The 1935 Guyana event and the 1908 Tunguska event

Andrei Ol'khovatov 

This paper is a continuation of a series of works, devoted to various aspects
of the 1908 Tunguska event. In 1935 a remarkable event took place in Guyana (at that
time British Guiana). A meteor was seen and a large area of devastated forest was
discovered. The main source for information on this event was an article published
in an astronomical magazine in 1939. The 1939-article provided 2 possible
explanations for this event. The first one is that these destructions were caused by the
meteor, the second one is that the destructions were caused by a tornado. The 1939-
article says that this event may be equal to or superior to the great Siberian meteor of
1908 (i.e. the 1908 Tunguska event). According to the author of the present paper,
from the analysis of the available data, it follows that it is extremely unlikely that the
devastation of the forest was caused by the infall of a spacebody. There is a hint of a
role of a meteorological factor in the 1935 Guyana event. The paper also briefly
examines a remarkable natural event that took place in Brazil in 1930, which in some
publications is compared to the 1908 Tunguska event. There is too little data on this
event to draw a more or less reliable conclusion. Nevertheless, the available data casts
doubt on the assumption that this phenomenon was caused by infalls of spacebodies.
Some comparison of the 1935 Guyana event with the 1908 Tunguska event has been
made.