The Tunguska Event was seen as many throughout the world as the single largest unexplained explosion on Earth in the past two centuries. But shortly before the famed and highly publicized Tunguska explosion, another event was recorded by Thomas Jefferson that worked to shake the very foundation of the then Vice President’s notion of science. And today it once again receives the spotlight as one of the strangest and most unexplainable events in modern history.
Jefferson was a naturalist and then president of the American Philosophical Society. He believed strongly in what would eventually become the scientific study of astral bodies and was definitely interested in the anomaly that came to his attention in the year 1800 by witnesses including William Dunbar, who was himself a naturalist and man of science.
The event chronicles an object which was spotted on the horizon soaring over the landscape in the form of a massive fireball. The object was an incredible sight to behold by witnesses who said it shot over the plains like nothing they had ever seen. The object was allegedly the size of a house and made a steep turn before eventually turning to the forest just out if sight and exploding. Fragments of the object including steel plates were discovered and then taken into custody by the Philosophical Society. These plates were later lost.
At first, this sighting appears nothing more than to be a comet or meteorite crashing to the Earth. But if a meteorite the size of a house had crashed into even a wilderness area, the devastation of such an object would be seen far and wide as it would explode with an incredible force and create a massive crater in the Earth’s surface or explode overhead due to the quick cooling and send fiery debris scattering several miles in every direction. In this case, however, the object did crash and there was even a brilliant light, but the other side effects of a meteor explosion were not seen by either Dunlop or other witnesses present at the scene. If this is evidence of a meteorite explosion, then it’s certainly not the kind of evidence that was later retrieved at the scene. In fact, witnesses to the event describe what we would call today almost a Roswell event.
And in those days the idea of alien invaders was still 98 years from being born with the assistance of HG Welles. But people had been meeting mysterious people from the sky already for decades. In the same year a man by the name of James Lumley discovered a similar crash that knocked down trees in the Rocky Mountains discovered an object that sailed through the heavens and crashed into the side of the mountain. According to Lumley’s report, when he examined the strange object he discovered that it seemed like it had been created and controlled by “animated” beings. Though his claim would eventually fall into obscurity, is it possible there could be a crashed flying saucer still left undiscovered in the Rocky Mountain range?