New data on accounts of the 1908 Tunguska event

Abstract

There has been a longstanding debate about the nature of the 1908 Tunguska event.Many eyewitness accounts were collected more than half of a century after the event. Among these are many second-hand oral accounts after the generation of eyewitnesses faded away. However, several years ago, two valuable publications appeared containing first-hand eyewitness accounts collected by a Russian ethnographer, Sev'yan Vainshtein, during an expedition to the settlement of Sulomay in 1948. This paper presents additional details of these accounts, based on the author's discussions with Vainshtein before he died in 2008, and demonstrates how these accounts shed new light on what happened in Tunguska in June 1908.