The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  He also quotes from the experience of a friend he calls A, who was on his way back from the station when he experienced mild indigestion. The thought occurred to him

  It belongs only to my body and is real only to the physical not-self. There is no need for the self to feel it . . . Even as I thought this the pain disappeared; that is, it was in some way left behind . . . the sensation of “rising up within” began . . . First there is the indescribable sensation in the spine, as of something mounting up, a sensation which is partly pleasure and partly pleasure and partly awe . . . This is accompanied by an extraordinary feeling of bodily lightness, of well-being and effortlessness . . . Everything was becoming “more”, everything was going up to another level.

  Here it sounds as if A’s “self number three” had decided to actively intervene, and the result was a sense of leaving the pain behind.

  If there is any general conclusion to be drawn from these experiences of the “undoubted queerness of time”, it is this: that we are somehow mistaken in our natural and very understandable assumption that the physical world is the basic and perhaps the only reality. Experiences of “time slips” and of precognition suggests that when the mind can slip into another “gear” it escapes its normal enslavement to time, and achieves a state of serene detachment “above” time.

  The puzzling thing about such a notion is its implication that time is somehow unreal, or at least less real than we take it to be. Common sense and science are in agreement that the future cannot be predicted with any precision because it has not yet happened. Every “cause” in the world of the present moment could have many different effects. When a gas is heated its molecules begin to move faster, and an increasing number of collisions will occur. Each of these collisions causes the molecules to change course, and so leads to a different set of collisions. So it would be virtually impossible to determine which molecules will be colliding with others in ten minutes’ time; everything depends upon chance. In the same way, the five billion or so people in the world at the present moment will interact in unpredictable ways, and will determine what is happening in a week from now. In the case of the gas molecules, a sufficiently complex computer could in theory predict what will be happening a week from now; but no computer could make similar predictions about people.

  Experiences of time slips and of precognition contradict this assertion. They clearly imply that in some sense the future is to some extent predetermined, as if it had already happened. This is, in fact, precisely what the materialist would assert. Free will is an illusion; therefore human beings obey mechanical laws. Yet apparently this cannot be entirely true, or Priestley’s mother would not have been able to prevent her baby from drowning. In fact, the very existence of precognition means that the future cannot be entirely determined, for to know the future in advance is to be able, to some extent, to alter it. Even though Michael Shallis obeyed his compulsion to go to look for the book, he had nevertheless made an effort not to do so – thereby revealing that he was not completely “determined”. (And, presumably, he would have been able to overcome the compulsion if he had felt strongly enough about it – for example, if his sense of déja-vu had warned him that he would meet with a serious accident on his way to his office.)

  It is a disconcerting thought: that life is somehow basically “scripted”. But what seems to be more important is the recognition that, with the right kind of effort, we can depart from the “script”. Priestley takes issue with Professor Gilbert Ryle’s view – in The Concept of Mind – that man is merely a living body, not a body controlled by a self or soul. Ryle calls this view “the ghost in the machine”. Experiences of “time in disarray” seems to support Priestley and contradict Ryle: in fact, to confirm the view that we have at least three “selves” as distinct from the physical body, and that the third of these selves corresponds roughly to what Kant (and Husserl) meant by the “transcendental ego”, or “the self that presides over consciousness”.

  56

  The Great Tunguska Explosion

  On 30 June 1908 the inhabitants of Nizhne-Karelinsk, a small village in central Siberia, saw a bluish-white streak of fire cut vertically across the sky to the north-west. What began as a bright point of light lengthened over a period often minutes until it seemed to split the sky in two. When it reached the ground it shattered to form a monstrous cloud of black smoke. Seconds later there was a terrific roaring detonation that made the buildings tremble. Assuming that the Day of Judgment had arrived, many of the villagers fell on their knees. The reaction was not entirely absurd; in fact, they had witnessed the greatest natural disaster in the earth’s recorded history. If the object that caused what is now known as “the Great Siberian Explosion” had arrived a few hours earlier or later it might have landed in more heavily populated regions, and caused millions of deaths.

  As it later turned out, the village of Nizhne-Karelinsk had been over 200 miles away from the “impact point”, and yet the explosion had been enough to shake debris from their roofs. A Trans-Siberian express train stopped because the driver was convinced that it was derailed; and seismographs in the town of Irkutsk indicated a crash of earthquake proportions. Both the train and the town were over 800 miles from the explosion.

  Whatever it was that struck the Tunguska region of the Siberian forestland had exploded with a force never before imagined. Its shock-wave travelled around the globe twice before it died out, and its general effect on the weather in the northern hemisphere was far-reaching. During the rest of June it was quite possible to read the small print in the London Times at midnight. There were photographs of Stockholm taken at one o’clock in the morning by natural light, and a photograph of the Russian town of Navrochat taken at midnight looks like a bright summer afternoon.

  For some months the world was treated to spectacular dawns and sunsets, as impressive as those that had been seen after the great Krakatoa eruption in 1883. From this, as well as the various reports of unusual cloud formations over following months, it is fair to guess that the event had thrown a good deal of dust into the atmosphere, as happens with violent volcanic eruptions and, notably, atomic explosions.

  Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Great Siberian Explosion was that no one paid much attention to it. Reports of the falling object were published in Siberian newspapers but did not spread any further. Meteorologists speculated about the strange weather, but no one came close to guessing its real cause.

  It was not until the Great War had been fought, and the Russian Revolution had overthrown the tsarist regime that the extraordinary events of that June day finally reached the general public. In 1921, as part of Lenin’s general plan to place the USSR at the forefront of world science, the Soviet Academy of Sciences commissioned Leonid Kulik to investigate meteorite falls on Soviet territory. It was Kulik who stumbled upon the few brief reports in ten-year-old Siberian newspapers that finally led him to suspect that something extraordinary had happened in central Siberia in the summer of 1908.

  Leonid found the reports confusing and contradictory. None of them seemed to agree quite where the object had exploded. Some even claimed that the “meteor” had later been found. But when his researchers began to collect eyewitness reports of the event Kulik became convinced that whatever had exploded in the Tunguska forest was certainly not a normal meteorite.

  These reports described how the ground had opened up to release a great pillar of fire and smoke which burned brighter than the sun. Distant huts were blown down and reindeer herds scattered. A man ploughing in an open field felt his shirt burning on his back, and others described being badly sunburnt on one side of the face but not the other. Many people claimed to have been made temporarily deaf by the noise, or to have suffered long-term effects of shock. Yet, almost unbelievably, not a single person had been killed or seriously injured. Whatever it was that produced the explosion had landed in one of the few places on earth where its catastrophic effect was minimized. A few hours later, and it could have oblit
erated St Petersburg, London or New York. Even if it had landed in the sea, tidal waves might have destroyed whole coastal regions. That day the human race had escaped the greatest disaster in its history, and had not even been aware of it.

  Finally Kulik discovered that a local meteorologist had made an estimate of the point of impact, and in 1927 he was given the necessary backing by the Academy of Sciences to find the point where the “great meteorite” had fallen.

  The great Siberian forest is one of the least accessible places on earth. Even today it remains largely unexplored, and there are whole areas that have only ever been surveyed from the air. What settlements there are can be found along the banks of its mighty rivers, some of them miles in width. The winters are ferociously cold, and in the summer the ground becomes boggy, and the air is filled with the hum of mosquitoes. Kulik was faced with an almost impossible task: to travel by horse and raft with no idea of exactly where to look or what to look for.

  In March 1927 he set off accompanied by two local guides who had witnessed the event, and after many setbacks arrived on the banks of the Mekirta river in April. The Mekirta is the closest river to the impact point, and in 1927 formed a boundary between untouched forest and almost total devastation.

  On that first day Kulik stood on a low hill and surveyed the destruction caused by the Tunguska explosion. For as far as he could see to the north – perhaps a dozen miles – there was not one full-grown tree left standing. Every one had been flattened by the blast, and they lay like a slaughtered regiment, all pointing towards him. Yet it was obvious that what he was looking at was only a fraction of the devastation, since all the trees were facing in the same direction as far as the horizon. The blast must have been far greater than even the wildest reports had suggested.

  Kulik wanted to explore the devastation; his two guides were terrified, and refused to go on. So Kulik was forced to return with them, and it was not until June that he managed to return with two new companions.

  The expedition followed the line of broken trees for several days until they came to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, and pitched camp there. They spent the next few days surveying the surrounding area, and Kulik reached the conclusion that “the cauldron” as he called it, was the centre of the blast. All around, the fallen trees faced away from it, and yet, incredibly, some trees actually remained standing although stripped and charred, at the very centre of the explosion.

  The full extent of the desolation was now apparent; from the river to its central point was a distance of thirty-seven miles. So the blast had flattened more than four thousand square miles of forest.

  Still working on the supposition that the explosion had been caused by a large meteorite, Kulik began searching the area for its remains. He thought he had achieved his object when he discovered a number of pits filled with water – he naturally assumed that they had been made by fragments of the exploding meteorite. Yet when the holes were drained they were found to be empty. One even had a tree-stump at the bottom, proving it had not been made by a blast.

  Kulik was to make four expeditions to the area of the explosion, and until his death he remained convinced that it had been caused by an unusually large meteorite. Yet he never found the iron or rock fragments that would provide him with the evidence he needed. In fact, he never succeeded in proving that anything had even struck the ground. There was evidence of two blast waves – the original explosion and the ballistic wave – and even of brief flash fire; but there was no crater.

  The new evidence only deepened the riddle. An aerial survey in 1938 showed that only 770 square miles of forest had been flattened, and that at the very point where the crater should have been the original trees were still standing. That suggested the vagaries of an exploding bomb, rather than that of the impact of a giant meteor – like the one that made the 600-foot-deep crater at Winslow, Arizona.

  Even the way that the object fell to earth was disputed. Over seven hundred eyewitnesses claimed that it changed course as it fell, saying that it was originally moving towards Lake Baikal before it swerved. Falling heavenly bodies have never been known to do this, nor is it possible to explain how it could have happened in terms of physical dynamics.

  Another curious puzzle about the explosion was its effect on the trees and insect life in the blast area. Trees that had survived the explosion had either stopped growing, or were shooting up at a greatly accelerated rate. Later studies revealed new species of ants and other insects which are peculiar to the Tunguska blast region.

  It was not until some years after Kulik’s death in a German prisoner-of-war camp that scientists began to see similarities between the Tunguska event and another even more catastrophic explosion: the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with thermonuclear devices.

  Our knowledge of the atom bomb enables us to clear up many of the mysteries that baffled Kulik. The reason there was no crater was that the explosion had taken place above the ground, as with an atomic bomb. The standing trees at the central point of the explosion confirmed this; at both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, buildings directly beneath the blast remained standing, because the blast spread sideways. Genetic mutations in the flora and fauna around the Japanese cities are like those witnessed in Siberia, while blisters found on dogs and reindeer in the Tunguska area can now be recognized as radiation burns.

  Atomic explosions produce disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field, and even today the area around the Tunguska explosion has been described as “magnetic chaos”. It seems clear that an electro-magnetic “hurricane” of incredible strength has ruptured the earth’s magnetic field in this area.

  Eye-witness accounts of the cloud produced by the explosion again support the view that it was some kind of atomic device; it had the typical shape of the atomic “mushroom cloud”. Unfortunately, the one conclusive piece of evidence for the “atom bomb” theory is lacking: by the time the area’s radiation levels were tested, more than fifty years later, they were normal.

  Later investigators also learned that Kulik had been mistaken in his theory about the water-filled holes; they were not caused by meteorite fragments but by winter ice forcing its way to the surface through expansion, then melting in summer. Kulik’s immense labours to drain the holes had been a waste of time.

  Unfortunately, none of the new evidence that has been uncovered by Russian – and even American – expeditions has thrown any light on the cause of the explosion. UFO enthusiasts favour the theory that the object was an alien space craft, powered by atomic motors, which went out of control as it struck the earth’s atmosphere. It has even been suggested that such a space craft might have headed towards Lake Baikal because it was in need of fresh water to cool its nuclear reactors; before it could reach its objective the reactors superheated and exploded.

  The scientific establishment is naturally inclined to discount this theory as pure fantasy. But some of its own hypotheses seem equally fantastic. A.A. Jackson and M.P. Ryan of the University of Texas have suggested that the explosion was caused by a miniature black hole – a kind of whirlpool in space caused by the total collapse of the particles inside the atom. They calculated that their black hole would have passed straight through the earth and come out on the other side, and the Russians were sufficiently impressed by the theory to research local newspapers in Iceland and Newfoundland for June 1980; but there was no sign of the Tunguska-like catastrophe that should have occurred if Jackson and Ryan were correct.

  Other American scientists suggested that the explosion was caused by antimatter, a hypothetical type of matter whose particles contain the opposite electric charge to those of normal matter. In contact with normal matter, anti-matter would explode and simply disappear. Only atomic radiation would be left behind. But there is even less evidence to support this theory than there is for the black-hole explanation.

  Slightly more plausible – but still highly improbable – is the theory of the English scientist Frank Whipple that the earth had been struck by a c
omet. Astronomers still have no idea where comets originate, or how they are formed. The two chief objections to the comet theory are that it would be unlikely to produce a “nuclear” explosion, and that it would have been observed by astronomers long before it reached the earth. Supporters of the comet theory have pointed out that a comet coming in from the direction of the sun might be very hard to detect, and that the explosion of a comet might produce an effect similar to that of solar flares, which produce radio-activity. But none of the 120 observatories questioned by the Russians have any record of a comet on the trajectory of the Tunguska object.

  More recently, it has been pointed out that the Tunguska event took place on 30 June and that on that same day each year the earth’s orbit crosses that of a meteor stream called Beta Taurids, producing a “meteor shower”. If one of these meteors had been exceptionally large, it could have survived burning up in the earth’s atmosphere, and as its super-heated exterior reacted against its frozen interior, it would have shattered like molten glass suddenly plunged into freezing water. If this theory is correct, then it seems that Kulik was right after all. But that only reminds us that Kulik was unable to find the slightest shred of evidence for his theory. Eight decades after it took place, it seems increasingly unlikely that the mystery of the Tunguska explosion will ever be solved.

  Postscript to The Great Tunguska Explosion

  Since this article was written, new research has suggested that the “Tunguska object” was almost certainly a small comet or meteor, and not, as some have suggested, an exploding space craft, or even a miniature black hole. A comet seems less likely than a meteor, since comets travel relatively slowly, and would surely have been seen approaching the earth. Professor Alexis Zolotov (the leader of the 1959 expedition to Tunguska) calculated that, whatever the object was, it was about 130 feet in diameter, and exploded about three miles above the ground with a force of 40 megatons, 2,000 times greater than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.