Aliens At Tunguska: Research-Skills To The Rescue...

Every so often, I run across a piece of UFO-debunkery that is so outrageously blatant and badly researched that it is flat-out funny. Case in point this week is an article by Nancy Atkinson over at Universe Today that has been miraculously picked up and quoted in its mis-representational entirety by many disparate sites that have, on the face of it, nothing to do with UFOs. Just Google 'Universe Today Tunguska UFO' to garner yourself the proverbial shit-load of hits-- you will find that the article is not so much news reportage as it is blog-wallpaper in certain e-sectors.

Interestingly, the sites that are post-proliferating said article are quoting it in its entirety, and with no attribution or acknowledgment of either the Universe Today website or the author of the article, Ms. Atkinson. This seems a mite odd, in terms of the speed-of-spread for the whole article online as well as with regard to the usual custom of attributing sources, which is markedly lacking in this case.

Also of interest is that Ms. Atkinson herself does not give proper attribution-of-source information for the Pravda (in English) article she haphazardly quotes in her hatchet-job post at Universe Today. (Again, just Google 'Universe Today Tunguska UFO' to read the full text of her article.)

Now, the reason I am bringing the whole thing up in the first place is that with 15 minutes, a computer with an internet connection, and some basic research and reference skills, what emerges is a very different scenario than the one Ms. Atkinson paints in her article. I work for a public library system in a large city, and as I routinely perform reference-work for folks doing research papers and the like, I know how to find periodical source material online. It is something I am paid to do on a daily basis, and I am good at my job.

The first thing I did was to copy the whole of Ms. Atkinson's article off of Universe Today, and drop it into a Word document. I then removed all of Ms. Atkinson's (biased and pejorative) personal opinions-- including her opening sentence, 'Classify this under new of the weird'-- and I was left with the following pieces of information:

A Russian scientist claims that aliens downed the Tunguska meteorite 101 years ago to protect our planet from devastation. Yuri Lavbin says he found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the massive Siberian explosion. Ten crystals have holes in them, placed so the stones can be united in a chain, and other have drawings on them. “We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals,” said Lavbin. “We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”

A couple of expeditions have gone to the remote site of the crash. Lavbin says that one expedition located the unusual crystals.

Since there is stuff in quotation marks from a Russian scientist named Yuri Lavbin, it seemed safe to assume that the quoted-but-unattributed info in the Universe Today article was taken from an interview that must have been published somewhere. Inputting the Russian scientist's name and a few phrases from the unsourced material led me to an online news-clipping service, which identified my bits and pieces as coming from an article that was originally published online by the English version of the Russian paper Pravda. The news-clipping service also obligingly provided a link to the article itself, so I didn't have to Google it.

Upon reading the Pravda article-- awkward translation and all-- I found that it had been selectively quoted/heavily edited (to make it appear that there was nothing to the story) in the Universe Today post. Even though the translation of the Pravda article leaves a lot to be desired, it is still understandable by English speakers, and it tells a much different story than the Universe Today article presents. Here is the entire Pravda article (translation and spelling issues uncorrected):

Aliens downed Tunguska meteorite to save Earth

Translated by Lena Ksandinova

Aliens downed Tunguska meteorite to protect our planet from devastation, stated Russian scientist Yuriy Lavbin. He showed 10 quartz crystals that he found at the place of the meteorite’s crash. Several of the crystals have holes in between, so they can be united in a chain.

What could this chain serve for? Besides, some crystals have strange drawings on them. We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystal. We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere but in the space”, - the scientist states.

The meteorite’s crash took place long time ago, in summer of 1908. An enormous volcanic ball rushed over the sky with terrifying wallop and thunder-like sound. All the citizens were frightened to death and scared to move out of their houses. A flight of a “flamy alien” ended up in an hour in deserted taiga area. In a matter of seconds an explosive wave spread for 40 kilometers, devastating everything living around.

It was not until many years later that a Siberian scientist set up an expedition to place of the meteorite’s crash. They searched carefully through the river banks and found there unusual quartz boards. Mr. Lavbin states that such solid stones do not exist in the Earth. He said about the experiment that was taken on the crystals: scientists tried to put some of the same drawing that were on the stones initially with a laser machine.

How surprised they were to realize that the laser (that usually cuts metal objects into pieces) managed to put just some faint stripes. The stones though have an entire system of different lines and circles on them. Scientists suppose that the stones used to be a part of the navigational system of a spaceship. All stones united form a map, which they used to cruise through the Universe.

In 1908 the UFO is thought to be hit by the meteorite that weighed 1 billion tonnes. If the meteorite fell down on the Earth, all the people would have been dead. But the aliens interfered and put their lives to save our land. A strange portrait of a strange person on one of the stones proves this hypothesis. Isn’t it the pilot that once put his life for the sake of our future life?

When one looks at the ridiculously redacted information in the Universe Today article (with its accompanying dismissive editorial opinions) and then compares it to the Pravda article in its entirety, it is painfully clear that Ms. Atkinson wrote her piece not to report on the Pravda article, but to quash it. There can be no other reason for the scathing invective, the hatchet-work editing, and the non-attribution of the source.

The short-and-sweet of it is that the Universe Today article left out a lot of information that was in the Pravda article.

Next, I revisited Ms. Atkinson's dismissive remarks in light of the full Pravda article, and I became intrigued by the following assertion made by her--

While I’m not a chemist, I couldn’t find any information on “ferrum silicate.” Seemingly, it doesn’t exist.

My first thought was, "the translation of the Pravda article is so glitchy, I bet they mean something like ferrous silicate, rather than ferrum silicate." This confusion of terms is something that is seen a lot in library reference-work-- people think they have the correct name for something only to find out they don't when they try to look up information on the mistaken term. I duly Googled both terms and found out I was correct-- ferrous silicate does indeed exist, and it has sometimes been mistakenly referred to as ferrum silicate. Ferrous silicate is of great interest to anyone involved in metallurgy or glass manufacturing, and has been the subject of a whole lot of scientific research since the 1940s.

Here are two summary pages of professional papers detailing research into the properties of ferrous silicate. The first one is a recent abstract that is available on the subscription database SpringerLink, and the second is a paper from 1941 that can be found on Google Books:

Soft X-ray spectroscopy of ferrous silicates (on SpringerLink)

Charles G. Dodd and Paul H. Ribbe

Energy gaps and electrical conductivities in the ferrous silicates, Fe2SiO4 and FeSiO3, depend primarily on Fe-O bonding and may be studied by ultraviolet and soft X-ray spectroscopy. We have measured FeLII–III X-ray band spectra under conditions of 'minimal' (I4, at 4.0 keV) and 'high' (I10, at 10.0 keV) self absorption to determine 3d orbital energy levels, to delineate d states in the valence band, and to construct band gap models.


Research Article (1941)
The Specific Heats at Low Temperatures of Ferrous Silicate, Manganous Silicate and Zirconium Silicate

K.K. Kelley

The available low-temperature specific heat data for silicates are rather meager in spite of the wide interest in and importance of these substances as constituents of slags and glasses.

I have only given these two references, but there is tons more information (much of it highly technical) on ferrous silicate research online. To borrow (and correct) a phrase from the Pravda article, I think that a kind of 'ferrous silicate that can not be produced anywhere but in space', would be of intense interest to many, many people, as would be the fact that said ferrous silicate crystals are apparently darned near impervious to lasers.

Thus, the trash-it-fast agenda of the Universe Today article is exposed for what it is-- spinola designed to distract and/or discourage people from researching the actual story for themselves. No attribution of the Pravda article was given in the Universe Today article, because the spin-meisters do not want anyone looking at the Pravda article and/or taking it even half-way seriously. I can just hear the intel freak-out now-- 'Geez, not only are the Russians blabbing about laser-proof materials, there's a frikkin' alien face on the stuff they recovered! We have so-o-o gotta kill this story...'

In this case, there is already way too much bona-fide research posted online, and the spin is coming way too late.

Also, before I forget, the photo accompanying this article is from the Pravda article, and is an actual picture of part of what was recovered at Tunguska, according to Pravda. It is not a picture of 'supposed crystals', as the Universe Today article labels them. Of course, I leave it entirely up to the reader as to whether or not they wish to view the Pravda article as factual, but at this point, I'd say the Pravda article has way more going for it (in terms of a bona-fide news agency standing behind it as well as quotations and pictures from checkable sources) than the Universe Today hit-piece does.

Goddess, but I love my job...