Moronic Legends, Ch. 1: Nikola Tesla's Death Ray and Tunguska

Last updated: March 11th 2023

Tesla gets a ton of undeserved credit for things he didn't actually invent. The most famous misattributions are the radio, Alternating Current, the X-Ray, and the subject of today's urban legend: The Death Ray.

In case you're not familiar with the "Tunguska Event" or "Tunguska Incident" (see the wikipedia article), it was an insane explosion that happened in Russia in 1908, which "flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest."

I'm no Scientist, but if you ask me, it sounds like if no volcanoes were detected then clearly it was some rocks from space or something. End of mystery. No need to even go there and check. But that's me, lazy.

Anyway, today the explosion is indeed attributed (by The Science, I suppose) to a "meteor air burst."

I personally don't care about The Truth, but today I heard about a legend that says it was actually Nikola Tesla, with his Death Ray which he supposedly invented, that caused the explosion!

(How do you "flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest." with a Death Ray? Did he shoot it from space too?)

This 2002 article from the New Scientist mentions the legend, but it links to a broken link.

Here's a link that works as of March 2023, to some random website that I know nothing about (so don't blame me for what you read in there; in fact, don't click on it.) It talks about the moronic legend (which it calls a "theory"): https://blogerizsjene.com/en/tesla-i-tunguska-eksplozija/.

So that's today's Moronic Legend: The massive Tunguska explosion in Russia was the result of Nikola Tesla testing his Death Ray that was funded by JP Morgan.

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