During my adolescence and youth, I lived with my mother in a communal apartment in Rostov-on-Don. We lived in poverty, almost on the verge of poverty. Despite all our poverty, my mother had a cherished dream - to buy a TV, an expensive thing and in those years very scarce.
Mom spent a long time, bit by bit, saving money to buy it. Then, having saved up, for months I ran like a groovy one every week to register in the lists of “queues for TVs”. And finally, her dream came true. A black and white "Record" TV set has appeared in our room. I clearly remember that I had just turned twelve years old.
And our neighbors in a communal apartment, a married couple of old Jews, had a dog. Such a large-bodied shaggy dog of gray color, too, like its owners, is very old. All residents of our communal apartment loved this good-natured and affectionate dog. She walked into any of the rooms in the communal apartment and felt like a complete mistress in the apartment where four families lived.
All our neighbors in the communal apartment were either even poorer than my mother and I, or, unlike my mother, did not show any interest in the "fashionable" technical innovations of their time. None of them had a TV yet.
My mother and I put the purchased TV on the bedside table. They turned it on as soon as possible, burning with curiosity. We sat down on chairs and stared at the screen. As I remember now, the movie “Dzhulbars” was shown on TV that day, the main character of which was a service dog with a nickname in the name of the film.
Some people were running across the screen - "our" border guards and "not our" spies. And, of course, Dzhulbars ran, barking loudly at "not our" spies, chasing them. His loud barking sounded almost deafening in the room.
And the door leading from the room to the common corridor of the communal apartment was ajar at that moment. I didn’t have time to slam it behind me when, together with my mother, I was dragging a cardboard box with a TV into our room.
The next minute it turned out, along the corridor, meanwhile wandered back and forth, adored by all the tenants of the apartment, a dog, an old, good-natured, shaggy dog. Hearing a loud dog barking suddenly in our room, the dog, it must be understood, was terribly surprised. And, surprised, she hurried to visit us with an inspection, in order to find out on the spot what kind of dog had suddenly appeared with us?
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The dog hit the slightly open door leading to our room from the common corridor. With a heavy shuffling gait of a very old creature, exhausted by her old age, she entered, or rather, entered the room.
And then I saw something that I have never seen in my life.
The dog froze to the spot suddenly in place. With tearful old eyes, she stared at the working TV screen. Dzhulbars on the screen continued to give his bass loud voice every now and then … And then a miracle happened. Our elderly dog in the blink of an eye seemed to be many, many years younger.
The fur on the back of her neck stood on end. The dog tensed, bared, exposing large yellow fangs, and … And she began to have a uniform hysteria! Forgetting about her venerable age, she began to bark at the TV with such passion, with such ferocious hatred that frothy saliva flowed from her mouth in jets onto the floor. She covered the whole dog's face with foamed scale. Going into barking, the dog jumped on the spot, then squatting on its hind legs, then with all its large body almost soaring into the air.
I got cold on my skin from such a sight. The dog seemed to have gone mad this minute, mad. It took me a long time to get my bearings in the situation, I realized what was the matter, why our shaggy darling began to rage.
My mom turned out to be much smarter than me. She silently rushed to the TV and turned it off.
The heart-rending dog barking stopped almost immediately. Heavily, with strained wheezing breathing, the dog fell sideways to the floor and remained there for a long time, slowly recovering, puffing noisily.
The working TV completely stunned her, completely unsettled her.
The box that barks like a dog! And besides, with some kind of flickering picture behind the glass inserted into its side! Such a box did not find a place for itself in the dog's psyche, did not fit into it in any way. He was absolutely alien to the dog's consciousness for his uniqueness, strangeness, mystery.
From the point of view of the dog, it was something unprecedented. And by virtue of the unprecedented, surely dangerous, threatening, Completely and completely hostile. Here is our old shaggy dog and reacted to the source of possible danger accordingly.
Many years later, reading various books on the psychology of not only people, but also animals, I learned from them that all animals on Earth do not really like phenomena and things that are incomprehensible to them - they meet on their life path for the first time and turn out to be a wonder for them.
Does a person perceive UFOs and aliens with fear and aggression simply because he is afraid of everything unknown and incomprehensible?
Anything incomprehensible is perceived by animals as a direct immediate threat to their lives. The incomprehensible causes fear in them and an immediate defensive reaction to this most incomprehensible.
Man is also an animal, perhaps endowed with some kind of intelligence, not God only knows what kind.
Along the way, I would like to briefly ask a question: have you ever thought, reader, about how hard it is for a person to think? How much sometimes exorbitant effort is spent on the thinking process, the network of analysis and synthesis?
Even at the beginning of this century, the Russian psychiatrist D. Kovalevsky stated: “It is generally not human to think. For the most part, he lives his life without thinking, at the level of the simplest stereotypes of behavior and the simplest reflexes."
The ability to think, the ability to think prevents an ordinary person from living. She brings into his ingenuous existence only additional burdensome chores, unnecessary for most people.
Every person on Earth, this is "also an animal", reacts to this or that incomprehensible, strange for him, mysterious phenomenon in the same way as any other animal. The reaction takes place not at the mental level, but at the level of instincts.
In the opinion - fair! - the modern French researcher L. Povel, even the slightest hints that huge areas of the Unknown may exist in the Universe, disturb people unpleasantly. For all the Unknown is fraught with a potential, perhaps, threat to human existence.
Science, too, has always met, and to this day meets all the Unknown, the Unknown with hostility. On this account, the famous American researcher of anomalous phenomena Charles Fort, now deceased, once remarked poisonously: “Scientific knowledge is biased. It, like civilization, is a conspiracy."
A large number of facts are discarded by science, since these facts contradict established concepts. No matter how bitter it is to state this, we all live under the regime of the scientific inquisition. Her main weapon, most often used against reality that does not correspond to generally accepted ideas, is contempt, accompanied by chuckles.
What is knowledge in such conditions?
"In the topography of the mind," said Charles Fort, "one could define knowledge as ignorance in the shell of laughter."
Fort proposes to demand an addition to the freedoms guaranteed by constitutions - freedom of doubt in science. The freedom to doubt everything but the facts. Not sorted facts, but all, without exception, facts in a row, including incomprehensible, inexplicable, beyond the limits of human understanding.
Researcher of anomalous phenomena Alexey Priima, from the book "The World Inside Out"
