In 1908, a sudden explosion flattened 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest, destroying 80 million trees. One hundred and twelve years later the exact cause remains a mystery. The Tunguska event is one of the most speculated-about anomalous events of all-time and, while scientists firmly believe that a meteor exploding some 5 to 10 kilometers above the Earth’s surface is to blame, they don’t have any direct evidence. This has led to the usual sort of wild and baseless (although extremely fun) speculation involving everything from aliens to secret weapons tests.

Scientists from four major Russian scientific institutes—the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Tunguska Nature Reserve, and Krasnoyarsk Biophysics Institute—are now hoping to solve the Tunguska mystery once and for all. Dr. Arthur Meidus, deputy director of the Tunguska Nature Reserve,  says:

“The mystery of the Tunguska Catastrophe worries both the scientists and the public. The meteorite is not here as a physical body, but the traces of the extremely powerful explosion are, which is what is currently studied by researchers.  Many of us still hope to unravel the scenario of 1908 disaster.”

The general consensus is that a meteor caused the Tunguska explosion, but scientists have yet to find hard evidence.

To do this, the scientists are looking at the bottom of a lake. The sediments at the bottom of Lake Zapovednoye, approximately 40km away from the assumed epicenter of the blast, may contain evidence of a meteor explosion—if, in fact, one occurred. Dr. Meidus says:

“Although this lake is outside the territory that was affected in 1908, it is of great interest. It is deep, and silty sediments that have accumulated here, do not mix, or subside.

Spring-autumn waste waters and the Lakura River brought traces of the Tunguska catastrophe to this lake, because the event was accompanied by massive wildfires and emissions of both planet and space origin.”

Trees leveled by the Tunguska explosion.

Using fun science words like X-ray fluorescence and synchrotron radiation, the scientists hope to be able to detect particles of extraterrestrial origin in the layers of sediment that date to the Tunguska event. Dr. Meidus says they have already been able to determine which layers come from the year of the blast. They are looking specifically at the layers from 1908 through 1910, as meteor particles may have washed into the lake in the two years following the explosion. Dr. Meidus says:

“We discovered a distinguishing light-coloured layer in sediments of Lake Zapovednoye the content of which – an increased content of potassium, titanium, rubidium, yttrium, and zirconium – allows to tie it to the consequences of the Tunguska bolide explosion. This way we know which layer of sediments might contain particles of extraterrestrial origin.

‘The next stage implies search for micro-particles with unusual composition with the use of synchrotron radiation. Now we know where to look for them.

‘If there is extraterrestrial substance, it will be in the 1908-1910 layer.”

It will be interesting to see if they find what they’re looking for. If they do discover particles from some extraterrestrial object in the lake, it would put a damper on all the fun speculation. But they haven’t found it yet and mysteries like the Tunguska event seem to enjoy remaining mysteries.

On February 28, 1959, a Private First Class Gerry Irwin was on his way back to his duties as Nike missile technician at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, after having just enjoyed a one-month leave in Nampa, Idaho. On this evening he was passing through a portion of southern Utah, near Cedar City, Utah, when there was a bright flash in the sky and he could make out a brilliant white light traveling across the night sky. It was apparently so bright that it lit up the desolate landscape around him, and Irwin actually stopped his car and got out to track its progress across the star-filled sky until it disappeared behind a ridge. At this point he was sure it had to be an aircraft going down, and it had been so alarmingly low that he was convinced he had witnessed a plane crash. He got in his car and scrawled out a note reading “Have gone to investigate possible plane crash, please call law enforcement officers,” which he left on his steering wheel, and he then wrote “STOP” across the side of his car with shoe polish before venturing out over the scrub-filled area towards that ridge and the unknown. And so would begin one of the earliest and weirdest alien abduction cases on record.

Thirty minutes passed before any other car came along on this remote stretch of road, and it happened to be a fish and game inspector, who found the note and quickly informed the Cedar City Sheriff’s Office. When authorities arrived that carried out a search of the area, and while there was no trace of a crashed plane they did find an unconscious Irwin sprawled out of the ground. He was totally unresponsive, unable to be revived, and was rushed to the nearest hospital, where it was found that there seemed to be nothing physically wrong with him other than the fact that nothing could seem to raise him from his stupor, remaining completely unable to be woken up.

Concerned medical staff did what they could and allowed the man to sleep, during which time we was allegedly heard by nurses to talk in his sleep and mumble what sounded like “jacket on bush.” The next morning he came to, and the first thing he wanted to know was if there were any survivors of the airplane crash. Doctors informed Irwin that there had been no plane crash, which seemed to surprise the young man, and he also seemed to really want to know where his jacket was, which he had not been wearing when he was brought in and had not been found by the search party. Although he was physically uninjured, Irwin claimed to remember absolutely nothing from the time he had left his car, and could not in any way explain how he had come to be passed out in the wilderness. He would be kept for a few days for observation, after which he was told that he was suffering hysteria of some sort and sent on his way. This would be just beginning of the strangeness.

In the days after his release, Irwin experienced several episodes in which he would just faint and fall to the ground. The first incident of this was as he was on duty on base, which he snapped out of quickly, and then it happened again as he was walking down a street in El Paso, this time putting him in the same deep state of sleep as before. This caused him to be brought in for another round of medical check-ups and psychiatric evaluations. Interestingly, after this second fainting he seems to have been reset somehow, waking up to ask about any survivors of the plane crash and thinking it was still February 28, as well as not recognizing the same medical staff who had tended to him before or remembering the past two weeks, and this was enough to have him kept for observation for a full month, during which time his memory of the preceding two weeks came trickling back to him. He would eventually be released again with a bill of good health.

Although he seemed normal, his thoughts were constantly invaded by the urge to return to the site where he had originally left his car in this strange odyssey, and so one day he was overcome by such a compulsion and left the base to go out to that lonely road to have a look around, apparently finding his jacket perched upon a bush untouched. Oddly there was a pencil with a noted wrapped around it jammed into one of the button holes, but he never did read it, instead overcome with the urge to burn the note instead. He then apparently snapped out of his daze and realized that he had not left the base in a legal fashion, and was basically AWOL.

He did the right thing, turning himself in, and was subsequently extensively questioned, strangely with large holes in his memory still missing and unable to explain what had possessed him to do what he had done. He was not jailed or disciplined severely, but it was enough to get his security clearance revoked and to be reassigned. Things take a turn for the odder when not long after this he one day just failed to report for duty, and indeed no one had heard from him. Nothing was found missing at his residence and he seemed to have just stepped off the face of the earth. A month later Irwin was still nowhere to be seen, and the lore goes that indeed he has not been seen since. The case would go on to become highly investigated by UFO researchers, and speculation swirled as to what actually happened to him. The main idea was that he was abducted by aliens and then slowly lost his mind, perhaps even be abducted one final time, this time for good. Other ideas included that he was part of some sort of government mind control program or that he simply wandered out into the wilderness to die.

Yet things got really interesting when researcher David Booher investigated the case for his book No Return – the Gerry Irwin story – UFO Abduction or Covert Operation? which has all sorts of interesting information contained within its pages and is one of the most comprehensive write-ups on the case there is. Booher apparently was able to actually track the “vanished” Irwin down, only to find that the man did not seem to remember much of anything of what had happened in 1959, but he was able to manage to shed some light on it all. He claimed that he did disappear for while to live out in the woods, but that he had finally been tracked down and disciplined, after which he was reassigned and sent to Germany, never at any point actually being discharged from the military. He also said that he was long beset by strange blackouts and behavioral issues, and that he had been involved in some top-secret assignment in Austria, although details remain vague. It is interesting to see that while in a lot of literature Gerry Irwin is reported as having vanished into thin air to never be seen again, he was very much alive and not vanished when Booher found him. What significance does this have on the whole strange case as a whole?

In the end it is all very perplexing. We have this military man who was suddenly found unconscious in the wilds after seeing a UFO, the missing time and lost memory, the sudden urge to just go AWOL, the disappearance that never seems to have been properly followed up on, the sending away of Irwin to Germany, almost as if to get him out of the way, and the strange blackouts and disrupted behavior. Is this someone who just lost his mind, an alien abduction, a strange government experiment, or what? Whatever the answers may be, the Gerry Irwin case has managed to gain a reputation as being one of the very first publicized “alien abduction” accounts, and has remained much talked about to this day.

A lot of people seem to like to poke fun at UFO witnesses and believers. The field has unfortunately drawn to it some amount of skepticism from those who think it is all a bunch of quacks and weirdos out in the boondocks. Yet, this could not be further from the truth. Many of the staunchest supporters of not only UFOs being taken seriously by the public, but also full government disclosure on what might be kept secret from the public at large, are top, eminent members of the fields that matter most.

This particular tale revolves around the legendary astronaut Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper Jr., an American aerospace engineer, test pilot, United States Air Force pilot, an astronaut pioneer, who was also involved in the first human spaceflight program of the United States, Project Mercury, running from 1958 through 1963, piloting the longest and last Mercury spaceflight, Mercury-Atlas 9, and would have numerous accolades and notable achievements throughout his career. He would later go on to join several corporate boards and as technical consultant for more than a dozen companies, and he is widely considered a legend in his field. As respected as he was, he also had his share of stories to tell of strange UFO encounters in space.

Gordon Cooper

Cooper seems to have had a long history of UFO sightings, which he has spoken of in interviews and in his autobiography Leap of Faith. His earliest well-known UFO encounter apparently occurred in 1951, when he saw a circular formation of “metallic, saucer-shaped vehicles” while flying over East Germany. These objects would apparently frequently appear, and he would say, “We never could get close enough to pin them down, but they were round in shape and very metallic looking.” Shortly after this, he was transferred to the Edwards Air Force Base Flight Test Center in the California desert, where the weirdness would continue. In May of 1957, Cooper was a Project Manager at Edwards Air Force Base. He says that he and some of the other crew would sometimes see a strange object come down to hover over the nearby lake bed, of which he would say, “It was a typical circular-shaped UFO. Not too many people saw it, because it took off at quite a sharp angle and just climbed straight on out of sight!” This object would apparently come to rest on the lake bed upon an array of three “legs” that extended from the bottom.

They apparently took a lot of footage of this particular event, and it was allegedly very unnerving for all those present, all of them experienced airmen who were used to seeing experimental aircraft and whatnot. Cooper went about alerting the Pentagon as to what was going on, and he was purportedly subsequently told to send all of the negatives of what they had captured on film in a locked courier pouch. That was the last he would hear about it, with the photos just vanishing and no apparent action taken, no explanation given, despite the fact that this had been an obvious foreign craft in U.S. military airspace. Even though the government had apparently swept it all under the carpet, Cooper would have none of it. He appeared on several high profile programs such as the Merv Griffin Show, where he insisted that the incident was real and said:

I think it was definitely a UFO. However, where it (the object) came from and who was in it is hard to determine, because it didn’t stay around long enough to discuss the matter – there wasn’t even time to send out a welcoming committee! I think it’s fairly credible. I would like to see the time when all qualified people could really work together to properly investigate these stories and either refute or prove them.

Cooper’s UFO experiences would continue, when on May 15, 1963, he would allegedly witness one during his solo space mission above the Earth’s surface, saying that it was an anomalous “greenish object.” This would only add to his suspicions that something weird was going on, and in 1978 he penned a letter to the United Nations begging them to release any information they had. In the letter he expressed the importance of making contact with these entities and finding a way to “resolve our problems by peaceful means, rather than warfare.” Cooper would go on to become a major proponent of full government disclosure on the UFO phenomenon, and believed there was a massive government conspiracy covering it all up. He would claim that he knew of hundreds of cases from fellow pilots and astronauts of seeing something beyond understanding, which were subsequently kept hush hush. He would claim that there had been all sorts of evidence that had been buried as well, and he said in one interview in the late-1990s:

For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why?

Why, indeed. The public reaction to such allegations by such a well-respected icon of the military and space travel was to merely shrug its shoulders, after all what are you going to do when the guy is an aeronautic legend? In the meantime, Cooper continuously and tirelessly pressed for more information on what was being kept from the public, right up to his death in 2004 from complications of Parkinson’s disease, appearing in the documentary “Out of the Blue” about it and even writing at length about it all in his autobiography Leap of Faith. His whole message later in life was that the mass UFO cover-up that conspiracy theorists drone on about was all completely real, and he was a major champion of full disclosure in this area. It is hard to know how much of an effect he had, and he gained many critics, such as space historian Robert Pearlman, who wrote:

While no one can argue with someone’s experiences, in the case of Cooper’s own sightings, I found some difficulty understanding how someone so connected with ground breaking technology and science could easily embrace ideas such as extraterrestrial visits with little more than anecdotal evidence.

Cooper joins the ranks of very qualified, respectable UFO witnesses and ambassadors of disclosure who have mostly been either met with shrugged shoulders, raised eyebrows, or flat out disdain. Yet what are we to make of the claims and statements of such a well-respected member of the NASA community? Can his accounts an assertions really be written off as the ramblings of someone off their rocker, or do they perhaps deserve a little more consideration? Whether you believe him or hate him, Cooper has earned a place where he represents a certain type of witness and champion of UFOlogy that is hard to ignore.

When it comes to natural explosions on Earth, nothing tops a volcano and, in modern times, few top the Mt. St. Helens blast. In space, the biggest blasts beyond the original Big Bang belong to the supernovas – stellar explosions that usually collapse into a black hole. Now, imagine the Mt. St. Helens of supernovas. Having trouble picturing it? You don’t have to – astronomers have discovered what they believe to be the largest non-Big Bang explosion ever. How big is (or was) it?

“In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain. A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas.”

Mt. St. Helens

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal and summarized in a NASA press release and at Phys.org, Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study described the discovery of the blast in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster about 390 million light-years from Earth. A supermassive black hole in that cluster was first detected in 2016 astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, but at the time they couldn’t believe the even-more-massive cosmic hole in the gas surrounding the black hole was the result of an explosion. More recently, astronomers paired the Chandra X-ray data with that of the ESA’s XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and confirmed that it was indeed a big blast.

“The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove. This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here.”

This extremely powerful eruption occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is located about 390 million light-years from Earth.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Naval Research Lab/Giacintucci, S.; XMM:ESA/XMM; Radio: NCRA/TIFR/GMRTN; Infrared: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF

Co-author Dr. Maxim Markevitch from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center rightly called the explosion “unprecedented” – it’s at least five times larger than the previous largest explosion. The supermassive cosmic hole was caused by explosive jets shooting away from the erupting supermassive black hole and through a cloud of gas. The radio emissions detected by the telescopes came from electrons traveling at almost the speed of light filling the hole.

While the blast took hundreds of millions of years to carve a void that 15 Milky Ways could fit into, it’s all over now. Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, the director of the MWA, an expert in galaxy clusters and a co-author of the study, compares the discovery to finding dinosaur bones and then recreating the living beast. Knowing what to look for, she expects to find more massive explosions – possibly breaking the record. Putting the discovery in terms non-astronomers can understand:

“The Universe is a weird place.”

Indeed it is.