How underwater monster myths are born
Recently, news agencies reported that near the village of Somin in the Ukrainian Volyn region there is a lake where a strange giant monster with the head of a snake and the body of a crocodile lives. In a karst reservoir with a depth of 56 meters, there are underwater caves, where it is believed that the "miracle Yudo" lives. They say that people do not swim there, and they are afraid to catch fish - they are afraid. It is believed that the monster is not averse to feasting on human flesh. And somehow, 30 years ago, it ate either a drunken shepherd who fell asleep on the shore, or a teenager who disobeyed his parents and decided to swim …
The news was happily picked up by television, and one of the Russian TV channels was even going to shoot a film about the new Loch Ness. An ignorant person should think that after receiving such information, zoologists all over the world should rush to Ukraine in order to catch or at least photograph the "miracle Yudo". This did not happen. Scientists are literate people, and according to the laws of genetics, the population of large vertebrates, in order not to degenerate, should number 300 - 500 individuals. Will they fit on a six hectare Lake Soma? If we take the “herd” of the smallest size, then five animals should live on each “weave” - incredible crowding. Besides, they would have consumed all the fish long ago. And there is a lot of her on this lake. Until now, local fishermen catch pikes under two meters. By the way, the roots of the legend are probably connected with one of these giant fish. The boys saw a wiggling torso with a diameter of a decent log or a huge muzzle - that's a monster for you.
There are dozens of similar lakes, in which, as they say, unknown to science monsters are found, in Russia and the CIS countries. In some cases, this is a hoax, but in others, large animals unknown to science can really exist.
Black Yakut giants hit with their tail
The Yakut Lake Khayyr is located beyond the Arctic Circle. It is quite small - 500 by 600 meters and a depth of just over seven. The origin is thermokarst - thawed patches in permafrost. At the end of 1964, Komsomolskaya Pravda published the story of G. Rukosuev, deputy head of the North-Eastern expedition of Moscow State University, about an observation made by N. Gladkikh, a seasonal worker of the expedition. Early in the morning he went to fetch water and … collided with a monster that had crawled ashore. He described it like this:
"A small head on a long, sleek neck, a huge body with bluish-black skin, a vertically protruding dorsal fin." Then the monster slid into the water and then appeared in the center of the reservoir. “Suddenly a head appeared in the middle of the lake, then a fin on the back. The creature hit the water with its long tail, which caused waves to spread across the lake.
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Rukosuev did not confine himself to retelling the observation, but added information to thought and from himself: there is no fish in the lake, birds do not sit on its surface, and local residents often hear "dull sounds" and bursts. He also refers to a conversation with the famous polar pilots I. Cherevichny and V. Akkuratov, who also allegedly saw two large black animals from an airplane.
Alas, in the expedition organized to verify the story, it was found that birds also land on the surface of the lake, and fish are found there, and no one saw the monster, although, in addition to observations from the shore, scuba divers combed its bottom … We also managed to find the main witness N. Smooth. He admitted that he came up with this story either out of boredom, or trying to hide some fault from his superiors.
Little mermen sit at the bottom of Vedlozero
Karelia is a famous land of lakes. Amazingly blue, not yet overgrown, rich in fish. One of them is Vedlozero. A completely ordinary reservoir 15 kilometers long and about seven kilometers wide, of glacial origin, with a large village on a high bank. The first publications about Vedlozero appeared recently - in the mid-1990s. One of the old-timers, the now deceased PF Egorov, claimed that he had observed a large luminous object falling into the lake from the sky. The expeditions organized at the same time did not find anything at the bottom. However, the well-known cryptozoologist Viktor Sapunov, who took part in them, later wrote about the amusing messages received from local residents: they allegedly began to observe here after the fall of the "body" of some "water" - small men with round heads …
In November last year, we conducted a survey of old-timers on the shores of the lake - I don't know why, but no one told us about the "water" type described above. But they met more prosaic creatures - seals. Vasily Efremov, the head of the village administration, says: “I myself am a fisherman, I have never seen any mermen. And I have not heard of those. But seals - yes, seals come to us. Several years ago, our local resident S. Chumak caught one and even took a picture with her … And what's surprising - Ladoga is nearby, there is a waterway there along the channels … ".
It seems that the head of the village council is right - the rumors about the "water" could have started up the city fishermen who noticed the seals. Any diver will confirm - seals in the water are very similar to humans. And Ladoga is really close. Perhaps earlier seals (or another species of freshwater pinnipeds, perhaps unknown to science) were distributed over a much larger territory of Russia. And it is with them that a large part of the legends about aquatic and mermaids is associated.
Furry monsters snort at fishermen
In North-Western Siberia, among the swampy taiga and forest-tundra, there are many lakes of different sizes - often from a dozen or two kilometers. Many of them are also connected by ducts. Usually the locals call them "fogs".
The famous zoologist and "fighter with the seekers of the" Bigfoot "Professor N. Vereshchagin in the magazine" Okhota and Hunting Economy "spoke with irony about the letter that had come to the Zoological Institute - his author assured that either walruses or hippos are found in the Irtysh lakes … Cryptozoologists, on the other hand, are in no hurry to ridicule such messages without first checking them. The well-known, now deceased, "seeker of the" Bigfoot "Maya Bykova walked around many villages and villages in that region and wrote down many stories of the same type, approximately as follows:
“I was driving a boat through our fog and noticed an unusual splash. I thought I should see what kind of fish this is? And he stopped. Suddenly, like a shock of hay rises from the depths. Looked closely - the coat is dark brown, like a wet fur seal. The sound made a hissing: "Fo-o", as in an empty dish. And then it sank into the water."
Other eyewitnesses draw the appearance of the "foggy monster" in a similar manner - in shape and size resembling a dugout boat turned upside down: covered with dark wool, emerging from the water, snorting and hiding again …
From the point of view of the laws of nature, it is pleasant to note that in this case, monsters are found not in one closed body of water, but in many, often connected by rivers, on a huge unpopulated territory. In a word, all the problems associated with an insufficient food base and degeneration are removed - thousands of individuals may well be found here and not be seen. And not because of their special care - just these eyes are few, and even they belong to the villagers who are in no hurry to write memoranda to the Academy of Sciences (and if anyone writes a letter, see the attitude towards him above).
Who could the mysterious creatures be? Fur clearly indicates their warm-bloodedness, that is, these are animals, mammals … In my opinion, most likely, we are talking about some unknown species of pinnipeds, freshwater seals. Seals are found in Lake Ladoga and on Lake Baikal - and this does not surprise anyone!
However, there are other assumptions. So, recently, the idea that lake monsters are mammoths, which for some reason have switched to an underwater lifestyle, has gained extraordinary popularity. The idea is stupid already because the mammoths had almost no sebaceous glands and their hair easily got wet … More acceptable, although still semi-fantastic, it seems, in comparison with the "water mammoths", the version of the Perm cryptozoologist N. Avdeev that we are talking about relict outliving their era of woolly rhinos …
"Bigfoot" dives near Tula
A small one - two hundred meters in diameter - Sergeev Pond in the Tula region was formed less than a hundred years ago, when people blocked a small river with a dam. And they began to breed fish. In this case, the water is completely drained once a year or two. It would seem, where does the monster come from?
But for more than a year in the regional center Belev, a small old town in the south of the Tula region, rumors have been circulating about it. They tell different stories, but mostly in the "classic" style, with elements of thrillers. Of course, according to most informants, the monster has a massive torso and a long neck and is nothing more than a Jurassic plesiosaur. It got to the point that one of the "independent" Tula newspapers published a solid article about the "dinosaur of the Tula region".
The Labyrinth group together with the Tula ethnographer V. Yegorov conducted their own investigation. Sergiev's pond is perfectly visible from the windows of the neighboring village, and we went to her houses - none of the peasants had seen any crocodiles or dinosaurs. Hearing about the monster - yes, they did, but either from the city relatives who came to visit, or from the Tula newspaper …
At the fish breeding station, we get acquainted with the duty officer Alexander Gashenev. And this is what the ichthyologist told: “I have been working here for several years and I can guarantee that there are no“nessies”in the pond. He is constantly under my supervision, you see for yourself - the view from here is excellent. But in general, you're in luck - the story with which all these conversations began happened before my very eyes. A company of young people came here in cars. We stopped on the shore, as usual, made a fire, made a picnic … And in the morning they come running to me, shake and say something like this: “Right in front of us, some creature crawled out of the water! Shaggy and, like a man, on two legs! She shook herself off and went into the forest! " I think their swimming wild boar or elk scared - sometimes these animals swim across the pond, he himself observed. And the fact that he came out on two legs … well, the guys drank, and they were already sleepy "…
Well, we learned how rumors are born, and once again made sure that there is no smoke without fire. As for the "shaggy creature", perhaps the ichthyologist is right, it was a wild boar, but it is not excluded - two cryptozoological themes intersected here. And the "Bigfoot" scared the picnickers, he is a relict humanoid. To the north, in Karelia, even in the Novgorod forests, these "owners of the forest" are often seen, but to the south they sometimes wander, according to statistics and eyewitnesses …
BTW
Do the classics lie?
The fact that a certain mysterious creature is hiding in the reservoir of the Tula region was also mentioned by the writer Mikhail Prishvin in the story "Cool Beast":
“Nobody saw him, but everyone knows that his lips are calf. Nobody heard him, but everyone knows that he shouts in a black voice. And his voice is fatal."
Tula ethnographer and ethnographer Vitaly Yegorov says: “The legend, which Prishvin mentions in a couple of lines, was not known to local historians. But I, assuming that the writer had managed to capture the now unknown legend, continued to search for references to the mythical beast. And I was lucky: during the collection of ethnographic materials in 1999, I came across an interesting message: "There is some kind of animal in the lake, it splashes and screams at night." It was not possible to obtain clearer evidence”.