator of physics, who was inspired by Velikovsky. Thornhill opened my eyes by stoically calling Einstein’s relativity ideas “nonsense.” [For information irrevocably falsifying relativity, see the brilliant work of mathematician Stephen Crothers, physicist and John Deere GPS satellite algorithm writer Ronald R. Hatch, and ex-NASA physicist Dr. Ed Dowdye ( RIP ; 1943-2020 ), and see my article here: https://joebender.substack.com/p/amazing-megaliths-and-the-beautiful].
Although Lyttleton was ignored, he was right.
Video (above): Wal Thornhill gives an excellent presentation on electric comets and asteroids in 2014
Additional video by Matt Finn, about Wal Thornhill’s predictions for the Deep Impact mission
Ralph Juergens’ electrical model of the Sun, and Wal Thornhill’s further development of Juergens’ concepts, provide a compelling alternative explanation to the repeatedly falsified ‘snowball’ concept, by building on Birkeland’s work. I’ll provide a few select examples of the direct observational evidence that has been mounting since the mid 1980s, which supports Thornhill’s view, contradicts the ‘snowball’ hypothesis, and provides compelling insight into the cause of the Tunguska event.
According to the model Juergens developed in the 1970s, the Sun is a positively charged body, conducting negative charge from its galactic environment, and thereby producing a glowing electrical discharge.
Video: Stuart Talbott discusses the electrical nature of comets, and Ralph Juergens’ electric Sun model
Thornhill extrapolated this concept, noting that the mainstream, key supposition that bodies in space—whether stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, meteors, etc.—have a benignly balanced charge relative to each other, cannot be correct. Like Birkeland, Thornhill believed comet tails were produced by electrical activity.
Extending Juergens’ insight, Thornhill proposed that comet tails are produced by a discharge resulting from the comet’s charge balance (+/-) differing from that of the electrical environment surrounding the Sun. This is analogous to the luminous static zap experienced when your finger gets close to a doorknob, albeit in the case of comets it occurs via a slower transfer of charge, by non-glowing (partially ionized) plasma in the superconductivity-favoring cold of space.
Direct evidence refuting mainstream comet theory was produced by the Stardust mission: Passing through the tail of comet Wild 2 in 2004, the Stardust spacecraft collected about 1 million dust particles up to 1 mm in diameter, and returned them to Earth in 2006. The sample particles were replete with silica, and indicated the comet’s composition was rocky, like that of an asteroid. As I’ll soon make more apparent for you the reader, this evidence of alike composition provided an indirect clue elucidating the cause of the explosion at Tunguska.
Photo: Dust particles from the coma (i.e. the tail) of comet Wild 2, captured in aerogel by the Stardust spacecraft
Another problematic observation for conventional comet theory was asteroid 3200 Phaethon developing a comet-like tail as it approached the Sun, as noted by Wal Thornhill in his 2014 presentation above. Asteroids, such as the one that exploded at Tunguska, supposedly differ in composition from comets. But do they really? Abundant evidence indicates they are made of the same rocky materials.
One primary distinction Thornhill points out between the two types of bodies, is the elliptical orbit characteristic of comets, which causes them to approach the Sun in a more direct path than most asteroids, which take more of a round-about path around the Sun. The highly elliptical/eccentric path of comets causes their distance from the Sun to change relatively more quickly, which may explain their more visible electrical interaction.
Some of the most telling direct evidence of an electrical cause of the Tunguska event came about in July 2005, when the Deep Impact spacecraft shot its impactor probe into the surface of comet Tempel 1. The projectile probe approached the comet at a speed of 6.3 miles per second (10 times the speed of a faster-than-average rifle bullet). The 820-lb impactor probe contained a 220-lb slug of pure copper at its core, designed to penetrate deep into the comet’s surface, so that the Deep Impact craft could record the result, and thereby study the comet’s composition.
Deep Impact’s mission was announced four years before the spacecraft’s probe struck comet Temple 1. Following the announcement, Wal Thornhill successfully predicted the probe would produce an explosive discharge when it neared the surface of the comet. He wrote at the time: “The energetic effects of the encounter should exceed that of a simple physical impact, in the same way that was seen with comet Shoemaker Levy-9 at Jupiter.”
An extraordinarily energetic interaction had previously been observed when comet Shoemaker Levy-9 neared the atmosphere of Jupiter. Bright flashes of cosmic lighting, between the comet and atmosphere below, destroyed the comet before it entered the atmosphere.
Sure enough, Thornhill’s prediction came true. The Deep Impact Wikipedia page notes: “The impact generated an unexpectedly large and bright dust cloud, obscuring the view of the impact crater.” Not only did the “unexpectedly large and bright dust cloud” confirm Wal Thornhill’s prediction, an even more telling confirmation of his prediction is found on the Mission Results page of the Deep Impact Team:
“As the impactor entered the nucleus, or shortly thereafter, a brilliant flash, lasting less than two tenths of a second, appeared probably as the impactor and part of Tempel 1 vaporized. The first flash was followed by a second presumably originating deeper within the comet.”
Note there were two flashes, and the uncertainty of exactly when the first flash arose. Due to the impactor traveling at ten times the speed of a particularly fast rifle bullet, or more than thirty times the speed of a typical handgun bullet (the gun-illiterate Deep Impact team referred to the impactor as a “bullet,” which is an insufficient analogy by an order of magnitude), the camera’s frame rate and resolution could not allow the team to determine if the first flash actually arose at initial impact with the nucleus (i.e. the body of the comet; the tail is technically called the coma), or if it occurred prior to impact, which they did not expect like Thornhill did. As you can see here in the screenshot below (linked here) the first flash does not appear to be from an impact, but rather looks like a flash of light, as we would expect from a burst of electricity.
Photos: Deep Impact impact. Note that the initial flash (second frame from top left) has a symmetrical cross shape, like a camera flash or street lamp in a photo.
It also is compelling to note that according to the Deep Impact team, “A camera on the impactor captured and relayed images of the comet's nucleus until just seconds before the collision.” Did the camera stop working due to an electrical shock?
The Deep Impact team also wrote on their website factsheet what they expected of the impactor: “The crater produced is expected to range in size from that of a house to that of a football stadium, and two to fourteen stories deep…” Elsewhere on the website they said they expected “[The crater] should be a few hundred meters in diameter….” Instead, it only created a very minimal depression in the comet, which should have been expected, since it is a rock, not a ‘dirty snowball.’
Now, how does this all relate to the explosion at Tunguska? As we’ve seen, due to bodies having differing electrical charge balance, when they get close to each other, they exchange charge in the form of a static shock. This may happen slowly, as in the case of a comet’s tail being produced by a continuous discharge scouring effect, or may be more rapid and directly analogous to your finger getting zapped by a metal doorknob. This second, instantaneous type of discharge is like lightning. I believe this is what caused the asteroid to explode over Tunguska, with such incredible force. This was in-fact seen on a massive scale when Shoemaker Levy-9 neared the atmosphere of Jupiter. See my report Electricity from Space here, for more information about lightning above the clouds/atmosphere.
Not only does lightning represent a massive transfer of energy, high-voltage discharges are proven to transmute elements via nuclear fusion. The is the focus of the SAFIRE project, which utilizes Ralph Juergens’ aforementioned electrical model of the Sun, in a laboratory device similar to Birkeland’s terrella, to release an enormous amount of energy, while transmuting elements via nuclear fusion. Elements that were not added to the chamber arise via fusion. This is a promising technology for clean energy production without the use of radioactive fuel. Another example of transmutation is a tree that was turned to silica by a downed power-line in Australia (tree at 18:00 mark in video); however, in this case it’s unclear how much energy may have been released by the event.
Here’s one more must-see piece of evidence showing a meteor explosion similar to the the one believed to have occurred at Tunguska: Watch the shocking (duh-dun tssss) video below, to see how a smaller meteor exploded over Russia in 2013. Bad jokes aside, the terrifying explosion produced a shockwave that broke windows and injured more than 1,000 people, mostly with shattered glass.
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For more on this subject, and how interplanetary lightning likely created the Valles Marineris on Mars—the largest known canyon in the Solar System, which stretches 1/3 of the way around the planet—see my article here: https://joebender.substack.com/p/amazing-megaliths-and-the-beautiful