Article/Document:
The Tunguska Problem: An Anomaly Par Excellence
Vladimir V. Rubtsov, RIAP Bulletin, 2000, Vol. 6, No. 1
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Summary: What is important is, first of all, the special place occupied by the Tunguska problem both in science and in anomalistics. The volume of well-established empirical facts collected and analyzed in this field, as well as the number of serious theoretical models developed to account for these observations, probably outweighs all those found and proposed in other anomalistic fields put together.
This RB issue is again totally dedicated to the problem of the Tunguska explosion of 1908 (as was Vol. 4, No. 1-2). It is no mere chance that we return regularly to this question. The point is not only that the Tunguska problem has for many years been one of the favorite research subjects of our institute, or that there are among the members of its Scientific Council a few leading Tunguska researchers. What is important is, first of all, the special place occupied by the Tunguska problem both in science and in anomalistics. The volume of well-established empirical facts collected and analyzed in this field, as well as the number of serious theoretical models developed to account for these observations, probably outweighs all those found and proposed in other anomalistic fields put together.
A lot of the credit for this situation must go to the Interdisciplinary Independent Tunguska Expedition (IITE)—a unique team of scientists studying the problem in depth since the late 1950's. But it is as much due to the phenomenon itself. In its elusiveness the Tunguska space body (TSB) may be called a "perfect UFO": after being observed for several minutes, it vanished, almost literally, into thin air. No proven particle of its substance has ever been discovered. At the same time, the amount of the TSB's indirect traces, left after its explosion (beginning with the trees leveled over an area of about 2150 square kilometers and ending with mutations in the pines), also exceeds the entire quantity of all traces of UFO landings ever found (or thought to be found).
Actually, thanks to tens of millions of leveled trees, the reality of the Tunguska event is beyond question. Its anomalous nature was recognized even as far back as half a century ago (I refer to A. P. Kazantsev's fundamental recognition of the overground character of the explosion). The trouble is, however, that the real extent of this anomalousness is evident mainly in the interdisciplinary context. The student of the Tunguska problem has to consider the whole body of relevant data; only then will a realistic model of the phenomenon be seen through the apparent chaos of the highly inhomogeneous body of information. The latter covers many different scientific disciplines such as, for example, botany and ballistics, or geology and hematology.
A good case in point is the paper "A Possible Genetic Trace of the Tunguska Catastrophe of 1908?" by Y. G. Rychkov, published in this RB issue. Even without being a specialist in genetics and hematology, one can certainly understand its main conclusion: there exists in the Tunguska region a rare mutation of a human gene—probably going back to the explosion of 1908. To comprehend Y. G. Rychkov's arguments, one should have some understanding of these disciplines. To evaluate the weight of these arguments is hardly possible without a deep insight into them. But a specialist in, say, ballistics only rarely knows something of the fields of genetics and hematology; much less would he agree that results of hematological studies might be of any use for his modelling the TSB path.
Forty years of IITE activities have shown, however, that mutual understanding between specialists in various scientific disciplines is basically possible, even if not always easily attainable. The greatest problems appear to be connected with the current situation in the IITE itself (see the paper by V. K. Zhuravlev, also published in this RB issue). It seems that the free forms of organizing scientific thought found under a totalitarian society are swiftly collapsing in a society that is (economically and politically) much more free.
It would probably be naive to call upon the international scientific community to pay more attention to the Tunguska problem, and to ask it to strive for a serious program of funded investigations in this field. In fact, means for scientific research are not allocated purely on the grounds of scholarly considerations. The transition of individual scientists or scientific groups to new fields of research is also mediated by a number of additional factors... Even though, as distinct from the UFO problem (see RB, 1999, Vol. 5, No. 3-4, pp. 2-3), the sums needed to give the Tunguska studies a new impetus are not too great (I daresay that a reasonably low, but consistent annual funding would make it possible to solve the problem in 10-15 years), this question is in fact not so simple. But I am calling upon interested parties to begin with a "necessary minimum"—that is, with translating into English the most substantial works on the problem of the Tunguska meteorite published in Russia, making them in this way easily accessible (say, via the Internet) to scientists all over the world. The distributed database on this problem initiated by the IITE (see this RB issue, p. 15) is probably a good foundation for such a work. Although its estimated volume is rather considerable (some two million words, plus a lot of schematics, diagrams, tables, etc.), given the inclination, the work might be performed in a reasonably short time. Let then the international scientific community judge for itself whether or not the Tunguska problem is worthy of really active investigation. As for RIAP, we are continuing to publish the most significant results of serious studies in this field...
— Vladimir V. Rubtsov
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