The View From Left Field

I'm going to spitball a really wild theory just to see if it makes anyone else accept the possibility that someone knows.

Let me lay out the scenario and then we'll get into recorded belief of the local people involved. Their belief is that some et presence (or at least intervention) was involved, but we'll get to that later. Ready to go off road?

Good. The year is 1908. The place is, as you may have guessed, is Tunguska, Russia. The Earth experiences a fairly big bang. At the time, people notice the results of this blast, but it's so far from anything like civilization that it doesn't make any long term difference. There are bright skies at night that may point to the meteorite being a comet fragment rather than a rocky boulder. The gasses released by a comet fragment may well have been spread after the high altitude explosion, resulting in the materials being excited the same way they would have been in space.

Now, let's look at what we know, what we should be able to figure out, and then consider some strange 'why's.

We know approximately how high the thing was when it popped. We have a decent guess at how fast it was going. We have a really detailed survey of how big an area was flattened and what way the trees were pointing. This should let us find out the direction it was going and the angle of incidence, if we work at it. There have been studies done of the blast patterns of air burst explosions. This is really critical and we must have this nailed down in order to ask the right questions.

Now. There is a local myth(?) that calls the Tunguska area involved "the valley of death". The locals say there are seven 'upside down kettles' that they say were left there by the gods to keep things from coming down from outer space. There have been some weird happenings that may confirm this, but nothing that can be called proof has been found.

Here is the question: if the meteorite had been coming in at a shallow angle, where would it have impacted and what was there in 1908?

If anything was already at the impact site, what was it and was it something that was important to someone and if so, who? All in all, it makes for interesting conversation.