On August 13, 1930, the area of Curuçá River near latitude 5° S and longitude 71.5° W experienced a meteoric air burst, also known as the Brazilian Tunguska event. The event was forgotten for more than 50 years, then was "revived" after the English astronomer M. E. Bailey found in the Vatican Library archives a 1931 issue of the L'Osservatore Romano which contained a dispatch from the Franciscan monk Fedele d'Alviano. D'Alviano visited the region five days after the event and interviewed people from the region; they told him they were frightened of what had happened. Read more
In his article, Father Fedele d'Alviano, an Italian Capuchin-Franciscan monk, states that he visited many sites along the River Curuçá listening to what the inhabitants had to say. He heard how that, as the whistling noises increased in intensity - like those of artillery shells, the children ran to hide in the corners of their huts. Some of the fishermen, however, gazed upwards and witnessed large balls of fire falling from the sky. The three explosions caused tremors like those of an earthquake and were heard over distances of several hundreds of kilometres. The Sun remained obscured by the rain of ash until midday. The Daily Herald article refers to Fedele's report and also mentions that, when the 'meteors' struck the ground, 'the whole forest was ablaze.' The fire is reported to have lasted for some months, and depopulated a large region of the forest. Read more
R. de la Reza[1], P. R.Martini [2],A. Brichta [3], H. Lins de Barros [4], P. R. M. Serra [5]. [1] Brazilian National Observatory-MCT, delareza@on.br. [2] Brazilian Institute on Space Research-MCT. [3] Federal University of Bahia. [4] Brazilian Physics Research Center-MCT. [5] Brazilian Institute on Space Research - MCT.
This event, also known as the "Brasilian-Tunguska Event" (Bailey et al. 1995), refers to a supposed fall of three bodies in the early morning of August 13, 1930 on the Brazilian Amazonian forest, near the Peruvian border.