Alexej Sokolov

The ground beneath my feet was frozen, though it was only October. Out here in the Siberian taiga, the air carries a strange stillness. I stood by the banks of the Tunguska River, staring out at the landscape, knowing this place had been the stage for something incomprehensible. For 57 years I’ve walked this earth, most of them spent in academic halls, buried in the study of stars and the universe. Yet, it is this barren stretch of Siberia that haunts me now.

I’ve been here for weeks, hoping this expedition would provide clarity. Instead, the deeper I dig, the more elusive the answers become. The Tunguska event of 1908—an explosion that could be heard 500 kilometers away, with no crater to explain it—remains an unsolved mystery. Every logical explanation fails to account for all the anomalies. No debris from a meteor, no trace of a comet. It’s as if the earth opened up and swallowed the evidence, leaving us only with the devastation it caused.

The locals tell stories, but most of them are colored by myth. A blinding light, a heatwave that felled trees like a giant hand sweeping across the land. It’s all too fantastical, yet the aftermath is undeniable. I’ve walked through forests where trees still lean outward from the epicenter, like frozen sentinels, refusing to forget.

I’m not a superstitious man—science is my guide, always has been—but even I can’t shake the feeling that something unnatural happened here. Some of my colleagues laugh at the idea of extraterrestrial involvement. I used to be one of them. Now, I don’t laugh so easily.