Approved For Release 20 3/07 CIA-RDP96-00789RO01 200060OQ8@ @`7 6V SECRET/ NOF"ORN PROJE("J SU111 STREAk,'. WAI'MING NOTICE@, IWELLIGENCE SOURCES AND MET14ODS INVOLVED NIJMBEF'@-. 0227 (Trig) EJD,3@3310N NUMBER. 1 DA11".' i"IF REPORT- (")5 MAR 90 D T 1:-:' 0 1S1*,-.:.'!3ST.ON 02) MAR 90 1 r:,@r I-" N D . PH.' TF1DD(.,)L.0GY- CRV VITWER I'D ENTI F:'].'EF:',.@ 05. . ... ..... ............ . .... ..... .... ..... .... . mi@:%Sic)N. ro descr-ibe the tar--get slite ("I"he air-- explosion in in Stage 2 ter-iminc)].ogy. IS/01,D) VIEW!"'R JASV. I NG. Encryptetd coordinates not set, sc-i tar-get numbei- was used. No other cueing given. COMMENT,13. No Physical Tnclemencj.E..@s. 052 accessed the Site quickly in Stage 1 .,and proceeded thr--augh Stage 2' quic.1<1y ancl ef,ficiently. 0",',2 1-iciid pi-c-)blems getting SOUnd p-r-ceptions in the past, bUt this h@:-.-%.S@ evidently bpar-i r-escjlw..@d. 052 needs, a Iittle mor-e, pr-actice ini dirriensional--", pe-ir-ceptions, arvV will. be r--eady to pi-oceed into Stage '3' training. IL (S/STD) EM.11ATION. 5. (S/G"FD) SLARCId E,VALLJATJ.'(`)N@ N A W."N J-'F0F,,.- 0 1 @'B HANDL.E V:[A STIPPLE CHANNEL-6 ONLY SECRETMOFORN C-I'LASSIV:JED !.'.?Y. D I A (DT'i DECLASS I F-Y - W)DR Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789ROO1200060008-5 Approved For Release 2001/03/07 CIA-RDP96-00789ROO1200066~~-c5)- )Pt"C4 q@ 00V Approved For Release 2001/03/07 CIA-RD,F@6-09789ROpl 60008-5 117 Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789RO01200060008.-5 J Approved For Release 2001/03/07 CIA-RDP96-00789ROO1200060008-5 Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789Ro012q~0)66~e-5,--@ OV @ h-4 Approved For Release 2001/Oal~.~A-RbPaO,0070~OUI~0060008-5 If"/. @'I Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789ROO1200~6'0008~~- ' -_"", 15&@7 C, ,@@ @ qc;@ Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789ROO1200060008-5 -RDP96-00789' Approved For Release 2001/03/07: CIA 9600789 WHAT SETOFF THE BIGGEST BANG IN RECORDED HISTORY? Shortly after 7 A.M. on ".bomb was detonated). June 30,1908,_- abetter ex- early rising farmers, -planation, scientists Could the Siberian blast herdsmen, and - continued to have been trappers in the sparsely @ascrib e the cataclysmatomic?'In '1958 a Russian settled to a meteorite, engineer- ,vastness of the central a'nd Leonid Kulik,,a: turned- writer, Aleksander Siberia Plateau mineralogist who Kazantsev, watched in awe as a cylindricalheaded governme-rit-sponsored.published a story'-article object, ex- pinning that glowing with an intense peditions to the Tunguski,in:disaster on Martians bluish-white the early killed on their light and trailing a fiery-1926s and again -in way to Earth by cosmic tail, raced 1938-.:!39,.searched rays or meteor- across a clear blue sky for evidence -to supportite bombardment; their toward the this view. ship, with no northern horizon. At 7:17,Although this search.provedone at the controls, over a des- fruit- hurtles into our at- olate region of bogs and less, Kulik uncovered mosphere at unreduced low, pine- a wealth of in- speed and covered hills traversed formation about the burns up from friction, by the Stony blast. Near the triggering a Tunguska River, it disappeared;swamp into which the chain reaction in its in- meteorite had atomic fuel that itantly, a "pillar of supposedly plummeted, sets off the explosion. fire" leaped sky. scorched Few informed ward, so high it was seentrees, striped of branches,readers by then still hundreds of still stood, accepted the me- miles away; the earth but around this weird teorite theory, and shuddered under "telegraph-pole" some, particularly the impact of a titanic forest, except whereinterveningyounger men and women, explosion; the hills found Ka- air was wracked by thunderoushad shielded them, everyzancsev's hypothesis claps; tree within persuaiive, but and a superheated wind fifty miles had been others rejected it in rushed out- 'blown flat, its favor of an earlier ward, setting parts of trunk pointing away alternate explanation, the taiga on fire. from the swamp. according to At a trading post forty From this -and from which the head of a miles from the his failure to find comet had pene- blast, a man sitting on even a small impact trated the atmosphere the steps of his crater - Kulik con- at such high ve- house saw the blinding cluded that the meteoritelocity that the heat flish and cov- had never thus generated had ered his eyes; he felt reached the ground but caused thecomet to blow scorched, as if the had exploded. up. (Skeptics shirt on his back were two or three miles up pointed out, however, burning, and the in the air. The that a comet next moment he was hurledtestimony of local herdsmencould hardly have approached from the yielded Earth steps by a shock wave other -curious details-without being seen.) and knocked un- the blast's in- conscious. 'Four hundred tense beat had melted ) - Two further explanations miles to- the the permafrost,'- involving south the ground heaved causing -water trapped natural causes have, under the- underground been advanced. cracks of the recently for -tens of thousands The first is that a completed of years to - gush tiny "black hole" - a Trans-Siberian Railway, forth in fountains, chunk of matter collapsed threatening to and those reindeer to minuscule der" an express. And abovethat had not been killedAimensions and so dense the had developed that its grav- Tunguska region a mass mysterious blisters ity sucks up even light of black and scabs on theii @ hit Siberia and clouds, piling up to a hides. Stranger still, passed in an instant height of twelve examination of the through Earth, miles, dumped a shower trees that had been emerging in the North of "black rain" germinating in Atlantic. The on the countryside -dirt 1908 revealed that theysecond asserts that and debris had then an -anti-rock- of sucked up by the explosion-while-grown at several timesantimatter plunged into the normal rate. the atmos- rumblings like heavy artillery. @During World War phere and exploded on fire re- 11 Kulik was contact with verberated throughout captured by the Germansatoms of ordinary matter, central-Russia. and died a producing a Since seismographs and "-prisoner. The riddle fireball of gamma rays. barographs he had worked to While this everywhere had recorded solve was forgotten. would account for the the event, In August 1945, absence of the entire world knew however, certain Russianresidual material at that something scientists. the site, it is not, extraordinary had occurredwere abruptly reminded most experts say, compatible in the Si- of it by the with ob- ber@-,.n wilderness. But atom-bombings of Hiroshimaservable physical effects what? Scientists and of the blast. conjectured that a - giantNagasaki, events which In the' end, we do not meteorite seemed uncan- know what must have fallen, explodingnily familiar in both caused -the cataclysm from the their manifesta-. in Siberia. We intense heat its impactgenerated;-@Ontions (the fireball, -,raay never know. But the searing,thermal today, fewer 'hitting the ground, suchcurrent, the towering --scientists than at a body would, "mushroom any time in the past -theoretically, have 'blown-cloud),,and their effects-Lwould be astounded out a ,huge.: (the 1nstanti- to receive a mes- crater like the onein neous;and -near@total sage beamed from-.some Arizona, three-. .destruction,-:the. corner of the I ' quare,4eft by a me'- -radiation burnsonliving-n universe inquiring -quarters@of fiesh,-the-ac- into the fate of a mile-s teorite that fell fifty celeratqd,@@growth bf -certain space voyagers thousand years- -new, plovAife,. who vanished ago, but. the Siberian even the "te,legraph,-pole".@on.our planet in what impact. Appearance we call the year turned jout to be a dismalofsoo 'r'ched and branichlessireei -swamp, -with , no trace of a meteorite -ing below the:point.at..whi to @be -Seen. &'Aft 4com 7 1@77 Approyed P.S. A Guest; from the Uidverse? The stage was being set for a world-shaking drama that was rushing to its fiery climax fiear the cold and sluggish Yenesei River of Siberia. The date: June 30, 1908. Out in space, miles from the earth, a gigantic object was rushing to destruction, headed for a thinly populated area near the YeneseL Its speed was probably in excess of thirty thousand miles an hour. It was only seconds from destruction, tralling long su@eams of fire behind it as it en- tered the atmosphere. On the river a fisherman. tugged at thi ropes leading to his nets. He paused in his work long enough to return the waAe of a friend who sat on the shore, sheltered fortu- tiately by a steep overhang. His friend on the bank was the last thing the fisherman would ever am He had less than five seconds to Eve. A few miles from the river a herdsman, driving several hundred reindeer across the grassy Hats, paused'to fill his leather water bag at a shallow well. Thd bag fell into the water and he climbed down to retrieve iL It was the luckiest move of his rife. Across the river, at the edge of a small grove of trees. a woodchopper and his two grown sons took time out from their labors to smoke their pipes, their axes leaning against the log on which they were sitting. The stage was set. The gigantic thing that was plunging to earth exploded with a fury that was recorded around the globe. Of those in the immediate area, only the herdsman in the well and the man sheltered by the river bank survived. The fisher- man was swept away. The woodclioppers were never found; but one of their axes was finally picked up a mile and ft half from where they bad been smoking their pipes. The herd of reindeer vanished in the twinkling of an eye. When the bewildered herdsman climbed out of the shallow well that had saved his life, he found himself in the midst of a charred and -king world; he was scorched and penai- ler.% br@@ alive. For Re]bO-VebMWOgffi7~,fleC4A4RDNrj,,.iOM9R eaplosions ever recorded on earth. Something weighing thousands of tons had exploded into a great hall of seething fire that climbed into the clouds in a matter of minutes, leaving below- it a stunned earth that seat its quivers to seismographs in many lands. World War I spread even greater havoc of a rliquent sort and scientists almost forgot the strange explosion in Siberia. which they had assumed to be some sort of huge meteorite. It was not until 1927 that a scientific study group reached the scene, They found a scorched and barren spot that showed plainly the effects of incalculable heat and pres- sure; trees brushed flat to earth for miles around the center of the blast, their bunks charred by its remarkable temper- ature. They found a few witnesses, including the herds- man and the rnnn on the river bank. and some villagers who had seen the catastrophe from a vantage point miles away. After examining the scene and interviewing the wit- nesses, the scientists went away. They had determined that something from outer space had struck in those lonely reaches of the Yenesei, something that scorched and blasted --but something that left no craters in the earth to mark its collision. For want of a better name it went down in the records as the Tunguska Meteorite, and ther e it remained for more than thirty years. A Russian scieatist@ Dr. Alexander Kazentsev, was a mem- ber of the Soviet team that spent considerable time inv-d- gating the scene of the Tunguska explosion. LAe their Prede- cessors, they were puz7lcd by what they found and Puz- zled even more by what they did not find. No craters. No logical, acceptable explanation for the recorded fury of the explosion. Fortunately for science, Dr. Kazentsev was also a mem- ber of the Russian team that went to Hiroshima to study the effects of the atomic bomb which had obliterated that hap- less city and most of its people.. * Dr. Ka=tsev was particularly impressed by a peculi- arity of the blast; directly beneath the center of the air- home explosion the tops of the trees had been snapped off, while the trees remained standing. Somewhere, he had seen something Re that before--but where? -runguska Suddealy he remembered. At the scene of the Meteorite" in Siberial Tree tops snapped off in one area, while for mil "Ind the trees were brushed flat to earth, 1200060:090&5t Hiroshimal But that phenomenon was known to be a characteristic of only nuclear devices. Did it mean that a nuclear explosion had taken place over that lonely Siberian terrain almost half a century before? There was a relatively simple way to check the suspicion. If the explosion had been nuclear, there would be radio- activity in measurable quantities in the earth. And Ka- zentsev knew that when Professor Kutik had made the orig- inal investigation of the Tunguika blast in 1927, no check had been made for radioactivity; he also knew tha Kulik hid been disturbed by the complete absence of meteoric fragmentL A new expedition, headed by Professor Ijapunov and in- cluding Dr. Kazentsev, was dispatched to the scene of the so-called Tunguska Meteorite. @Uy spent months tracking out the radioactive pattern in the soil that sent their Geiger counters chattering; they interviewed an eyewitness who still recalled vividly the great ball of fire that rolled into the heavens and the strange mushroom cloud from which it stemmed. They dug up tons of soil to collect a scant hand- ful of metal fragments. Then they went home to evaluate and study what they had found. Dr. Kazentsev and most of his colleagues came t6 the conclusion tha-t some sort of atomic-powered device of tre- mendous size had exploded over the earth at an altitude of 1.2 miles on the morning of June 30, 1908. He calls it a space ship. In his Official report filed with the Soviet government agency which directed the expedition, Dr. Kazentsev says thafthe blast damage. and the radioactivity charts enabled the scientists to locate the point directly beneath the blast and to trace out the familiar atomic cone. Sifting the soil around the edges of ;his "cone" produced tiny bits of metal, some of which were not of any known meteoric nature and some of which seemed to be alloyed. T..e eyewitness ac- counts all agreed on the seething fireball and th6 mush- room cloud, which we now know to be characteristic of nuclear explosions. And exhumation of some of the long- dead residents of the area indicated that they had died of a "strange malady" indeed, for they were victims of excessive radioactivity. Say& Kazentsev, "The weight of evidence clearly PLUM tlie explosion slightly more than (a mile) above the center of the destruction. The damage is "identical to that produced by man-made atomic devices under similar condition& The lingering radioactivity, the mixed metals, the descriptions Of the explosion itself all coincide with an atomic explosion. 1111111ir CPYRGHT APproved For Release 2001/03107 CIA-RDP96-00789ROO1200060008-5 fin %"IF An J I I Pf', i Mi.