Quote from Samanthaj on 20 June 2023, 00:07

This story was originally published on Gizmodo

Some things, science just can’t explain. How could an explosion 1000 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima not take any human lives? How did the fumes emitted by a living human cause more than twenty people to become ill? And why is there a bridge in Scotland that compels dogs to throw themselves off it?

We look into some of the strangest mysteries ever to be documented on this Earth.

The Tunguska Event

In the early morning of June 30, 1908, a huge explosion 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima flattened 2000 square kilometres of forest in the sparsely populated Siberian Taiga. Astoundingly, there were no known human casualties from the event.

Evenki natives and Russian settlers played witness to an intense blue light, almost as bright as the sun, moving across the sky. It was almost ten minutes later that there was a flash and a huge sound, accompanied by a shock wave that broke windows and knocked people off their feet even hundreds of kilometres away.

The explosion was registered across Eurasia, but even more astoundingly, the event caused the skies to glow over the next few nights — a phenomenon visible from across Europe and Asia. Interestingly, a very similar glowing-sky event was reproduced later in the century by space shuttle launches. The following comes from an eyewitness account of the event:

At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara Trading Post, facing north…I suddenly saw that directly to the north…the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn’t bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few metres. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing

While the Tunguska event is technically classified as an impact event, no trace of meteoric impact has ever been found. No object was ever detected approaching the Earth, either. Other theories propose that the object could have been a comet — composed of ice rather than rock — that disintegrated as it entered the atmosphere.

The most scientifically accepted explanation is that of an air burst from an asteroid or comet, or even an explosion caused by the ignition of natural gas from within the earth’s crust. However no one has ever been able to confirm the cause of the huge explosion. With an event like this, conspiracies are bound to crop up.

Alternate explanations range from alien visitors to supernatural events — some have even hypothesised that a miniature black hole impacted the earth. Considering the similarities between Tunguska and much later space shuttle launches, the UFO theory is the most popular alternate explanation.

Also unusual is the extreme remoteness of the occurrence. The Tunguska area is essentially uninhabitable for humans, and the huge explosion caused no known casualties – though charred reindeer corpses were found in their hundreds. If this had occurred over a highly populated metropolitan area, it could have razed an entire city and wiped out literally millions of people.

Was the location of the explosion just divine good luck, or is it evidence that the event was planned by intelligent beings, whether human or otherwise?

Dyatlov Pass
Everything weird seems to happen in Russia. In the early days of February 1959, a group of nine hikers failed to return from a challenging trek they had undertaken through the northern Ural mountains.

It wasn’t until they were more than a week overdue that the first search and rescue groups were sent — at first consisting of fellow teachers and students at the Ural Polytechnical Institute and later of military including search planes and helicopters. It took searchers almost a week to find the battered and slashed remains of the group’s tent — which was empty.

The tent was only the beginning of the Dyatlov Pass mystery, but it baffled the searchers. All the groups belongings and shoes had been left behind, and the tent was cut open from the inside as if they had fled in panic. Many different sets of footprints left by people wearing socks, a single shoe or even barefoot, led down towards the edge of the forest. Down here, the searchers found the remains of a fire — and the first two bodies.

These two hikers were dressed only in their underwear, and were shoeless. Branches on the tree they were under were broken at heights that suggested that the men were trying to climb up, or had climbed up before their death. In the stretch between this tree and the tent the searchers found three more bodies buried in the snow, their poses looking like they were attempting to return to the tent.
It was more than four months before the remaining four hikers were found in a ravine under four meters of snow, almost 100 meters further into the woods from the forest’s edge. These four were better dressed, as though the others had relinquished their clothing to them.

While some of these events are consistent with hypothermia and a phenomenon called ‘paradoxical undressing’ — where hypothermia sufferers will undress as they begin to feel unexpectedly hot as their nerves and mental faculties fail — there were still elements that didn’t make sense. Three of the hikers had fatal internal injuries, with one doctor comparing the force required for such trauma to be comparable to that of a car crash. Some sources even claimed that there were high doses of radioactive contamination on some of the bodies, while one witness claimed that the corpses had a “deep brown tan”.

While theories on what happened to the hikers range from cryptozoological to extra-terrestrial to the standard secret Russian weapons testing, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what really happened on Dyatlov Pass.

Overtoun Bridge

There’s nothing particularly special about the Overtoun Bridge in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland. It was built in 1895 for ease of access to Overtoun house, and while it is quite a nice looking bridge, it isn’t anything special compared to most historical sites in Scotland. Except for the fact that dogs crossing the bridge feel compelled to throw themselves from the bridge to their inevitable demise.
This phenomenon has been occurring since the 1950s or 60s, with the bridge claiming the lives of dogs at an average rate of one per year. At this stage, it has claimed more than 50 dogs’ lives. Some dogs will even leap off the bridge a second time if they happen to survive the first.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI7iPb3qtZM[/media]

There are some similarities in most cases of dog suicides at Overtoun. Most of the incidents seem to happen at the same place — between the final two parapets of the bridge on the right hand side. It mostly happens in clear weather, and it also tends to happen with breeds with long snouts such as labs, collies and retrievers.

The mystery has been studied in depth, and the best answer anyone could come up with was that dogs were being lured to their death by a potent odor of male mink urine. This is despite a local hunter swearing that there were no mink nearby. Even if there were, mink are not confined to that one corner of Scotland, and this phenomenon doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else.

The Overtoun Bridge mystery opens up a lot of questions about domesticated animals and whether they would deliberately commit suicide. Considering it only happens at that one spot, there seems to be something else at play here, however.

Local legend claims the bridge is haunted, and at least one human victim has experienced its effects. In October 1994, a man named Kevin Moy threw his two week old son from the bridge, condemning the infant to death as he believed the child was the Anti-Christ. Moy then attempted to end his own life in the same way, though was unsuccessful.

A sign has been erected in recent years at Overtoun Bridge, warning dog owners to keep their pets on a lead.

Source
www.dmarge.com