the Vurdalak Conjecture

The Tunguska Event -- a blast that scorched two thousand square miles in central Siberia in 1908. The blast was unknown in origin. Its shockwave was felt around the globe, and the debris it threw up in the sky, coloured the northern European sky for weeks. Two UofTexas astrophysicists, Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan, proposed in 1973, that the blast was caused by a black hole. The conjecture was dismissed by the scientific community for a couple of reasons: 1) there was no evidence that a similar blast occurred on the opposite side of the planet when the theoretical black hole exited, and, 2) Stephen Hawking's work had shown that black holes radiate energy, and any black hole would have dissipated before it had a chance to reach our planet. Recently however, Stephen Hawking has been having second thoughts about some his theories about black holes. The theory that leads the way as an explanation for the blast, is the explosion of a meteorite about 10km above the Earth. The problem with that explanation is that the exploding meteorite vaporized cleanly. No remnants were ever found. This site, the Vurdalak Conjecture, takes the black hole premise and extrapolates. It makes for an interesting read.