Although we will talk about the Ladoga phenomenon further, I will start with a similar Baikal phenomenon. Local hunter Viktor Larionov told about him.
Once the hunters, who were resting in the winter hut, at midnight heard a sleigh drive up to their hut, creaking with runners. A peasant got out of the sleigh, groaning, and began to unharness the horse. Apparently, the horse caught a restive, and he began to scold the animal for something. This went on for 5, 10 minutes, half an hour. One of the hunters could not stand it, got off the trestle bed and went outside to help the unlucky driver.
But there was no one outside. There was the usual silence of the night, and around the white, without any traces, snow that had fallen in the evening. Such meetings with the "invisible" are quite frequent, their scenario is almost the same, and in some places they occur regularly.
In particular, the famous writer Alexander Bushkov, who during his time worked on a geological expedition, cites a similar case in his collection of anomalous phenomena "Siberian horror". Only there, not an invisible horse, but an invisible truck, periodically drives up to the base of geologists.
Several years ago I wrote about my own observations of acoustic mirages in the northern part of Ladoga. I think it is worth telling about our research in more detail in order to remove a touch of some mysticism from such stories.
During my summer vacation, if it did not coincide with the planned expeditions, I quite often sailed on the seagoing boat of my friend from the institute, Nikita Dubrovich, in the northern part of Ladoga, which abounded with numerous uninhabited islets. Both of us were specialists in the field of atmospheric physics, so we knew well all the signs of a change in the weather and were sensitively tracking it, hiding in case of something on these very islands. Once, fortunately, the weather was excellent and the nights were white, we ventured to make a big transition, and got to the next island rather late.
They made a fire (by tradition, not out of necessity - there was a galley on the boat) and they began to cook a late supper. And suddenly, in the silence, a man's squabble was clearly heard, then women's voices joined the scandal, an empty bucket fell with a crash, and a child's crying was heard.
The tiny island was visible through and through, and no uninvited visitors were observed. And the nearest shore was far beyond the horizon.
Promotional video:
Invisible brawlers poisoned our atmosphere for about twenty minutes, then the noise gradually subsided. Thank God, the night passed in complete silence. In the future, we encountered similar acoustic anomalies more than once, and the idea arose to investigate them, since it was right in our specialty. We already had some considerations on this score, it remains to confirm them purely experimentally.
Earlier, I had to participate in an experiment to study the propagation of impurities from pipes of the Narvskaya SDPP, so we decided to apply a similar method in a simplified form here. In Narva, we lifted the shell of the radio probe with the transmitter of temperature signals on a thin cable, and on the ground we registered them with a receiver with a recorder.
For our purposes, a much smaller shell from a pilot ball -40-50 cm in diameter, and a thin nylon line were suitable. On the fishing line, every 5 meters, we tied knots with white rags to hold the ball for about 10-15 seconds at each level. And so on up to a height of about 100 meters.
But immediately there was a problem with filling the shells with hydrogen. We could not get a portable balloon, and a standard hydrogen balloon for filling the shells of radiosonde was the size and weight of a small torpedo. We had to fill several shells with hydrogen in advance, place them in the bow compartment and start the expedition from the pier near our institute.
Unfortunately, we have forgotten about the insidious property of hydrogen to seep through all obstacles, including some metals. So our probe had to be launched on three shells, since they were significantly deflated during the two days' journey. But the weather was favorable for us: the sky is clear, that is, the same as in the first case of observing the phenomenon. And he was not long in coming. At around 11 pm, our ears were delighted by the choir singing and playing the harmonica - it looks like there was a holiday in the invisible village. We started working everyday life - it was necessary to raise our thermal probe.
In addition to the surface temperature inversion (this is when the temperature does not fall with height, but increases), we recorded the second inversion at an altitude of about 50-60 meters. This is what we expected to see. Locked by these two inversions, a kind of sound waveguide was formed in the surface layer, allowing sound to travel long distances. Additional conditions for its formation were an anticyclone, a weak wind from the side of the sound source, and pre-night hours. An hour and a half later, the wind began to intensify and turn to the west. The phenomenon quickly faded away, and when we raised our probe again, the upper inversion also disappeared.
As the barometer readings began to fall rapidly at night, and the sky was covered with stratus clouds, we decided to wait out the change in weather on the island. The next day, in a strong southwesterly wind and overcast clouds, no sound mirages were observed.
Valentin PSALOMSCHIKOV