...it would have been identified long before. In theory, all the downed tree trunks would point back to the centre of the explosion and there would be fragments of debris from the crater, blasted out amongst the downed trees.

Although the srea was not visited immediately after the blast, it was soon enough to note evidence like this, if it were present. The concept of an explosion coming from a crater was not foreign to folk of the Early 20th century. The puzzle for the last 100 years has been that there was NOT an obvious crater commensurate with the scale of air-blast damage.

All the impact modelling is consistent with a high-altitude detonation...