On the morning of June 30th, 1908, something traveling at sixty thousand miles per hour entered the atmosphere above central Siberia and exploded with the force of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Eighty million trees were flattened across two thousand square kilometers of forest. The shockwave circled the globe twice. For several nights afterward, the skies over London glowed bright enough to read a newspaper by at midnight. The thing that caused all of it left no crater, no wreckage, and almost nothing recoverable. It simply vanished.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the indigenous Evenki people who felt the heat and were thrown from their feet and named it after their god of thunder, the Russian scientist who spent years fighting for an expedition to reach the site, and the century of investigation that followed — from alie ...