1908

The Tunguska meteorite. A mysterious fireball exploded over Tunguska in Siberia, creating shock waves felt miles away and setting 1,200 acres on fire. In 1927, Russian scientists first visit the sight of the blast. They find no meteorite fragments.

Robert Sterling Clark – still in the Army – undertakes an ambitious expedition to a remote area of northern China. Under Clark’s leadership an expedition of thirty-six men carried out zoological and ethnological research and made the first map of a little-known area of China between 1908 and 1909. This expedition came to an abrupt end, however, when the party’s Indian surveyor and interpreter, Hazrat Ali, was killed by the Chinese. Clark returned to the United States and published a vivid account of the day-to-day experiences of the expedition together with its scientific results: Through Shøn-kan: The Account of the Clark Expedition in North China, 1908-1909, by Robert Sterling Clark and Arthur de C. Sowerby, ed. by Major C. H. Chepmell (London and Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912). Clark describes:

The visitor to Hsi-an, as he travels over the rolling plain from no matter what direction, cannot fail to notice numerous mound of unusual shape dotted about everywhere like immense molehills, ofetn attaining a height of at least 100 feet, and standing on bases of very considerable area. […] they are the tombs of kings and emperors, and their wives, and of scholars and sages notable in their day. […] Concerning some, fantastic legends still linger in the minds of the people. [p.45]

Sowerby and Clark nowhere refer to the mounds as “pyramids.”

Bulgaria, Sofia. A very bright spherical object flew slowly above a square one afternoon.

President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the bill creating theNational Monetary Commission.