In other words, the device, completely isolated from the environment, will not fly and will not go: neither a car without outer wheels, nor an aircraft with a "sheathed" propeller and engine, nor a rocket with "plugged" nozzles. The only exception is Baron Munchausen, who once managed to pull himself out of the swamp by his hair …
It happened in 1981 near Novosibirsk, when we studied the entomofauna of alfalfa - its pollinators and pests. Walking across the field, with quick movements of the net, I “mowed” the alfalfa, then the restrained net - insects, leaves, flowers, knocked down with a hoop - transferred into a dark box, to which I put a glass stained jar. This is a cruel way to study the species composition of insects in the fields, nothing else has been invented - alas, this was my job, for which I received a salary at the Institute of Agriculture and Chemicalization of Agriculture.
I just wanted to slam the lid of the stain and throw in a cotton swab with ether - when a light cocoon popped out into the light. It was oval, seemingly rather dense, opaque. Not otherwise, one of the captives accidentally pushed him into the stain: the cocoon itself cannot jump!
But the cocoon, refuting my doubts, jumped again; hitting the glass wall, fell to the bottom …
I had to sacrifice the catch - the frightened insects with obvious joy rushed into the wild. And I isolated the strange cocoon and hid it in a separate test tube. At home I examined it through a binocular microscope - nothing special, a cocoon like a cocoon; three millimeters long, a little more than a millimeter wide. To the touch, its walls were strong - as it should be.
The cocoon jumped vigorously when it was lit - or warmed up? - the sun; in the shade he calmed down. His jumps reached thirty millimeters in length and, even more remarkable, fifty millimeters in height! As far as I could catch, the cocoon flew almost without tumbling, smoothly; however, high-speed filming is needed here. Undoubtedly, the mechanical movement of the cocoon from the inside was imparted by the larva or pupa of an insect. But it was impossible to see how this happened.
… Looking ahead, I will say that a rider of the ichneumonid family, belonging to the Batiplektes anurus species, emerged from the cocoon, useful because its larvae parasitize on the alfalfa pest, the phytonomus weevil. The "flying" cocoon was supposed to end up in a cool shelter - in an earthen crack; he hit my net, probably, during his strange journey, namely at the moment of the jump.
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All this strongly resembled a poltergeist - inexplicable "jumps" of everyday objects, already described more than once in print. I put the cocoon on the glass and looked carefully from below: maybe the larva somehow sucks its bottom before jumping, and then suddenly releases it? Nothing of the kind - no dents, and the cocoon bounced regularly and tall, no matter how I rolled it; it was even more remarkable that from the horizontal and slippery glass it took off not vertically, but obliquely! I measured the trajectories: in length they were up to 35, in height - almost 50 millimeters, that is, the cocoon flew up to a height thirty times its thickness!
To deprive this "flying capsule" of support so that it does not lie on anything? But how?
And so: put it on a layer of loose cotton wool!
No sooner said than done. Thinly I fiddled with a piece of cotton wool - it turned out a cloud with blurry, foggy edges. I carefully put the cocoon on the “cloud”, expose it to the sun, and look forward to it: after all, a blow, if it is applied by the inhabitant of the cocoon on its lower wall, forcing it to bounce off the support, will not work now: it will be extinguished by the thinnest springy fibers of cotton, and, in theory, the cocoon hardly moves.
But no: all of a sudden my cocoon breaks off and flies rapidly from the unstable cotton wool, "as expected" - up and to the side. I measure the long jump - forty-two millimeters, that is, the norm. The insect, probably, made its throw or blow not on the lower, but on the upper part of the cocoon, in any case it did something there that set the capsule in motion.
To be honest, this is me in excitement right now; then, in eighty-first, I did not see anything supernatural in the jumps of my captive, because I did not know at all that unsupported propellers, according to physics, do not exist and cannot be. Otherwise I would have spawned a hundred or two of these riders, fortunately, they turned out to be not uncommon, and I would have researched everything thoroughly.
From the book by V. Grebennikov "My World"
