The morning of February 12, 1947, dawned cold but bright and sunny in the wide Ussuri valley of Eastern Siberia. During the early morning hours the people in the villages went about their everyday chores as usual. Farmers fed and watered their livestock, while housewives tidied rooms and fired up stoves for heating and baking. Miners went to work deep underground. An artist seated himself outdoors near his home to make exercise sketches. In a densely wooded area on the slopes of a nearby mountain range, a logging crew began a day’s timber-cutting.
Suddenly, at 10:35 a.m., an extraordinarily large and brilliant fireball flashed above the central part of the mountain range. It streaked across the sky in less than 5 seconds and disappeared beyond the western foothills of the range. Then the inhabitants of a wide area heard what seemed to them a mighty thunderclap followed by a powerful roar like an artillery cannonade. Many people felt a strong airwave. (Field parties later found that those who noticed this effect were quite close to the place where the meteorite fell.)
For several hours afterward, a large black column of smoke tinged with a reddish-rose color stood above the place of fall. Gradually, this cloud spread outward, became curved and then zigzag in form, and finally vanished toward the end of the day.
The flash of the fireball and the loud noises that followed it caused panic among the farm animals. Cows lowed mournfully and herds of goats scattered in every direction, chickens and other fowl squawked in alarm, and dogs ran whining for shelter or crouched against the legs of their masters.
In the villages, the airwave blew snow off the roofs of houses and other buildings, while the strong earth-shocks opened windows and made doors swing ajar. Housewives were dismayed to see glass windowpanes shattered in their frames and burning coals and firebrands jolted out of the wood-burning stoves.
Even deep in the mineshaft, the vibrations in the air were strong enough to snuff out the miners’ lamps, leaving the men in darkness.
On seeing the huge fireball streak across the sky, the artist put aside his practice sketch and began a picture of the display before his impressions of it could fade. His painting of this natural event is now famous. Not only is it on display in scientific museums all around the world, but a color reproduction of it has been issued in Russia as a postage stamp.
The forester supervising the logging crew reported that his attention was first attracted to the sky when he noticed a strange “second” shadow rotating rapidly about the tree that cast it. On looking up, he saw a blindingly bright fireball, twice as large as the sun, a fiery globe that threw off multicolored sparks as it passed. Not long after the fireball disappeared behind the trees, the forester heard a loud noise like nearby cannonading and saw a large dark-colored cloud—later tinged with red—billow up over the impact point. (The members of the logging crew were among the very few persons actually abroad near the place of fall. It turned out that they were only about 9 miles from it.)
As soon as the many eyewitnesses of the fireball had recovered from their fright, the questions almost everyone asked were “What could it have been?” and “Where did it come down?” To answer the first question was not as difficult as to answer the second. Local scientists in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, the nearest cities of some size, suspected from the first that a very large meteorite fall had occurred. But exactly where? All they could be certain of was that the impact point lay in the Ussuri taiga, a formidable wilderness.
The Sikhote-Alin mountains lie along the Siberian coast between the Sea of Japan and the Tatar Strait. The Ussuri taiga is a vast, low-lying, marshy, densely forested region fronting the western flanks of these mountains. Ordinary cedars, pines, oaks, and aspen grow in the taiga, but the region is also noted for such rare plants and trees as the celebrated ginseng, the cork tree, the Greek nut tree, and the black birch. Wild grape and ivy vines intertwine the upper branches of the thick forest, and the trunks of the trees themselves rise from an almost impenetrable maze of brush and downed timber.