Unidentified flying object crashes, burns in Siberian taiga

Dec 1, 2006, 10:58 GMT

Moscow - Russian officials said an unidentified flying object fell out of the sky and burned on impact Friday in the taiga of East Siberia, the news agency Interfax reported.

Law enforcement authorities in the Krasnoyarsk region told Interfax residents had reported seeing a 'flying apparatus' plunge from the sky at about 10 a.m.

Residents of the remote area, some 260 kilometres north of the regional capital of Krasnoyarsk, said the surrounding area had been charred, showing signs of a fire.

Authorities, however, said they had been unable to reach the scene due to inclement weather conditions.

'Investigators and transport officials are now being sent from Krasnoyarsk to establish the reasons behind the crash,' a police official said.

Regional authorities have not speculated about what the object might have been, but they noted a helicopter had flown over the scene and that its crew had not seen any traces of fire.

The vast Siberian taiga, an area of boundless forest, famously played host to an explosion known as the 'Tunguska event' in June 1908 after an object, now thought to be an asteroid or comet, slammed into a remote area north of Lake Baikal.

The blast, which felled an estimated 60 million trees over 2,000 square kilometers, was later calculated to have been the equivalent of 10 to 20 megatons of TNT, similar in force to that of the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated.