1993, June, the road from the village of Shiryaevo deep into Samarskaya Luka
Our main group was four hours ahead of us, at which time they had already arrived at their destination and, probably, were unpacking their backpacks and preparing for the night. But we could only assume this, because we ourselves had just left the pier in the village of Shiryaevo and were following them. We were detained by some quite ordinary everyday circumstances, and Boris Smirnov, the cameraman of Lada TV, volunteered to be a guide for the "catch-up". We went along the long road through the Shiryaevsky ravine.
All this way, Boris carried a weighty movie camera, because his main goal was to shoot a story about the campaign and, especially, to capture local anomalies, if any suddenly arise. I must say right away that they did not arise - in the form in which I would like to see them. And, I must say, I still cannot decide whether this is good or bad. It is one thing when an eyewitness comes who managed to get out of some incredible story more or less safely and tells about what happened to him, and another thing when you yourself have to make an operational decision on the fact of the emergence of an AI …
We caught up with the group, the camp in the Stone Bowl (on the territory of the National Park, not the Zhigulevsky Reserve) was already ready. To prepare for our observations, we opened a notebook with eyewitness accounts. So what makes this area interesting?
Stone Bowl: myths and facts
For some reason, sometimes places that are completely ordinary, with a minimum indicator on the "scale of abnormality", suddenly begin to have an irresistible attraction for people and become cult. One of the most striking examples of such a cult place, which was born literally in front of one generation of people, is a spring in the Kamennaya Chasha tract. Needless to say, the water in it is really tasty - clean from what was filtered in limestones on the way to freedom, slightly alkaline in composition, has a healing effect on the digestive system, like soda, flushing out dirt from the intestines; delicious from the fact that, like milk, it contains calcium, does not spoil for five days due to the silver content (although negligible).
Pay attention to such warnings.
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Spring, Shiryaevsky ravine at the Stone Bowl
The Kamennaya Chasha tract is a beautiful place, and it is interesting at least because there are very few springs on the Samarskaya Luka. But for the time being, it attracted only tourists. And then something happened that made the Chalice an object of pilgrimage. In August 1993, a rather large group of people with an interest in paranormal topics stopped at the Chalice to rest. Spending the night by the fire, appropriate conversations, experiments on extrasensory perception (the first rule of a psychic should be the well-known "trust, but verify", but in this case, objectivity gave way to the romance of a warm summer night …) In short, it was this night that turned out to be a key point and gave a start to the formation process legends about the Stone Cup as an anomalous place.
Then someone remembered an old legend. They say that many years before the revolution, bandits frightened a resident of Shiryaev, a frightened woman turned to St. Nicholas the Pleasant for help, who saved the woman. They say that since then the Shiryaevsk women have especially venerated the savior, and the local grandmother-reading rooms have dedicated secret rituals to him. Well, the source that was in an accessible place not far from the road leading to Solnechnaya Polyana was just, so to speak, lucky: the surrounding residents recognized him as a saint.
Later, in the mid-90s of the twentieth century, with the blessing of Archbishop Sergius of Samara and Syzran, the source was included in the pilgrimage routes to the holy places of the Samara region, Russia and the Orthodox world.
By the way, two other sources of the Chalice, which they know about, but which almost no one goes to, are stronger in their effect and with more tasty water. However, they are located in places that are not so accessible.
Spring in the Stone Bowl
Thus, in this case, all the necessary signs of the "mythogenic zone" have found their place:
- the presence of a "miracle" (in this case, it refers, rather, to the field of mass psychology), - the presence of a myth, which, in principle, is already fully formed;
- the presence of a ritual object of nature;
- integration into the existing system of beliefs (two streams of popular beliefs have been combined - canonical Christian and popular);
- availability of a miracle confirmation system (word of mouth, backed up by publications in the media, spread rumors about the phenomenon of the Stone Bowl far beyond the Samara region).
Here's what is interesting. As the years passed, it became clear that in those years such a cult was bound to appear in our places. No matter how technocratic our society may be, the connection with nature remains one of those elements that ensure its sustainability. And water, rivers, springs always have a special place in human consciousness. And if not for the Chalice, they would have chosen any other source. Or they would have dug up …
Here, for example, what article appeared in 1996 in the newspaper "Freedom Square". Its author and our colleague Julia Vinokurova wrote:
“At the end of the twentieth century, mankind, wise with life experience, is absolutely sure that all miracles and legends were born a long time ago. Not even yesterday, and certainly not today. All miraculous places, as they say, are in their places. I want to talk about how a legend is born literally before our eyes.
One Togliatti woman, I will call her Vera, had a dream several times. As if she was walking along a ravine, kneeling down and digging a spring with her hands in the damp loose earth …
Waking up under the impression of what she saw, not from the first time she got ready to the opposite side of the Volga to find the coveted place in the ravine. Even at home, her legs ached so much that she had no strength to walk. But the dream seemed so real. "What if he's prophetic?" - thought Vera.
She got to the place by hitchhiking and went down the ravine. No signs of water. Only damp. Has passed yet. She stopped and listened. A trickle is murmuring somewhere. Straight with her hands, as in a dream, Vera began to dig the dirt. And I found and cleaned the fontanelle. Then she brought stones from a neighboring field, surrounded the spring. Straightened up - feels: the pain in the legs is gone."
This is how light anomalies look in Samarskaya Luka
However, in this case, it is clear that something "did not grow together." It is not known who or what so persistently broadcast pointing dreams to this woman, but the dug-out spring never became a cult place.
I will also say that the Stone Bowl (and that territory in general) cannot boast of the so-called "classic" UFOs, i.e. objects of man-made nature that have nothing to do with our human technology. Such objects are most often observed near Togliatti or Samara. Although, if you're lucky, a "plate" or "cigar" can still be seen during its transit over the Zhiguli.
But now - closer to anomalies. In those places, relatively often people become witnesses of such an unusual phenomenon as searchlight-like rays of many kilometers length, emanating from the virgin forest of the Zhiguli and hitting the sky at a height of several kilometers. Tourists, locals, and foresters talk about such rays. Especially often, such phenomena are observed within the Charokaysky ravine, near the former tar plant, but there are such observations along the entire length of the route from the Stone Bowl to the village of Shiryaevo.
These "rays" arise among a dense forest where there are no technical sources and cannot be. As a rule, they have an apparent height of up to several kilometers, and light (or the substance that we perceive as light) does not scatter over this entire length, but remains focused. Most often, the rays are white (light), but not so long ago there were reports of red rays. For example, not so long ago a group of schoolchildren led by a guide was returning from the Stone Bowl by a "long" road. About two kilometers from the Chalice, everyone noticed how close to the road, just behind a few rows of trees, a bright red ray, "up to the sky", flashed from the ground. The guide with difficulty kept the guys from the intention to "run to see" (in which she was absolutely right). They managed to photograph the beam with a cell phone, but the photograph, unfortunately, has not survived.
Perhaps the appearance of such interesting phenomena is provoked by the geophysical features of these places. But this is only a guess. And for skeptics, I will add that similar rays were observed in the pre-revolutionary era. By the way, a variety of this anomalous phenomenon has been called "cat ears" for a long time, and these phenomena look like cone-shaped low columns of light beating directly from the ground. The luminous zone in them is clearly delimited from the surrounding space - in the same way as it can be done only with the use of modern laser technology (which, of course, had nowhere to come from in the middle of the forest, and even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).
Charokaysky ravine
There are also strange "foggy" formations that openly violate the laws of physics. Many times tourists who visited the Stone Bowl observed very dense small "clouds" of white color, comparable in size to the size of a human figure. These clouds are so dense (in appearance) that the impression of a solid body is created. They move along the slopes of the Chalice in any direction. Interestingly, the wind, no matter how strong it may be, does not impede the movement of these clots, which often go exactly towards the wind, without changing their shape or dispelling under the influence of air currents.
But it is not safe to deal with such clots. So, one inveterate skeptic, in order to prove something to himself and others, entered such a "cloud" and was inside it for a couple of minutes. Bottom line: in the evening the temperature rose to 400, and then for a long time he needed the help of a specialist in nervous diseases.
Charokaisky ravine: the strangeness is just beginning …
And now - the strangest facts, for which there is no explanation.
In the early nineties, a man came to us - an inveterate tourist, accustomed to walking alone in any, even the most deaf, places. He considered Samara Luka as a place for an easy out-of-town recreation - the forest is sparse, there are many roads, villages are often found - in a word, nothing complicated or dangerous …
His next route ran along the Shiryaevsky ravine in the opposite direction - from the upper reaches to the village of Shiryaevo. He walked slowly, the backpack was not heavy. In the morning, after spending the night near the Charokaik cordon (this is 25 kilometers along the Shiryaevsky ravine, if you count from the village of Shiryaevo), I had breakfast and headed towards Shiryaev. On the way, for some reason, he needed salt. He took off his backpack, took out a jar and, wow, accidentally dropped it on the road. I didn’t collect the spilled salt, because in the evening I intended to go to the village.
I moved away from this place for several tens of meters and faced a crowd of strangely dressed people nose to nose. Gray homespun shirts to the knees, onuchi, tied with ropes, armed with stakes, axes and something else. On knobby sticks, spreading out some banners with the image of the moon dangled.
The first thought that came to our storyteller's mind was that they were participants in role-playing games. However, that was not the case. The speech of these people, though understandable, but with peculiarities. And he himself (suspecting that he was an enemy spy) was taken by the crowd with them - apparently he was not captured, but there was no way to escape. Omitting details, we can only say that the man spent about a month in the village with the inhabitants who had captivated him. I even got used to such a life and began to forget who he was and where he came from.
They fed him, did not offend, then they even began to consider him almost their own - after he took part in a skirmish with another tribe - the tribe of the Sun. So, maybe he stayed in that world (it is not clear what and where, although they spoke in a completely understandable and almost Russian language), but once he moved away from the village and … ended up on the road along the ravine, at the very place where I scattered the salt. He says how the haze left him - he remembered everything, and the jar of salt was in the same place where he dropped it.
The second case from the category of unexplained happened quite recently, in 2006. A young man, a resident of the city of Zhigulevsk, decided to go to the cycle circle. He knows these places very well, more than once he was there in the company, and alone, and on foot, and by bicycle, and therefore could not get lost. However, he somehow fought off a group of cyclists and got lost. For several days, no matter how I circled the forest, I could not find my way home.
Many strange things happened to him at that time, but the most unimaginable thing is that several times during his wanderings he seemed to have met people, but only with "cat" eyes. The pupils of their eyes were not round, like ours, but slit-like and oriented vertically. The circumstances of these meetings are such that there is no joke with the use of special lenses. These people went about their business, ran some kind of economy … Maybe such meetings served as the basis for local legends about the "white-eyed chudi" - secret inhabitants of these places (after all, their iris was barely yellowish, almost white).
The subsequent medical examination showed that the young man was completely healthy, including mentally, only exhausted and scared. He went out to people not far from Shiryaev, in the area of the Popova Gora adits, which also served as a source of a considerable number of oddities.
Tatiana Makarova