There are ominous episodes in the history of UFO sightings, when the appearance of unidentified objects is accompanied by terrible events. One such incident took place in Ethiopia, and its circumstances remain unclear to this day.
On August 7, 1970, at approximately 11:30 am, residents of the village of Saladare, located 14 kilometers north of the city of Asmara, heard a loud noise coming from somewhere in the dense jungle. An unusual sound grew, and people, abandoning their affairs, looked into the sky. From there, a fiery red ball rushed towards them, similar to hot lava.
Flying about 140 meters low above the ground, the mysterious glowing sphere destroyed several houses and uprooted trees. When the ball approached the road, the asphalt began to crack, and the area about 2x7 meters in size and completely melted. Without changing its speed and trajectory, the UFO knocked down the stone wall of the bridge.
Having reached the hill, the object briefly hovered a few meters from the ground, and then, to the horror of eyewitnesses, turned back towards the village. Continuing his destructive path parallel to the previous route, he again destroyed houses, and then disappeared in the same direction from which he appeared.
In total, in 10 minutes the UFO covered a distance of six kilometers. Having come to their senses after the experience, the peasants rushed to help the victims. Eight people were injured, one child died under the ruins of a house. The fireball destroyed about 50 buildings. A molten boiler was found in one of the houses - this fact was taken into account when calculating the intensity of the heat emitted by an unknown object.
In the seventh issue of UFOPRESS magazine, April 1978, researcher George Kendall noted with surprise that the appearance of a red-hot UFO did not lead to fires: “The UN representative, Dr. Attal Mack, visited the village with several colleagues. He found that 50 houses were completely destroyed and more than a dozen were seriously damaged."
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In a letter addressed to UFO researcher Joseph Allen Hynek, Dr. Mack gave more information: “The flying machine is said to resemble a log. And the residents of the neighboring village added that the object looked like a ball with a tail; it flew over them with a deafening noise. The people were so excited that we had to go to the village three times. I took about thirty photographs, some of which are attached to the letter. The settlement looks like it was fired at with large cannonballs."
“Some people think it was a meteorite, but meteorites cannot travel from one place to another. It could not be a tornado, because the wind did not rip off the tin roofs - they all remained in their places, although they were pressed through, melted, and in places twisted. We have no idea what it could have been,”he wrote further.
“The Assis newspaper, published in Addis Ababa, classified the incident as a storm. I am sending you a clipping. An Italian newspaper devoted five columns of text to the incident. We may rule out the option of wind or lightning because the weather was clear and dry. Like Asmara, the village is located at an altitude of 2300 m above sea level, and lightning here sometimes moves horizontally, but, as I said, there was not a cloud in the sky. On the other hand, the object was radiating heat. He melted asphalt and metal objects, burned grass and bushes, but without fire. The mechanical impact of the object was enormous. He destroyed the stone wall of the bridge half a meter thick, but when he flew back, he had enough strength to cause even more damage."
No metal fragments were found in the affected area, which means that the object was not a military projectile. No other studies have been conducted.
Perhaps the clue to this incident could be found in similar cases. In April 1968, in Massachusetts, residents of one of the households woke up at night from a loud noise. When they went out into the courtyard, they found four trees with "cut down" branches. The trees and grass around them were burnt and smelled strongly of sulfur. In September 1980, a UFO about 30 m long and about 15 m in diameter with a blue crown in the bow swept over the Senegalese village of Baradiam. The trees that came across in his path were uprooted. In two minutes, 50 rural houses and 9 office buildings were damaged. At this time, eyewitnesses felt a strong, suffocating heat, and the water in all containers heated up to 50 degrees Celsius.
And in November 1994, not far from the Chinese city of Kunming, with the sound of a "racing locomotive", several luminous points flew past in a line. Approaching the ground, the dots turned into large balls. They flew at a low altitude, making a clearing in the local forest three kilometers long and about three hundred meters wide.
In January 2009, Lincolnshire residents reported the appearance of glowing balls "with tentacles" in the evening sky. Objects were heading towards the wind farm. Then the people heard loud thunders like thunder. At the same moment, one of the huge turbine blades fell to the ground, and the other was seriously damaged. However, the company's engineers were not fans of the paranormal and tried to give a more rational explanation for what happened.
In the summer of 2015, a mushroom picker and an amateur local historian, Yuri Zavyalov, discovered in a suburban forest of Chelyabinsk an unusual clearing with an area of about twenty square meters, where perennial pines were pressed to the ground, like ears from crop circles. “Some kind of pinpoint strike. For such pines to fall in one direction, an impulse of such colossal energy is required,”the author of the find said. Putting aside the jokes about the unsuccessful parking of the alien ship, experts put forward various versions, the main of which was a micro-cyclone.
Maybe the Ethiopian incident also lends itself to rational analysis from the point of view of people who are friends with the exact sciences. After all, most of the anomalous phenomena are simply not sufficiently studied and are patiently waiting in the wings.
Elena Muravyova