Eyewitnesses about the Tunguska cosmic body

Abstract

The analysis of 700 eyewitness’s stories about the Tunguska disaster enables to have an important information about the Tunguska cosmic body, its flight and destruction. Having compared the visual sizes of the flying object with the Sun, according to eyewitnesses stories, one can conclude that the visual size of the cosmic body considerably, more than 10 times, exceeded the real size of the Tunguska body. Dozens eyewitnesses noted sparkles scattering from the object, therefore the body’s substance was breaking to pieces strongly, its fragments flying out of the object at a speed close to that of the cosmic body. The flying object resembled an inflammation, both in its coloure and form, i.e. the substance that had separated from the object was undergoing a reaction of burning with atmospheric oxygen. Eyewitnesses neatly determined a head and a tile divided by a bottleneck in the contour of the flying object. Therefore, substance of the cosmic body must have comprised two components at least. Gases and small dust particles got burned down right at the moment of discharging from the object, thus forming “the head”. Larger fragments formed the burning tail of the flying object. In settlements at a distance of 200–350 km from the epicentre eyewitnesses noted that the flying object had a multicoloured iridescent tail. Duration of the flight of the body was more than 1 min inasmuch as people had enough time to go out from their houses to discern the phenomenon.