Yuri Suprunenko, a researcher at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the authors of the Underworld encyclopedia, talks about his extraordinary encounters and adventures
You can see everything underground …
To face the unknown, you don't have to go to the Bermuda Triangle. It is enough to go underground in Moscow or in the very near Moscow suburbs. According to speleologists, in 90% of Russian caves and dungeons no modern man has set foot. Meanwhile, the underground is a special world in which phenomena unexplained by science take place.
In one of the caves, researchers regularly observe the spontaneous combustion of matchboxes. In the other, time is slowing down and speeding up. In the third one finds "on unknown paths traces of unknown animals." Even encounters with ghosts underground do not seem so unrealistic. Advanced science, however, is somehow in no hurry to go underground.
Gold on blue
Viktor Yemelyanov calls himself a professional treasure hunter. He prepares his hikes, disappearing for months in libraries and museums. On his account, one and a half dozen successful expeditions and only one unsuccessful one. He talks about her reluctantly. Apparently, he is afraid that he will be considered insane.
He learned about the treasure near the village of Rumyantsevo from a pre-revolutionary newspaper during his studies. According to legend, one of the Volokolamsk merchants hid the treasures in the underground passages under the church. In Soviet times, there was a cowshed in the church, but now only ruins remain.
“I arrived there with a sapper shovel and a dowsing frame,” says Victor. - I set myself up for a search: I threw out all extraneous thoughts from my head and presented a scattering of old coins. He began to walk slowly around the ruins.
The place was promising: the frame began to rotate several times. But then suddenly she started spinning like mad. There was no doubt: there was a treasure, you just need to find the entrance to the dungeon. Victor tried to dig near the altar, but then his gaze fell on the destroyed bell tower: a bright blue glow appeared directly above it. There seemed to be nothing threatening in him, but the treasure hunter was seized with horror. For several kilometers to the station he ran without stopping.
Almost every digger will tell you about something similar. There are even references to fire over the treasures in ancient chronicles. So, in the Old Russian "Legend of Boris and Gleb" we read: "If there is either silver or gold in secret, then many people see fire burning in that place - I will show the devil, for the sake of money."
Modern science, however, rejects the devil. Roughly the same picture is typical for Scythian burials. The Scythians hid the goods stolen during the campaigns in large pits. And in order not to attract too much attention from comrades, they arranged this business like a funeral for a horse: the horse's corpse was laid on top of the treasures. Over time, methane naturally evolved in such a burial ground. Under certain conditions, gas may escape and ignite. It burns with that very bright blue flame.
If Victor had known the materialistic version of the glow, you see, his secret collection would have replenished with the treasures of another treasure. But he himself believes that he was lucky, he got off easy. Indeed, among "black archaeologists" there is a belief about a "blue background" that can pull out all bones from a person and leave only a shapeless pile of bloody meat on the ground.
In the animal world
… Once a year, the animals of the Moscow Zoo in the middle of the night go out into the underground passages under the zoo and scatter around the city to take revenge on people for their "happy childhood". This, of course, is from the category of digger tales. But the fact that the underground and underwater world in the capital is teeming with mutants is a medical fact, as they say.
Even 10 years ago, the Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences conducted a study of the fauna of the Moskva River and found that there were practically no fish left in the city without genetic changes. Scientists have come across freaks without eyes, fins, scales. But the river is a powerful ecosystem, capable of self-cleaning for the time being. What can we say about the inhabitants of underground drains, in which the entire periodic table is dissolved.
According to the leader of the Moscow diggers, Vadim Mikhailov, a special fauna has formed underground: from mutant worms that feel great in alkalis, to huge cockroaches like turtles. And the giant rats, the size of a good dog, have already been seen many times by completely different people.
“They have all rat proportions,” says one of the eyewitnesses. - Unless at the withers mutants are a little more narrowed, and they do not have such a rounded rear as their classic relatives. In appearance, such a creature can easily bite off a leg.
According to one of the versions, ordinary rats who lived in communications near the nuclear reactors of Kurchatnik and other institutions mutated.
Cave explorers also meet animals unknown to science. In the Koltsov system near Kaluga, cavers noticed that food was missing from their underground camp. Soup concentrates were especially popular. And then one day the explorer of caves Konstantin Nosov happened to encounter an unusual animal, as they say, nose to nose. The animal was drawn by the artist from his words and under his guidance. So, in the atlases of the animal world of Eurasia, nothing similar could be found. Cavers made several attempts to photograph the stranger.
“We have installed a stretching camera,” says expedition member Andrey Perepelitsyn. - In the morning it turned out that it did not work, although the bait disappeared - the harsh thread was bitten 50 cm from the bait, and the remaining tip was soaked.
Several more attempts were made, but the result was the same all the time. And it is not surprising, because the equipment was used most that neither is amateur: a camera and a household video camera. Official science with its advanced technology is in no hurry to go underground. And in vain. Speleologists have been talking about bats living at a depth of 100 meters since the 1960s. Then no one believed them either. Until in 1995, the students of the Biological Faculty of the Pedagogical University descended into the caves.
… Miners from the Tula village of Staraya Vasyukovka talk about animals with big eyes, which they call kobeas. The Kobeas have warned people about the collapses more than once.
In caves and quarries, they also meet an underground inhabitant, overgrown with wool from head to toe. He looks like Bigfoot, only no more than a meter tall. According to Pavel Miroshnichenko, a Gatchina speleologist, this is a shubin. Walking around the adits, Shubin coughs like an old man. Anomalous people consider it an underground brownie, and biologists, having checked different descriptions, suggest that both kobeas and shubin are unknown species of relict lemur. But how did these inhabitants of Africa end up in our middle lane?..
If the glitch was suddenly
… In a small mountain village on the Kelassuri River in Abkhazia, a boy lived. He grazed sheep in the mountains. Once the Moscow cavers who came to the village asked the shepherdess to take them to the cave. They walked underground all day, and in the evening the guy decided to show the guests one of the passages in a hard-to-reach place. He was the first to descend into the well along a rope, and suddenly a stone fell from the wall and broke his leg. The cavers threw down their backpack with food, and went to the village for help. But there they were afraid to talk about the misfortune and quietly fled. The whole village was looking for the guy for many days, but they found only a backpack with untouched food. Since then, a ghost has appeared in the cave.
This is one of the versions of the legend about the White Caver. In fact, there are as many versions as there are caves. Every dungeon has its own White. A fairy tale, of course, is a lie … However, the very persistence of legends suggests that there is not enough scientific knowledge to explain the oddities taking place underground.
“Suddenly you wake up in an underground grotto in an incredibly vigorous state,” says a caver with 30 years of experience Sergey. - And suddenly you see the contours of the grotto, highlighted with a greenish light, or a pattern of luminous dots, reminiscent of the starry sky. And this is at a depth of tens of meters in absolute darkness. Or do you hear footsteps approaching. As if someone enters the grotto, bypasses it and exits back.
Scientists reduce their explanations to hallucinations. Indeed, the underground environment is not typical for humans. It is believed that the brain, experiencing information and sensory hunger in complete silence and darkness, itself extracts pictures and sounds from the subconscious. If suddenly someone begins to hear Aleksandrov's Red Banner Choir underground - well, that's okay: the poor fellow caught his glitch.
But how to explain that in the same grotto in the middle of the night, for some unknown reason, five people simultaneously wake up, and each of them observes the same greenish glow? After all, as it was said in the cartoon about Prostokvashino, it's just that everyone is sick with the flu, everyone goes crazy on their own. And such collective "glitches" happened more than once or twice.
Dungeon explorers lead their own set of speleo-anomalous phenomena. Three dozen unexplained events have already fallen into the category of these SAYs. And these are only recurring ones, observed by more than one person and not in one place.
… In the summer of 2003, a German speleotourist got lost in one of the caves in Spain. When he was taken out two days later, he spoke to the rescuers in perfect Spanish. Although I didn't know the language before! There are more than a dozen such examples, when stress experienced in a dungeon causes an abnormal exacerbation of creativity.
Another phenomenon is speleotransgression. A man in the far corner suddenly finds himself without light: the batteries are discharged. Of course, he is under intense stress. And then he finds himself in the very place where he went initially. In this case, the entire path traveled is erased from memory. And if you believe the clock, then there was no time spent on the road. Only in one cave system near Moscow Nikita 20 cases of speleotransgression were recorded, and three of them were group.
Inevitably, you will think about the White Caver, who is famous for helping good people find a way out, and bringing bad people under landslides.
By the way, ancient legends sometimes come true
… In the XIV century, the inaccessible mountain fortress Chufut-Kale in Crimea was besieged by enemies. People in the fortress began to die because there was no water in it. The girl Dzhanyke saved everyone. She was so small that she was able to squeeze into a mountain crevice and make her way to an underground source. All night Dzhanyke carried water in a wineskin into the city reservoir, and died at dawn.
For many centuries this story was considered a fairy tale. It is no easier to believe in the water in the midst of the red-hot stones of the Central Crimea than in cave ghosts. But in 1998, cavers dug up the entrance to an old well … Today, tourists are taken along a serpentine cave to a huge grotto, in which a real lake splashes.
So fairy tales may be a lie … Or maybe not a lie - it just takes time to understand their truth.
PRIVATE BUSSINESS
Yuri Pavlovich Suprunenko - Candidate of Geographical Sciences, employee of the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Member of the Russian Geographical Society and the National Geographic Society of the United States, Corresponding Member of the All-Russian Research Public Organization "Cosmopoisk". Deals with the issues of recreational development of the mountains within the framework of the problem of rational nature management. He combines scientific interests with the popularization of knowledge, regularly appears in periodicals. Member of the Writers' Union of Russia. Author and co-author of several books, including: "The Newest Encyclopedia of Mysterious Places of Russia" (M., 2006), "Mysterious Land: Places of Power on the Map of Russia" (Moscow, 2007), "Domestic Travelers and Navigators" (M., 2010) and others. Several books by Yu. P. Suprunenko were published in the series "I know the world" and "Popular encyclopedia"The newest encyclopedia of mysterious places in Russia."