There have been numerous theories proposed about what struck the taiga in central Siberia, causing millions of trees to topple over and many still-standing trees to lose all their branches. Many expeditions have looked for traces of what hit Earth and have not found much. There is no telltale meteor crater, and no clear evidence of a nuclear blast. In fact, at the epicenter, the trees were found to be still standing. Whatever hit Earth did not reach the ground. It exploded in the air above the ground.
In The Tunguska Mystery by Vladimir Rubtsov, the efforts put forth by generations of Russian scientists, technicians, and others are documented. What did they find? Was it a meteorite, as had first been thought? Was it an asteroid? Was it a comet? Some support the idea that this was not a "natural" event at all but one caused by the explosion of an alien spaceship trying to land on Earth. Is there any evidence for this? How did the Russian scientific and world community react to this theory?
The mystery has been very difficult to solve, but it is important – perhaps even urgent – to solve it. We live in a very violent universe, and we are extremely vulnerable to its vagaries. How can we prevent another "Tunguska" if we don't even know what it was? And next time, the event might not occur in a remote, barely inhabited region of Earth. It may take many thousands of lives and destroy whole cities.
Vladimir Rubtsov was born in 1948 in Kharkov, Ukraine. He received his Ph.D. degree in the philosophy of science from the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, having defended in 1980 the doctoral thesis "Philosophical and Methodological Aspects of the Problem of Extraterrestrial Civilizations," the first of its kind in the former USSR. Dr. Rubtsov has authored two monographs and some 120 scientific and popular science articles in the Soviet, post-Soviet and international press.
Vladimir Rubtsov
The Tunguska Mystery
2009. X, 318 p. 49 illus., 11 in color.
Hardcover. EUR 29.95, £ 26.99, $ 29.95
ISBN 978-0-387-76573-0