Tunguska "alien craft debris" expedition (Yuri Lavbin), Evenkia, 2004

1908. Over the Siberian taiga, residents saw "a dazzling fireball crossing the sky, followed by a flare brighter than the sun. Minutes later, a shock wave knocked many of those residents off their feet." Since then the Tunguska explosion has drawn scientists and dreamers to Evenkia.

In July 2004 a new expedition left Krasnoyarsk. The Siberian Public State Foundation "Tunguska Space Phenomenon" sent it, and its president, Yuri Lavbin, led it. On 29 July, Pravda quoted his goal. The team meant to prove "it was not a meteorite that rammed the Earth, but a UFO."

The team chose its search area from satellite photos. It lay near Poligus, a village on the right bank of the Podkamennaya Tunguska. On 9 August 2004 the team finished its work. The next day, the find was in Pravda.

"Blocks of an extraterrestrial technical device." A buried object covered with trees. A metal block that preliminary analysis called "a compound of iron silicate with unknown material." Then the "deer stone" of Evenk folklore, a huge white stone on a crag, said to be the size of a peasant's hut. Lavbin suggested it was "part of the core of a comet." A 50 kg piece went to Krasnoyarsk for analysis. Two black stones followed, "regular cubes with their sides measuring a meter and a half." Lavbin said their "material recalls an alloy used to make space rockets."

At a press conference in Krasnoyarsk, Lavbin confirmed that parts of an alien device had been found. His team concluded that the object moved from west to east, not from southeast. And it had not simply fallen. "They exploded this enormous meteorite that headed toward us with enormous speed," he said. "I am fully confident and I can make an official statement that we were saved by some forces of a superior civilization."

Within days, NBC space analyst James Oberg responded. "That's the theory he admits he started with, even before he got to the area." The region, Oberg added, is a drop zone for discarded rocket stages from Russia's Baikonur base. Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University called it "a rather stupid hoax." Anna Skripnik of the Russian Academy of Sciences meteorites committee was unimpressed. "There are plenty of amateurs who organize trips to the site."

Dutch space historian Geert Sassen had a suspect. "They might have found some parts of the fifth Vostok test flight." On 22 December 1960 that capsule, carrying the dogs Kometa and Shutka, came down near the Podkamennaya Tunguska. Both dogs were recovered alive. NASA's David Morrison said the 1908 object was very likely a stony body about 60 meters in diameter that disintegrated at an altitude of approximately 8 kilometers.

No laboratory results were ever published. Ufologist Patrick Gross noted that Lavbin did not let outside scientists examine the sample. His judgement was blunt: "when there is no description whatsoever of some extraordinary finding, it is often because there is no finding, but a hoax." By January 2005, he wrote, the story had "died naturally."

Lavbin did not stop. In 2009 he described quartz crystals. Some had holes "placed so the stones can be united in a chain." Others had drawings that he said formed a map. Universe Today put the "strange portrait" he saw on one stone down to pareidolia. In 2013 RIA Novosti reported that he planned a new search for an alien ship.