IT'S just after 7 on a quiet Tuesday morning in June 1908 when a dazzling fireball streaks across the Siberian sky. Minutes later an immense blast topples 80 million trees and knocks people off their feet 60 kilometres away. It's the violent end of an alien dogfight, with one spaceship destroyed in mid-air and the other turning and vanishing into space.
His voice trembles as 79-year-old retired Russian physicist Viktor Zhuravlyov tells me this rather unorthodox theory of what happened that day at Tunguska. The enigma has fascinated scientists for more than a century. Something exploded over the Siberian taiga – but what?
Back in 1959, when he had just graduated from Tomsk State University, Zhuravlyov joined one of the earliest expeditions to the region, marching for three days from the nearest town of Vanavara to get there. But neither he nor the hundreds of other researchers who have visited ...
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