Many incredible things can be found when traveling through the taiga or the mountains. However, sometimes there is no need to go so far to experience an unexpected and incomparable horror.
Moscow suburbs
It happened in the forests near Moscow, not far from the old Russian village of Sofrino. Here, according to information received from ufologists, there is a small but tricky anomalous zone. I had no intention of investigating it, but simply decided to cross the area with two friends and compare my impressions with the official report received from the School of Survival, headed by the then famous traveler Vitaly Sundakov.
At some point, each of us received an almost literal blow to the head. Volodya - the most powerful of us, weighing under 90 kilograms, - suddenly began to break through the bushes, leaving behind a "clearing" of trampled hazel. Oleg gave a strange squeal and rushed after Volodya, waving aside something hanging in the air as he walked. A sharp pain squeezed my head like ticks. And I wandered towards the disappeared companions, not realizing anything and not understanding what happened to us.
In about twenty minutes all three came to their senses, calmed down and shared their impressions of what had happened. I could only describe the crimson-blue circles in front of my eyes. Volodya recalled that he was sure that in a few minutes the forest would burst into flames and that the only way to escape was to run forward. It seemed to Oleg that some strange "bird" attacked him.
A gray "rag" flew straight out of the bushes, which suddenly had shaggy wings. The "rag" rushed at him, and Oleg, fighting off the unexpectedly appeared enemy, followed Volodya. What did we happen to encounter in the well-known forests near Moscow?
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Vologda region
Many years ago, Pavel, a student at the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute, published a story in a youth newspaper about his trip with friends along a forest river in the Vologda region. Climbing upstream, the students saw an abandoned farm on the high steep bank of the river.
The huge residential building and the bathhouse near the water are well preserved. The location was convenient for parking. The tourists were divided: two decided to continue the journey, while Pavel and his friend Mikhail decided to relax, living in an abandoned farm.
Pavel and Mikhail later spoke of the days they spent at the farm with horror. They were haunted by the feeling that someone was constantly watching them. They spent two nights … on a birch tree. Both were convinced that this was the safest place. Pavel wrote in the article:
“Up there, in the rustling foliage, we had a plan. To leave immediately tomorrow, we could no longer endure this torture of fear. He fettered us, turning our numb figures into some kind of mummies …
In the morning of the next day, having collected our things, grabbing some food, we literally rushed, with all our strength, from this place. There was a tent, sleeping bags, kettles, the main part of the food in the bathhouse … And a note in which we informed our friends that we had decided to leave."
Paul's journey did not end well. But sometimes in the forests in the so-called anomalous zones, much more sad cases occur.
Ural. Bear cave
In the Northern Urals, you can find yourself in “reserved” places. In them you can come across absolutely incredible things, which, when you return home, sometimes you yourself do not believe. One of them is located in the upper reaches of the Pechora River, where the Ural Mountains pass into the foothills. Here is the Bear Cave, known to many Russian archaeologists, where the bones of long-extinct animals have been preserved.
It begins with a large, south-facing grotto. It is always warmer than in a small gorge, at the bottom of which the entrance to the cave is located, so the grotto has long been chosen as a warm and safe place to spend the night. It was in it that the northernmost site of the Stone Age people was discovered.
But I was attracted to the cave not by archaeological finds, but by its amazing shape. Oval tunnels literally licked to a shine, which were so convenient to walk through, intersected in it with narrow cracks through which it was difficult to squeeze, and unexpectedly went out into large rooms convenient for spending the night.
In order to understand the origin of this labyrinth, I and two geology students decided to take the time and crawl along the paths of the cave longer.
By this time, I had already visited, probably, a hundred caves of the Crimea, the Caucasus, Tien Shan, Kopetdag. Therefore, the study of, at first glance, a "simple" cave seemed to me a break from geological routes. We entered the Bear Cave early in the morning, at lunchtime we decided not to go to the surface, but to have a snack below. After eating, we decided to take a break.
They turned off the lights … and in the absolute darkness I clearly saw my hands. Nearby one of the students screamed softly. It turned out that he also had the ability to see in pitch darkness. A little more time passed, and all three of us felt that we were not alone in the cave. The feeling was that someone was standing behind him, staring with a heavy look at the back of his head. The feeling of heaviness turned into a distinct fear. We decided to stop work and go to the exit.
I remembered the move plan well. We went out to the gallery of Archaeologists, walked for about ten minutes along the oval corridor and … ended up at the place of our dinner. Again, already slowly, we moved to the exit and … Again we were in the same place! Our state was approaching panic, the light of the lanterns began to fade, the pressure on the psyche increased.
Only from the third approach did we manage to escape from the "charmed" gallery to the surface.
Death Mountain Otorten
Mount Otorten is the highest point in the Northern Urals. At the end of January 1959, a perfectly trained group of skiers of the Ural Polytechnic Institute perished here. It was led by an experienced tourist, an excellent skier, who repeatedly made long winter mountain hikes, Igor Dyatlov. The students went to the mountains, the deadline passed, but the group did not reach the final destination of the route.
Rescuers who went in search of tourists found a tent with a cut back wall and the bodies of the hikers in deep snow. The faces of the dead were frozen in an expression of mortal horror. According to the forensic medical examination, some tourists died of hypothermia, others had a heart failure.
There are several versions of why the tourists died. At one time the most popular was the shamanic version. According to her, tourists were punished for stepping on sacred land. The shamans allegedly gouged out the tourists' eyes and left them to die in the snow. The second, more fashionable hypothesis is nuclear radiation. Allegedly, the tourists were covered with a radioactive cloud brought after a nuclear test from Novaya Zemlya.
The third version was based on a flight over the Ural ridge at the time a tourist group of a powerful military missile was on it, which lost control. Her flight was accompanied by a strong impulse of infrasound, which first caused unaccountable horror in people, and then, with an increase in sound intensity, internal hemorrhage and death.
Supporters of the third version, as confirmation of its reality, argued that 10 years later, at the site of the tragedy, they found strips of oppressed forest left after exposure to infrasound trees.
From 1969 to 1973, I worked in a geological team that compiled a detailed geological map of the upper reaches of the Pechora River. In the center of the study area was Mount Otorten. But we did not find any strips of oppressed forest or traces of radioactive contamination of the area around the place of death of skiers.
According to the Mansi hunters, who often came to our camp "for the light", there have never been any attacks by shamans on tourists or geologists in the area of Mount Otorten.
"Flickering" zones
What could have caused the death of the Dyatlov group? Everyone has probably heard about geopathogenic zones. In them, people sometimes encounter inexplicable phenomena. They are seized by a feeling of fear, there is a temporary loss of memory, hallucinations occur. Let us recall the sensations during our campaign near Moscow, with which I began the article, the fear of Pavel and Mikhail in the Vologda region, which made them hastily leave the "hospitable" house, and the unexpected horror that gripped us in the Bear Cave.
Judging by the strange behavior of the compass, the intensity of geophysical fields periodically increases sharply in these zones. People who find themselves in the territory affected by such "flickering" geophysical fields during the activation of the zones may behave inadequately. This can lead to disaster in difficult situations.
Geologists have known for a long time that there are structures in the earth's crust that have the property of changing the intensity of physical fields. A well-known geophysicist and hydrogeologist, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences GS. Vartanyan, who studied such zones, called them "shimmering structures." Unlike flickering structures "affect the properties of liquids, and a person, as you know, is 90% water.
We encountered such a "shimmering structure" in Bear Cave, and Dyatlov's group looks like it was on Mount Otorten. Loss of orientation and an unconscious desire to run, especially if they occur at night, could lead the participants of the hike to fall from a steep slope and die.
Mikhail BURLESHIN