Few people know more about the secrets of nature than Nikolai Nepomniachtchi. Orientalist, writer, traveler. Author of over 1000 books about the mysteries of history, nature and man. Winner of many literary awards. Among the bestsellers are the books "Unknown Great Patriotic War", "TASS is authorized to … keep silent", "People-phenomena" and others. Correspondent Marina Kruglyakova met and spoke with the writer.
Your book about America with archaeologist Andrei Zhukov has recently been published. You write that it was not Columbus who discovered it. If not he, then who?
- Columbus discovered what was already discovered. Such voyages were made by the Phoenicians, Celts and others several millennia before. Columbus followed the maps of his predecessors.
Why did Columbus enter the history of discoveries, and we know nothing about them?
- Columbus just translated everything into a commercial plane. He enlisted the support of kings Ferdinand and Isabella, and thanks to this, then the expansion into the New World began. His predecessors did not have such rich sponsors. They were mainly refugees, romantics, adventurers.
The most interesting and significant of these was the Chinese eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, who sailed around the world in 1420, that is, 72 years before Columbus. In total, he made 8 round-the-world travels and discovered almost the entire world known to us, including America, Australia and even northern Russia, where he entered in 1423 through Northern Europe and the Baltic.
And despite this, we also do not know anything about him
- Zheng He had a patron - the emperor, who encouraged and sponsored his voyages. After the death of this monarch, his fierce enemy ascended the throne, who eradicated from the history of China all the deeds of his predecessor, including the voyages of Zheng He. In China and Europe, they learned about them only in the 30s of the last century.
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Fossils, relics and animals unknown to official science are another topic of your research. Why did you become involved in cryptozoology?
- After graduation, I was sent to work as a translator from Portuguese in a group of Soviet geologists in Mozambique. Then this country only freed itself from the Portuguese colonial rule. We just had to sort through the archives. In them I found a lot of interesting information on the history and nature of Africa. In particular, there is some evidence that in the north in the lakes there are huge creatures similar to dinosaurs or other relict dinosaurs.
Sometimes our geological group went on expeditions to remote regions of the country. On one of these trips, we ended up in the province of Tete, on the border with Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). We set up a tent camp on the edge of a lake with swampy shores, which was considered by local residents to be an unloved and even cursed place - pets were constantly disappearing there and even hippos were not found. In the evenings we heard strange screams, not similar to the sounds made by animals we know.
Local residents said that these were the cries of the chipque, the owner of the local waters, a large animal, unlike any of the known animals. It has a small head on a long neck, a massive body covered with thick wrinkled skin and a long tail. Once we even saw footprints of it, similar to those of a frog, only very large, and between them there was a trace from the tail - as if a telegraph pole had been dragged through.
I was not able to see a live chipqueque then, and later these areas became the scene of a bloody struggle between the warring political groups in Mozambique, so the marshes of Tete province still keep their secret. Since then, I have been fascinated by the study of mysterious animals.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about some humanoid creatures, which are even called alternative humanity …
- This is a very fashionable topic now. Cryptozo-ologists are engaged not only in the search for new, not yet discovered species of animals, but also in various mysterious creatures. For example, whose image did the writer Alexander Belyaev have in front of him when he wrote his fantastic works "Ariel" and "Amphibian Man"? Or an incomprehensible flying creature, similar to a person, which in the Far East was met and described by the famous traveler, ethnographer, writer Vladimir Arseniev. Flying "people" were also seen in Mexico, America, especially in Texas and California.
Has it ever happened that a mysterious creature suddenly ceased to exist?
- For example, a cave bear, a cave lion or a saber-toothed tiger. It is believed that they disappeared during the Ice Age 10-15 thousand years ago. But the Arab chronicles and stories of travelers testify that they lived almost to the early Middle Ages. Then everything stops abruptly - no one else has seen them.
Did you communicate with people who saw mermaids?
- There are dozens of stories about encounters with these creatures, and all of them, despite the geographical diversity, are very similar to each other. I spoke with some of the eyewitnesses. For example, a young border guard on the border between Moldova and Romania saw a creature that was sitting near the coast, on a floating island, and was bleeding.
The creature signaled for help. The young man had a first-aid kit with him, he bandaged his arm, and the creature, nodding gratefully to him, plunged into the water and swam away. It had legs, with shiny skin covered in black-green slime like scales.
In Belarus, in Polesie, from there, by the way, comes a lot of evidence of meetings with mermaids, two schoolchildren spent the night in the hayloft and heard fuss in a nearby haystack. Approaching him, they saw a couple, very strange looking. About two meters tall and outwardly very similar to the creature described by the border guard. These two, seeing the children, were frightened, quickly went to the bank and disappeared into the river. There are dozens of such stories.
And, for example, the vision of the Virgin Mary - is it from the same category that the border guard saw?
- It rather belongs to the category of parapsychological things. But this is also reality, which is given to us in sensations in parallel with our reality. However, not everyone can perceive it.
So it has nothing to do with religion?
- All religion is deeply materialistic. This is another reality, unknown, still unsolved at the moment and clothed in the form of religion because of its incomprehensibility. All the mysteries and miracles of the Church come from a temporary ignorance of our nature.
And Bigfoot, where did he come from?
- One of the versions that these are some of our relatives, ancestors who have not received further development, is a dead-end branch.
What unique abilities does Bigfoot have?
- He is savagely clever, in some ways even "higher" than man. Yeti has the ability to wake suggestion, to suggest. He can stay under water for a long time. By the way, the legends about mermaids are in many ways connected with snowmen - sometimes eyewitnesses say that a mermaid hides under water and lives there. Perhaps this is just a yeti, which lives, of course, not in water, but in caves located below its level.
Where in Russia is Bigfoot found?
- It is most likely to see him in the Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Tyumen, Chelyabinsk regions, in Komi, in the Urals, in the Perm Territory, in Altai. In the central part of Russia - in the Tambov, Vladimir, Orel regions. By the way, the writer Ivan Turgenev met him there.
Are the details of this meeting known?
- It was in 1872. When Ivan Sergeevich was swimming in the river, someone touched him on the shoulder. Looking back, he saw that it was a huge hairy creature. Turgenev in panic went to the shore, jumped out of the water in what his mother gave birth and ran. The mermaid, as Ivan Sergeevich later called her, caught up with him and tried to touch him. Fortunately, there was a shepherd nearby who "walked" over it with a whip. The "young lady" bounced back with a squeal and ran into the river. The writer was in indescribable horror, like many others who found themselves next to this creature. Arriving in Paris, he told Maupassant and Pauline Viardot about this episode. And Maupassant from his words wrote the story "Horror".
Did you want to see Bigfoot?
- Not really, except from afar.
Why?
- I'm afraid. One of the forms of protection of this creature - it sends some kind of impulses that start negative processes in the body. There is such a sad statistics - many people who directly dealt with Bigfoot for a long time and came into direct contact with him, fell ill and died early. Although it may be just a coincidence. For example, Zhanna Kofman, President of the International Union of Cryptozoologists, has been working on this topic all her life, participated in many expeditions to the Pamirs and the Caucasus, most of our researchers communicated with the Yeti. By profession, she is a surgeon, professor, went through the whole war. Now she is under 90 years old, she feels great and is full of strength and energy, crossing out this gloomy legend with her fate.
Some people believe that Bigfoot is the result of crossing polar and brown bears
- It is not right. The opinion that there are interspecific crosses has long been refuted by Professor Nikolai Vereshchagin, a recognized specialist in bears. He was condescending to the problem of Bigfoot. But he had another passion: he recognized the existence of the Irkuyem in Chukotka.
Who is it?
- In Alaska, in Chukotka, an unusual, giant, as they called it, "bear" has been noticed for a long time. By the way, he doesn't look like a bear at all. The animal has a hump, a large fat bag hangs on its stomach. There is a version that this is arctodus - the ancestor of today's bear, a relative of some surviving ancient form that lived many thousands of years ago.
You spoke about the unique abilities of Bigfoot. Have you ever had to communicate with people with similar or other special abilities?
- I remember the meeting with the famous English science fiction writer Arthur Clarke. We came to visit him shortly before his death. He lived in Sri Lanka, in the city of Colombo, in a separate mansion. We talked about many topics, including his ability to foresee. He said that, according to his calculations, in a year or two in Southeast Asia as a result of an earthquake there will be a powerful tsunami, thousands of people will die, and named the exact places, not forgetting his native Sri Lanka. And so it happened.
Did Clark predict anything else?
- He made a lot of predictions, for example, he said that in 2040, small cloned dinosaurs will sit in the booths instead of dogs. It touched me, but I did not believe him. And at that moment, as if as punishment, his little dog, which was wandering around my feet, wrote on my sandals.
People with predictive abilities sometimes experience a condition called "automatic writing." All of a sudden, they begin to roll their eyes and write, as if dictation from someone unknown. In Moscow, there was such a Leva Fedotov, a friend of Yuri Trifonov. In his diaries, written in 1940-1941, he predicted the entire course of the Great Patriotic War, down to political collisions and the smallest details of individual battles, the Nuremberg trials, as well as other events until the end of the 1960s, including the landing of the Americans on The moon. Leva Fedotov himself died at the front near Tula in 1943. At 20.
Failed Wolf Messing?
- Yes, but there were many such people in history. For example, Matrona, Xenia of Petersburg, John of Kronstadt and dozens of other holy fathers and virgins were also fortunetellers and fell into similar states. Writers Mikhail Bulgakov, Maximilian Voloshin, Morgan Robertson and others sometimes wrote about things that came true.
“It all sounds incredible. But not as much as flying people, sea lizards, and so on. Is it really still possible to discover new species of animals, especially so mysterious ones?
- Even among large ungulates and monkeys, new species are being discovered, although it seemed that everything had been studied here inside and out. I'm not even talking about various worms or coelenterates, fish and other small inhabitants of our ecumene. There are lists of animals discovered in the XX and even in the XXI century. They are recognized by all scientists. There are still many unknowns. You cannot try to explain and understand everything using our logic. I have no doubt that there are some relic animals that have not yet been described in textbooks.