An unidentified lying object (UFO) - this can be called a stone block found in one of the villages of the Dalnekonstantinovsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod region. A local resident told about a strange stone of unknown origin.
- Help send the meteorite for research to scientific institutes, - Semyon FOMICHEV asked us (the name and surname were changed at his request, he also did not take pictures). And he invited him to visit him to get acquainted with an unusual stone.
"Treasure" under the sheds
“It has more than 300 kg,” the owner pointed out to us at the snowy bump in the garden.
Having poured a bucket of boiling water onto a snowdrift, he shows us a thawed stone block, and absolutely dry - for some reason the water evaporated before our eyes.
- You see, on one side the stone is porous, as if burning, and on the other - suspiciously flat, as if licked.
A stone that really looked unusual - heterogeneous, as if glued from many small metal ones - was found next to the village sheds.
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- Young hunters for non-ferrous metal, bypassing the area, accidentally stumbled upon a piece sticking out of the ground, casting metal, - says Semyon. - We began to dig and took out a stone block from the ground. With great difficulty, having cut off a part from it, they were taken to hand over the "treasure" to the local metal collection point. Our receptionists shrugged their shoulders, but nevertheless took from them a strange stone-metal piece. And then they grabbed their heads, realizing that they had given the money for some unknown reason - the piece did not fit for remelting, and on closer examination it turned out that it did not look like any of the metal alloys they knew.
As a result, all the nearest non-ferrous metal stations refused to accept the stone, and the "miners" themselves forgot about it.
Is there a village in the fall zone?
And the inquisitive Semyon thought that he had seen similar stones in television programs telling about meteorites that fell to the Earth. Immediately the man started his car and, together with a friend, went to the sheds for the remaining "meteorite".
Since then, the "alien" has been lying at his house. In his free time, Semyon tries to put him in good hands. The villager has no doubt that the stone fell from the sky. He even gives the approximate time of the fall.
- The meteorite fell during the Great Patriotic War, in the daytime when everyone was in the field, - says S. Fomichev. - Eyewitnesses saw: almost at once half the village broke out in calm weather!
Old-timers still remember this strange story, but they still cannot find an explanation for this phenomenon. Semyon is sure that the houses caught fire from the fall of the space body.
But why did none of the local residents see the meteorite fall? Semyon calmly explains:
- Fascist planes were deployed over our village, bombing Gorky. Apparently, my fellow countrymen were so used to the rumble in the sky during the war that they did not pay attention to the next flying object.
Semyon conducted various experiments on the stone. I tried to melt it with an autogen - it's useless, the pieces just bubble. The stone does not react to magnets at all, does not rust or tarnish.
Amazing mix
According to Semyon, several fans of meteorites have already come to him. They examined the stone, scratched their heads and, in the end, threw up their hands: "Where is the evidence that this is a meteorite?"
Under the patronage of friends, Semyon began to send fragments of a stone block to the chemical laboratories of large enterprises.
- All laboratories issued different analyzes, - says Semyon. - The set of chemical elements - from 15 to 20. In one place they said that there is palladium in the stone, in another they said that the nickel content was off scale - 60%, in the third it was given that the fragment contains rare earth elements - vanadium and tantalum.
Also on the list are chromium, nickel, magnesium, manganese, and more. But iron and silicon, as noted by chemists, are surprisingly little.
- In general, an explosive mixture, but clearly not an industrial slag, - concluded Semyon. - Who will throw such lumps with a high content of nickel and rare metals?
The owner of the miracle stone is convinced that for science its unique specimen is of great interest. On the advice of his friends, Semyon sent a piece to the meteoritics laboratory of the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry. V. I. Vernadsky RAS to qualify the meteorite and register it in the International Meteorite Catalog.
Recently, a response from Moscow scientists came to the village: "The presented specimen is not a meteorite, it belongs to shale rocks."
But Semyon refuses to believe this resolution of scientists. He generously shared with us two pieces of meteorite, spalling them off the second time with a sledgehammer.
The academics were wrong ?
We took the specimens of the miracle stone to the reputable geological enterprise Volgageologia. To our surprise, the resolution of the RAS scientists caused frank laughter among the Nizhny Novgorod geologists.
- How could they write that ?! - Yuri RUBTSOV was perplexed, chief specialist in solid minerals of the geological enterprise "Volgeologiya", Honored Geologist of the Russian Federation. - It is absolutely certain that this stone has nothing in common with shale rocks.
“I don’t dare say that it is a meteorite with 100% certainty,” says Y. Rubtsov. - But many years of experience gives me the right to say that it does not belong to the breeds available in the Nizhny Novgorod region. These specimens are very similar both to a fragment of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite kept in a museum at our enterprise, and to samples of industrial slag, which is often found in remote areas.
Yuri Sergeevich agreed to send copies to Kazan, to the Institute of Geology, which has specialized high-precision equipment. We will definitely tell you about the research results.