Dinosaur Killers

by Popoff, Alexander

  Very large static charges can accumulate in space bodies and space vehicles due to extremely low humidity in extraterrestrial environments.

  The Earth is electrically charged and it acts as a spherical capacitor; Earth has a net negative charge, while positive charge resides in the atmosphere. There is about a 300,000-volt potential difference between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere.

  The ionosphere is a shell of electrons and electrically charged atoms and molecules that surrounds the Earth from about 50 km (31 miles) to more than 1,000 km (620 miles). It is charged by the Sun.

  The coma, cometary dust, and meteor grains were pumping great amounts of negatively charged particles from the cometary coma into the positively charged ionosphere, changing locally the electrostatic potential between the negatively charged Earth’s surface and the positively charged ionosphere, creating a powerful, pulsating electrostatic field. The ionosphere began oscillating (moving up and down), creating local but powerful atmospheric pulses, a strong wind, eerie sounds, etc.

  Witnesses reported that they first heard a strong clap of thunder, and after that they saw the fiery ball in the skies.

  The Earth’s tremors, the reports, the strange sounds like the flying of innumerous birds, something pushing people and their huts: these could only be explained by electrical effects caused by the charged coma and the plasma about the heated core of the cometary fragment.

  In the first place, there were thunder sounds and after several minutes the bolide appeared, ergo, the cometary fragment was thousands of kilometers away from Earth’s atmosphere. That means that the sounds and the electrostatic effects were not caused by the meteorite but by the coma, because the meteorite still wasn’t heated enough in order for the observers to see it and there was still no hot, electrically charged plasma around it. This wasn’t electrophic sounds, too, for the same reason; the fragment did not have an ionized trail in the wake. The sounds were produced by the aurora borealis (but witnesses couldn’t see it in the bright sunny morning) and by the electrostatic effects.

  The energetic particles that create the dazzling lights high up in Earth’s atmosphere (aurora borealis) sometimes also produce strangenoises such as claps, crackles, muffled bangs, sputtering, and static sounds.

  When an object travels faster than the speed of sound in Earth’s atmosphere, a shock wave can be created that can be heard as a sonic boom. This is one of the immense claps of thunder the locals heard.

  After the static electricity events, the evenks saw in the sky a bright light, “as bright as a sun.” They reported different colors of the object. The bolide moved in the sky for about 10 minutes and exploded. The shock wave knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometers away. There was a strong, hot wind. There was lightning and powerful thunder. It was so hot that people couldn’t stand their clothes.

  The newspaper Sibir reported, “We observed an unusual natural occurrence. In the north Karelinski village the peasants saw to the north west, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a ‘pipe,’ i.e. a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark spot was observed in the general direction of the bright body. It was hot and dry. As the body neared the ground (forest), the bright body seemed to smudge, and then turned into a billow of black smoke, and a loud knocking (not thunder) was heard, as if large stones were falling, or artillery was fired. All buildings shook. At the same time, the cloud started emitting flames of uncertain shapes. All villagers were stricken with panic and took to the streets, women cried, thinking it was the end of the world.”

  The majority of the witnesses who were hundreds of kilometers from an epicenter reported three powerful thunderous sounds; after that, they heard something like artillery or gun shooting. People near the epicenter reported a much richer picture of the events. They heard many thunderclaps, reports, and other sounds.

  The flight of meteorites through Earth’s atmosphere is accompanied by various electromagnetic phenomena. There is observed a characteristic radio emissions from the ionized meteor trails, deviations of a compass needle, mild electric shocks, etc.

  In the 1940s, the Soviet scientists I. Ostapovitch and A. Kalashnikov did successful experiments to discover the electromagnetic effects caused by overflying meteorites.

  Vladimir Solyanik at the Altai State Technical University was very intrigued by the fact that when the Sikhote-Alin meteorite flew over a technician repairing a telephone line on a pole, he got an electric shock. How could meteorites produce electricity?

  In 1951, Solyanik presented a paper at a meeting of the Commission on Comets and Meteors of the Astronomical Council of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, suggesting that meteorites can create an ionized trail in their wake and the electromagnetic field is strong enough even to destroy the meteor by an explosion, if there is an electrical discharge between the ionized hot air around the bolide and Earth’s surface. He suggested that the Tunguska meteorite exploded at high altitude due to electrical discharge.

  Alexander Nevsky, a Soviet rocket engineer, developed in the 1960s a similar hypothesis about the nature of the Tunguska explosion and, in 1963, he wrote a report for the Soviet Academy of Sciences suggesting that the explosive destruction of the Tunguska meteorite was caused by powerful electrical discharge. His work was published much later, only in 1978, in the academic Astronomical Journal, and in two magazines for popular science.

  In the beginning of the 1950s, Nevsky was part of a group of engineers who had to resolve the problem of disrupted radio communication when a spacecraft enters the atmosphere. The research team came to the conclusion that the hot plasma around the craft entering the atmosphere at very high speed disturbs the radio waves.

  The plasma is created because of the super-heated air around the ship. The energy is sufficient to cause atmospheric molecules to dissociate and their component atoms to become ionized. The spacecraft descends in a superheated shroud of incandescent plasma.

  Nevsky and the team also had to resolve the problem with the strong plasma flare around the space vehicles.

  The plasma stream is electrostatically charged and it concentrates at acute surface contours. The resultant effect is particularly intense local heating at the airframe’s leading edges. Experts suggested that this is almost certainly what inflicted catastrophic damage to space shuttle Columbia.

  The research on the plasma and the powerful electric discharges gave Alexander Nevsky an idea about the Tunguska mystery.

  He developed a theory of electric discharge explosion of meteorites, using his knowledge on space technology. The surface of any meteorite or spacecraft moving in the Earth’s atmosphere is heated to very high temperatures, causing powerful electron emission from the surface of the bodies. The electrons are carried away by the hot air stream and they accumulate into the wake, which becomes charged negatively, while the flying meteorite and the plasma around it becomecharged positively. The meteorite creates a giant plasma dipole.

  Meteorites traversing the atmosphere leave behind extended columns of elevated ionization known as the meteor plasma trail.

  Earth’s surface is charged negatively.

  The massive electrostatic discharge between the electrically charged meteorite and Earth’s surface causes the meteorite to explode. The temperature of the core can reach millions of degrees Celsius. Because the Tunguska meteorite started the explosion from the bottom part of the bolide, the debris accelerated in the opposite direction to Earth, and part of it was ejected high in the stratosphere. The air at such high altitudes is very thin, and the debris was dispersed at thousands of kilometers. That morning, there were reports of tens of falling meteorites in different places in Siberia, some of them as far as 1200 km.

  The debris of meteorites that explode at an altitude of 40 to 50 km can be partially sent back into space.

  According to the witnesses, suddenly a pill
ar of light connected Earth’s surface and the fiery meteorite, and it exploded high in the skies. Locals said that “the fiery ball with a tail” has turned into “a fiery column,” “a vertical fountain,” “a spear.” Some observed within the column of light numerous electric discharges with different colors: red, blue, yellow. The powerful electrical discharge (the column of light) was between the negatively charged planet and the positively charged meteorite. The pillar of light appeared instantly and disappeared a bit later. The electrical discharges within the light column would reach about 1 million amperes and had the effect of a bomb of several hundred kilograms of TNT.

  Witnesses reported that they observed from within the light pillar rods of fire, colorful ribbons, and objects of other forms of blue, yellow, and red colors. The coloration corresponds to different temperatures of the plasma in the discharge channels.

  There were numerous pits in the supposed impact area and the researchers thought these were small impact craters, but there was no meteorite debris. They were caused by the electric discharges. Nevsky suggested that there is a crater, too, but it has still not been discovered.

  According to some witnesses, at the epicenter before the explosion there was a hill with pine woods; after it, they found a lake and a swamp.

  The electric discharge thawed the permafrost beneath the surface and the water flooded the region, creating lots of swamps.

  For two days, the locals observed huge geysers, hot lakes, and ponds with boiling water. This “mystery” can be explained by the electric discharges that heated up the underground water, creating immense pressure.

  According to the witnesses, the thunderclaps lasted between 15 to 30 minutes. People often described them as cannon shooting. They were caused by multiple electric discharges. The thunder and reports occurred before and after the explosion of the meteorite.

  There were reports that in the trail of the wake there was no smoke but colorful ribbons, rods, etc. These were electrical discharges between the super-hot burning meteorite (positively charged) and the opposite end of the trail in the wake (negatively charged). It was like a giant dipole. An electric dipole is a separation of positive and negative charges.

  After the explosion, the ionized trail stayed for 10 to 20 minutes, and it was a source for multiple electric discharges.

  Nevsky said that there are many craters around the globe but no debris from meteorites; they were created by electrical discharges. Satellites, observatories, and military radar stations have observed and recorded airbursts of meteorites caused by electrical discharges.

  Nevsky suggested that the electric discharge explains all the mysteries of the Tunguska meteorite explosion.

  He said that the electrostatic field fully explains the appearance of light corona on the tree branches, i.e., St. Elmo’s fires. They also caused the skin burns, sometimes creating Lichtenberg figures—branching, tree-like, or fern-like patterns that are caused by the passage of high voltage discharges along the surface.

  Witnesses and researchers reported that there were many fresh lightning injuries on the trees, bark blown off the trees, fissures on the tree trunks, etc.

  I think that the meteoritic plasma theory can’t explain all the events before and after the entering of the comet into the atmosphere and the resulting buildup of electrical charges. These events, however, could have been caused by the ionized coma entering at a very high speed into Earth’s atmosphere and creating very high levels of static electricity.

  Bolides at supersonic speeds can give rise to sonic booms. This would happen before the explosion. This was one of the thunderclaps the witnesses heard. The other sounds were from the explosion of the meteorite and the electric discharges in the ionized meteoritic trail before and after the explosion.

  The shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.

  Most of the researchers think that the airburst occurred at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometers (3 to 6 miles). Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the impacting object’s size, between 60 and 190 m (200 to 620 feet).

  Mark Boslough suggested the meteorite would have been a factor of three or four times smaller in mass and perhaps 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter. He and his colleagues calculated that the airburst would have generated a supersonic jet of expanding fireball from superheated gas that was much stronger at the surface than previously thought.

  Boslough said that the explosion was not between 10 and 20 megatons, as previously thought, but more likely only 3 to 5 megatons. If we accept the electric discharge hypothesis, we should also calculate the energy released by the powerful electric discharge, plus the energy of the electrically charged coma. Many researchers calculated the entire energy output based on the aftermath on the environment, while Boslough makes computer simulation based only on the meteorite explosion.

  Most estimates of the energy of the blast range from as low as several tons to as high as 40 megatons of TNT. Most probably it was about 40 megatons of TNT because of the combined effects of the kinetic energy, the energy of the explosion, the energy of the electric discharge, the energy of the ionized coma of the comet, and the specific interaction between the ionosphere and the charged particles of the coma.

  The temperature in the electric discharge channels could reach several million degrees Celsius, and the pressure of hundreds of thousands atmosphere. 30 to 50 percent of the energy is in the form of radiation, including X-rays and neutrons. Sometimes neutron radiation is discovered also in lightning.

  After the Tunguska explosion, there were numerous reports of sick people and animals. Entire families and large amounts of animals died off within a year or two, probably of radiation sickness.

  According to the locals, at the epicenter there were pits deadly for everything entering into them; something was glowing in them at night. In one of pits locals saw stones that were glowing at night. Radioluminescence is the phenomenon by which light is produced in a material by bombardment with ionizing radiation.

  For long time there were no animals in the region of the epicenter, while the adjacent areas were bustling with life.

  The annual rings were broader since 1908 than in the years before the explosion. Some genetic mutations in the flora were reported also. The vegetation grew faster than usual. The mutations looked like after a nuclear explosion.

  Genetic mutation could be caused by the neutron and X-ray emissions, coronal discharges, but also by the powerful electric discharge itself.

  Near the epicenter, the magnetic field of the soil is oriented differently than in areas 30 to 40 kilometers away. This is the result of a powerful electric discharge that changed the magnetic field of the soils.

  Kulik, a Soviet researcher, reported that the burns on the trees were very different from the burns after forest fires. All signs pointed to a momentary high temperature, after which fire was not followed. It is estimated that the Tunguska airburst knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq. mi). Some trees were left standing, looking like telegraph poles because they had no branches and leaves; most had fallen in a strange, butterfly-like pattern, with roots pointing toward the epicenter.

  The surrounding trees for many kilometers in every direction were flattened like matchsticks.

  After the explosion there was a geomagnetic storm lasting for several hours, similar to the geomagnetic disturbances following a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere.

  In his story-hypothesis “The Explosion,” published in 1946, Alexander Kazantsev, engineer, science fiction writer, and ufologist, described the Tunguska event as the massive nuclear burst of an extraterrestrial spaceship.

  The geomagnetic disturbances were observed and recorded by the Magnetographic and Meteorological Observatory in Irkutsk and by other observatories in Russia and Europe. They were caused by the electrical processes in connection with the comet intrusion and explosion, the ionized coma, hot plasma, and electrical discharges.

  The a
irburst caused fluctuations in atmospheric pressure as far away as England.

  The strange light effects in the skies that started before the explosion reached their peak and lasted for a few days. For several nights after the impacts, there was a glowing red haze and silvery clouds in the atmosphere.

  The ice particles and ionized gases from the coma caused the eerie glow high in the night sky.

  The nights were so bright that people could read newspapers. Many people couldn’t sleep because of the light. At midnight in Greenwich a photo of the seaport was taken with a simple wooden box camera that required long exposure time because of the low sensibility of the plates.

  In Heidelberg, the atmospheric phenomena over Germany were observed and described by Max Wolf, then Director of the Heidelberg Observatory and a pioneer in the field of astrophotography. He reported that the sky after sundown became covered with unusual high-altitude cloudlets. They resembled cirri (high-altitude clouds composed of ice crystals and characterized by thin white filaments or narrow bands) but were much higher than the usual cirrus clouds. They looked rather like layers of smoke in the sky at sunset. The intensity of the nighttime luminosity was considerable. At midnight, one could easily make out the hands and figures of a pocket watch. At 1.15 there was as much light as in daytime.