In the 18th century, the respected artisan Alberto Gordoni lived in the town of Tacone in Sicily. One day in May 1753, he walked through the courtyard of the local castle and suddenly suddenly "evaporated" in front of his wife, Count Zanetti and many other people.
Exactly 22 years later, Gordoni appeared again: he appeared in the same place from which he disappeared. At the same time, he claimed that he did not disappear anywhere, and he was placed in a house for the insane.
In 1898, Grace Perkins disappeared from her home in New England (northeastern USA). After a long search, her parents identified their daughter in the girl who was murdered in Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA. But on September 17, 1889, on the eve of the burial of the found body, the real Grace appeared alive and unharmed. Where exactly she disappeared and why her parents identified her in another murdered girl, remains a mystery.
In February 1920, a nude dead man was found in a field in Hampshire (UK). Judging by the tracks, he crawled for a long time before losing consciousness and freezing. There was no sign of a violent death.
The London Daily News wrote: “Despite the fact that photographs were sent to all police stations in the United Kingdom, the police still have not been able to identify him. Moreover, there are no reports of any missing person, even remotely similar to him. Apparently, he was an educated and wealthy man."
Anna M. Fellowes of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, left her husband William's home three years after the wedding and was absent for 20 years. No one had heard anything about her all this time, and then one day, years later, Fellowes returned home and found that his wife, who had disappeared two decades ago, was cooking food in the kitchen as if nothing had happened. She did not explain anything, and … they healed together again. However, three years later, Anna disappeared again. This time, forever.
In 1973, he disappeared, and after 27 years, as if nothing had happened, as if after a minute smoke break, Ayub Okochi, a resident of the Shiatzala village located in the west of Kenya, returned to his house. "Lunch is ready?" - only he asked the relatives, who were stunned by surprise. Almost three decades ago, he disappeared without a trace, without warning either family or friends.
For several years, the missing person was unsuccessfully searched for throughout East Africa. Finally, convinced of the futility of the search, the attempts were stopped, Ayub was declared dead and the funeral was celebrated in absentia in compliance with the necessary rituals.
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In 1983, Ayub's father died, having bequeathed all the land to his other children. Then, having lost hope of seeing her husband alive, his wife left home, taking the child with her. Returning, Ayub found only his sister, brother and centenary mother, blind and bedridden.
In the province of Ontario (USA) on July 30, 1960, literally in front of others, a 13-year-old boy suddenly disappeared. Four days later, he appeared at the same place. Where he was and what happened to him, he could not remember.
In 1975, an incident with the disappearance of an airliner for 10 minutes made a splash in print. An airliner with 127 passengers on board for landing at Miami Airport (USA) disappeared from the radar screens and from the radio for 10 minutes. Then, emerging from nowhere, the plane returned the crew and passengers from oblivion. And that's all - with hours late for 10 minutes …
Prior to this classic case described in many sources in the same flight zone, the arrival of aircraft earlier than the prescribed time was repeatedly recorded, but no one attached any significant importance to this.
There are not much fewer reports of strange-looking people appearing from "out of nowhere" in history than reports of mysterious disappearances. Stories have become classic, in all colors describing the details of the appearances: a boy of about 12 years old named Wild Peter (July 27, 1724 appeared near the city of Hamlmen, Germany); a teenager named Kaspar Hauser (May 26, 1828 in Nuremberg); the future famous designer R. Bartini (details of his appearance in the USSR in 1923 still give rise to the most amazing hypotheses among researchers); the teenager E. Gaiduchka with an amazing fate (1930s in the North Caucasus in the USSR); A “suspicious man” (executed in 1942 in the Caucasus); strange citizen Tuared (detained in 1954 in Japan) and other amazing people.
Bartini's story
Robert (Roberto) Ludvigovich Bartini (1897 - 1974) - a famous Soviet aircraft designer, physicist, creator of projects of devices on new principles (ekranoplan) Author of over 60 completed aircraft projects.
According to the official version, he was the illegitimate son of Count Ludovico di Bartini - of Italian descent, but living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Christmas story is as follows: he was born from a count and a servant, the baby was allegedly thrown to the devoted gardener, the countess, seeing the unfortunate child, fell in love with him without memory, adopted him, and he grew up in a happy family without worries and without hassle.
It seems so … One problem - no kind of Bartini existed in nature. He does not appear in the European "Who is who". And in general, it does not appear anywhere.
The rest is more or less clear. After a failure in the history of childhood and adolescence, Roberto Bartini ends up in the years of the First World War on the Eastern Front, then - captivity, from which he comes out after the October coup - a communist and employee of the foreign department of the Cheka.
Further - illegal work in Italy, where Bartini manages to graduate from the aeronautical faculty of the Milan Polytechnic Institute in two years, receive a pilot's diploma, and at the same time finance Italian communists from the funds inherited from his father's inheritance.
Again, everything would be fine, but how could Roberto Bartini (let's call him that) get money from the mythical pope? By the way, they do not pass according to the documents of the Comintern. Moreover, there is evidence that the real name of Roberto is Oroji, and the real father is Baron Formach. But…
It's the same story: Formach does not exist in the family tree of European aristocrats. In general, there is mysticism at every turn.
In Italy, on the orders of Mussolini, Bartini was sentenced to death, but escaped from prison. According to one version, Roberto got to the USSR by plane, according to another - by submarine. In the period from 1922 to 1925, he was seen in China, Ceylon, Syria, the Carpathians, Germany and Austria. Only after that did he finally remain in Soviet Russia.
Having started as a simple laboratory assistant-photographer at the scientific and experimental airfield on Khodynka, Robert Bartini made a dizzying career in two years. In 1927, the buttonholes of his uniform were decorated with rhombuses of the brigade commander, and he himself became a member of the scientific and technical committee of the USSR Air Force. However, the bureaucratic work did not suit him, and he was transferred to OPO-3, the most important aircraft manufacturer of that time. D. P. Grigorovich, S. A. Lavochkin, I. V. Chetverikov and S. P. Korolev worked with him.
It was there that Bartini headed a group of designers who developed unique seaplanes: the MK-1 flying cruiser, as well as the MBR-2 for short-range reconnaissance and the MDR-3 for long-range reconnaissance.
In 1939, Bartini's Steel-7 aircraft set a new world record: it flew 5000 kilometers at an average speed of 405 km / h. However, the aircraft designer did not find out about this. In 1938 he was accused of spying for Mussolini.
Bartini was saved from certain death by Kliment Voroshilov, who told Stalin: "It hurts to have a good head." The designer was transferred by the prison design bureau TsKB-29 of the NKVD. Once, at the beginning of the war, Bartini met Beria and asked him to let go. Lavrenty Pavlovich set him a condition: "If you make the best interceptor in the world, I will let you go."
Soon, Roberto Bartini provided a project for a supersonic jet fighter. However, Tupolev put an end to this development, saying that "our industry will not pull this plane." He considered Bartini a genius, who, however, did not follow through with his ideas. According to another version, the conversation between Beria and Bartini took place before the war and concerned the conversion of the Stal-7 passenger aircraft into a long-range DB-240 bomber.
Bartini worked at TsKB-29 until 1947 (he was released back in 1946).
Immediately after the creation of an atomic bomb in the USSR, the question arose about its carrier capable of reaching the North American continent. There were several bomber projects presented, but Bartini's plane stood out especially clearly - as if it was taken from Lucas' future Star Wars. A supersonic beauty unlike anything else with a megaton cruise missile above the fuselage and another bomb under it. It would have been simply inaccessible to the then air defense systems.
However, as always, the designer's project remained only on paper and in models. Too much he swung. The series went, excuse me, oaky, but simple, reliable and cheap Tu-95. As for the analogs of the Bartini bomber, they appeared much later: Tu-144, "weaving" of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, American "Hustler" and "Valkyrie". Serial samples (Tu-160 and B-1V) were built already since the late 70s. Total - a time lag of 20 years, at least so much Bartini anticipated the future.
We have somehow already got used to the model of the five-dimensional Universe - not everyone recognizes it, but the fact that there is a possibility of the existence of another world parallel to us no longer seems absurd. Bartini proposed the idea of a six-dimensional (!) World. Three spatial coordinates and three time coordinates. As a result, there is not one parallel world, but an infinite number. Leading, late and simply different. Another idea?
So who was he, Robert Bartini? An aircraft designer ahead of his time? An ingenious self-taught physicist? An alien from other worlds? Or just an Artist with a capital letter? It seems that we will never know, and his archives disappeared with the same shade of mystery with which he lived. But he lived, lived among us, and, perhaps, this is enough.