Two reports from Die Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, for 21 and 23 November, 1967:

'Belgrade (from our own correspondent)

'Unidentified flying objects (UFO's) have been sighted over various districts of south-east Europe during the last few days At the weekend an amateur astronomer photographed three of these gleaming celestial objects at Agram. But while the experts were still giving their opinions of this photograph that was splashed across several columns of the Yugoslavian papers, more UFO's have already been reported from the mountainous region of Montenegro, where they were even supposed to have caused several forest fires. These accounts come mainly from the village of Ivangrad where the inhabitants swear black and blue that they have observed strange brightly illuminated heavenly bodies every evening during the last few days. The authorities confirm that several forest fires have occurred in this district but so far cannot explain what started them.'

'Sofia (UPI)

'A UFO has appeared over the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. According to the report of the Bulgarian News Agency BTA, the UFO could be recognised with the naked eye. BTA says that the flying body was "bigger than the sun's disc and later took the shape of a trapeze". The flying body is supposed to have emitted powerful rays. It was also observed by telescope in Sofia. A scientific collaborator of the Bulgarian Institute for Hydrology and Meteorology said that the flying body apparently moved under its own power. It was flying about 18 miles above the earth.'

People block the road to serious research by boundless stupidity. There are 'contact men' who claim to be in communication with extraterrestrial beings; there are groups who develop fanciful religious ideas from hitherto unexplained phenomena or build cranky philosophies of life from them or even claim to have received orders for the salvation of mankind from UFO crews. Among the religious fanatics, the Egyptian 'UFO angel' naturally comes from Mohammed, the Asiatic one from Buddha and the Christian one directly from Jesus.

At the 7th International World Congress of UFO Investigators, in the autumn of 1967, Professor Hermann Oberth, the man known as 'the father of space travel' and the teacher of Wernher von Braun, said that UFO's were still 'an extra-scientific problem'; but, said Oberth, UFO's were probably 'space-ships from unknown worlds' and to use his own words: 'Obviously the beings who man and fly them are far ahead of us culturally, and if we go about things properly we can learn a lot from them.' Oberth, who accurately predicted rocket development on earth, suspects that the prerequisites for abiogenesis exist on other planets in the solar system. Oberth, a research scientist himself, demands that serious scientists, too, should tackle problems that may seem fantastic at first. 'Scholars behave like stuffed geese who refuse to digest anything else. They simply reject new ideas as nonsense.'

On 17.11.67, under the headline 'Second Thoughts', Die Zeit said: 'For years the Russians have ridiculed western hysteria about flying saucers. Not long ago Pravda contained an official denial that such peculiar celestial vehicles existed. Now the Air Force General Anatolyi Stolyakov has been appointed director of a committee which is to examine all reports of UFO's. In this connexion the London Times writes: "Whether UFO's are the product of collective hallucinations, whether they originate from Venusian visitors or are to be understood as a divine revelation—there must be an explanation for them, otherwise the Russians would never have set up a Committee of Enquiry".'

The most spectacular and puzzling incident connected with the phenomenon of 'matter from the universe' took place at 7.17 on the morning of 30 June, 1908, in the Siberian Taiga. A fire-ball shot across the sky and was lost in the steppe. Travellers on the Trans-Siberian Railway observed a glowing mass which moved from south to north. A thunder-bolt shook the train, explosions followed and most of the seisomographic stations in the world registered an appreciable earth tremor. At Irkutsk, 550 miles from the epicentre, the needle of the seismograph went on quivering for nearly an hour. The noise could be heard over a radius of 621 miles. Whole herds of reindeer were destroyed. Nomads were whirled up into the air with their tents.

Not until 1921 did Professor Kulik begin to collect eyewitness accounts. Finally he also succeeded in collecting the money for a scientific expedition to this sparsely populated region of the Taiga.

When the expedition reached the Stony Tunguska in 1927, they were convinced that they would find the crater made by a gigantic meteorite. Their conviction turned out to be quite wrong. They saw the first trees without tops as much as 37 miles from the centre of the explosion. The nearer they came to the critical point, the more barren the district became. Trees stood there like shaved telegraph poles; in the vicinity of the centre even the strongest trees had been snapped off outwards. Last they found traces of a tremendous conflagration. Pushing on further north, the expedition became convinced that a vast explosion must have taken place. When they came across holes of all sizes in swampy ground they suspected the impact of meteorites; they dug and drilled in the marshy ground without finding a single remnant, a piece of iron, a bit of nickel or a lump of stone. Two years later the search was continued with bigger drills and improved technical resources. They drilled to a depth of 118 ft without finding a single trace of any-kind of meteoric material.

In 1961 and 1963 two more expeditions were sent to the Tunguska by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The 1963 expedition was under the leadership of the geophysician Solotov. This group of scientists, now equipped with the most modern technical appliances, came to the conclusion that the explosion in the Siberian Tunguska must have been a nuclear one.

The type of an explosion can be determined when several physical orders of magnitude that caused it are known. One of these orders of magnitude in the Tunguska explosion was known in the vast amount of radiant energy emitted. In the Taiga the expedition found trees eleven miles from the centre of the explosion that had been exposed to radiation and set on fire by it at the moment of explosion. But a growing tree can only catch fire if the amount of radiant energy per sq. cm reaches 70 to 100 calories. Yet the flash of the explosion was so bright that it continued to cast secondary shadows at a distance of 124 miles from the epicentre!

From these measurements they worked out that the radiant energy of the explosion must have been around 2-8 x 10 <23> ergs. (Let me explain: the erg in science is the so-called 'measurement of work'. A beetle with a mass of 1 gramme performs 981 ergs' worth of work when it climbs a wall 1 cm high.)

The expedition found branches and twigs on the tops of trees that had been carbonised, up to range of eleven miles. From this they concluded that sudden heating had taken place. This was the result of an explosion, not a forest fire! These carbonisations were only found where there had been no shadows to interrupt the diffusion of the flash. Clearly and unquestionably it must have been a case of radiation. The sum of all these effects makes the energy of 10 <23> ergs necessary for the gigantic devastation. This immense energy corresponds to the destructive power of an atom bomb weighing 10 megatons or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, ergs!

All the investigations confirmed a nuclear explosion and related to the realm of fable explanations such as the impact of a comet or the fall of a great meteorite.

What explanations are offered for this nuclear explosion in the year 1908?

In March 1964, an article in the reputable Leningrad paper Svesda put forward the theory that intelligent beings living on a planet in the constellation Cygnus had tried to make contact with the earth. The authors, Genrich Altov and Valentina Shuraleva, said that the impact in the Siberian Taiga was a response to the colossal explosion-like eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the Indian Ocean that had sent a large concentration of radio waves into the universe when it erupted in 1853. The distant stellar beings had erroneously taken the radio waves for a signal from space; so they had directed a Laser beam, which was much too strong, at the earth, and when the beam hit the earth's atmosphere high above Siberia, it had turned into matter. I must admit that I do not accept this explanation because it seems too far-fetched.