The small town of Sasovo, located in the eastern part of the Ryazan region, has always been a calm and quiet place. For many years, tourists practically did not drop in to the town without any sights, until one day there were events here that made it famous all over the world. The explosions that thundered in Sasovo in the 91st and 92nd years of the last century still have no explanation, and the city itself today is one of the most popular destinations in Russia among supporters of the idea of the existence of extraterrestrial life.
First explosion
The first explosion occurred at 01:34 on April 12, 1991, that is, which is very symbolic, on Cosmonautics Day. According to eyewitnesses, at first they heard a growing powerful and lingering rumble from the sky, and then the earth trembled. The shaking was so strong that the high-rise buildings were shaking, cabinets were falling down in apartments, books were falling from the shelves, dishes, windows and chandeliers exploded from cupboards, generously sprinkling the stunned people with fragments, plaster fell off the ceiling in layers. Pipes burst underground, and wires above it. An unknown force knocked down doors in buildings, destroyed balconies, easily tore off metal covers of sewer manholes, shattered light bulbs. This lasted a few minutes, and then everything calmed down: at first the earth ceased to tremble, and after a while it fell silent and hum, as ifwhat caused the strange cataclysm, went away.
Before the explosion
About four hours before the explosion (April 11 at 21:20), unidentified spherical flying objects were seen in the sky above the city, emitting a glow. I. Kurchatov, the driver of a shunting locomotive, who happened to be at the Sasovo railway station that evening, says that he saw from the cab window a large bright white sphere hanging in the air, as if glowing from the inside. This object was also seen by other people - passengers, railroad workers and townspeople. For some time the balloon hung in the sky above the station without movement, after which it flew away, taking to the northeast, at the same height and with low speed.
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An hour before the strange explosion above the place where a huge crater would later be discovered, an unusual glow was noticed, the nature of which remained unclear. And in about half an hour, some locals saw two large slowly moving red spheres in the sky. Also, strange spherical objects were seen over the village of Chuchkovo, which is located about three dozen kilometers from the crater. Objects emitted a low twang and, according to eyewitnesses, caused the earth to tremble.
Explosion funnel.
The glowing spherical objects in the sky that evening were seen by many, including officials. Thus, inspector P. Panikov and district police officer N. Ryabov, who were part of the night patrol of the local GROVD, talked about the cloud they saw, resembling a ball, which hung in the sky approximately over the place where the funnel would later be found, and emitted a dim white-blue glow.
Many townspeople later recalled that before the explosion, they lost sleep and experienced anxiety and even fear, completely for no reason, as if something wanted to drive them away. Just before the disaster, two flashes of bright blue flashed in the sky over the city, and there was a hum.
A crater at the site of the explosion then and now.
After the explosion
After the last chords of the terrifying explosion died down, a strange object appeared in the sky above the city, resembling, according to the townspeople, a cloud with pronounced edges. The object glowed from the inside with a bright white light and was moving against the wind. And three or four minutes later, at some distance from Sasovo, a bright red glow was noticed, having a rounded shape, which gradually faded away.
Glowing objects and a fading red glow in the sky far from the city were not the only oddities that were observed that night. So, immediately after the catastrophe at the station, telephone communications completely stopped working, and the locomotive's engine stalled for some unknown reason.
But the most unusual thing was that people found at the site of the explosion - a huge funnel of an ideal round shape, the diameter of which was about 30 meters, and the depth - about three to four meters. As specialists would later say, in order to create such a funnel, an explosion was needed with a power equivalent to an explosion of 25-30 tons of TNT. In the very center, at the bottom of the crater, there was a small hill about 12 in diameter and a little over one and a half meters high. The hill had slightly concave slopes and looked like the imprint of some huge object.
According to many residents of Sasovo, who were eyewitnesses of these events, it was as if someone controlled the explosion, trying to minimize the damage. So, as a result of this explosion, despite the colossal destruction, only four people were injured - they were hospitalized with cuts from broken glass. An oil storage facility was located about half a kilometer from the epicenter of the explosion, and if the explosion damaged fuel tanks, the total volume of which was estimated at thousands of tons, the city could be completely destroyed. But the tank farm did not suffer at all, but the houses standing immediately behind it did.
Unanswered questions
It is noteworthy that no one managed to understand what exactly exploded. Not far from the funnel lay fertilizers - about 30 tons of saltpeter, packed in thick paper bags. The explosion tore the bags to shreds, lifted the fertilizer into the air and scattered it for miles around. But since the epicenter of the explosion was more than 70 meters from the bags with saltpeter, it could not explode in any way, especially since no traces of fertilizers were found in the analyzes of the soil from the funnel.
It was also suggested that an aerial bomb accidentally fell from a bomber flying over the city. But no fragments were found either in the funnel itself, or within a radius of one hundred meters from it. As reported in the official report on the inspection of the scene, in the future it was decided to expand the search area to half a kilometer, but no fragments of the exploded bomb could be found. In addition, the highest ranks of the Moscow military district assured that there was not a single military aircraft near the city at the moment when the explosion occurred.
There were also those who suggested that the hydrogen bomb exploded. Many buildings located behind the oil depot had windows and doors knocked out, and the doors flew out with the boxes, and the windows with frames, from the inside out. This nature of the damage indicated that the explosion was vacuum, but any vacuum bomb would have created simply colossal destruction, there would have been many casualties, but nothing of the kind happened. There were no traces of a characteristic high-temperature flame at the site of the explosion, so this hypothesis was also rejected.
Funnel at the site of the explosion.
There were other versions: detonation of ammunition lying in the ground since the Great Patriotic War and the explosion of an ice meteorite were named as a possible cause of the explosion. But these assumptions were not confirmed. Almost immediately after the explosion, the military arrived at the scene, but they did not stay for a long time and soon departed, not finding anything that could interest them.
The funnel after the incident emitted a strange glow, the nature of which was also not determined. Local residents, who came to marvel at the unusual education, and dared to go downstairs, complained of severe dizziness and headaches. Reacted to the funnel and electronics - calculators, radios and wristwatches were malfunctioning here. Some photos show strange reflections. This lasted two days, and then someone dug a ditch in the direction of the Tsna River, and the water filled the funnel to the brim, after which the glow went out, and life in the city gradually returned to its usual course.
The saltpeter is to blame.
Second explosion
A little more than a year has passed since then, and on June 28, 1992, a second explosion occurred in the vicinity of Sasovo. This time there was no destruction. According to the residents of the village of Frolovskoye, who became eyewitnesses of these events, the glass in the windows trembled and rang, the noise was unimaginable, but not a single building received any damage. Awakened in the middle of the night by a sudden noise, the people decided that it was just a low flying plane, and returned to their beds.
A few days later, a man called the Sasovo city administration, who refused to identify himself, and reported the explosion that had occurred in a corn field, indicating the exact coordinates. People who went to the field actually found a funnel in the indicated place. The diameter of the new crater was about 11.5 meters and its depth was about four meters. It is noteworthy that the scattering of clods of the earth raised by the explosion was more than 500 meters, while the trees growing only 15 meters from the funnel were not affected in any way.
The scientists who came to study the new education, as in the case of the first funnel, did not achieve the slightest success. The local newspaper Golos wrote that the specialists of the regional committee for environmental protection were not able to explain why their device, the most perfect, the most accurate one available at that time in the country, behaved so strangely.
Directly in the crater, as well as next to it, the device recorded bursts of beta and gamma radiation levels, exceeding the normal natural background by several dozen times, but very short-lived.
At the same time, even at a small distance from the epicenter of the explosion, the readings of the device were completely stable. During the investigation, like a year ago, many hypotheses were put forward, but none of them was confirmed. Experts were unable to find any traces of explosives or bomb fragments, no traces of fuel or anything else that could cause an explosion in the samples taken. In addition, this time there was no saltpeter near the crater, which could explain what happened.
According to A. Shirokov, the senior investigator of the regional prosecutor's office who worked on this case, the second explosion is definitely not the result of human impact. Also, the reasons for the occurrence of this crater cannot be explained by the processes taking place in the bowels of the Earth.
The next explosion.
Much later, already in the late 90s, the famous Moscow physicist N. Kulanin, who examined the area of the funnel, noted that the magnetic field in this place fluctuates with a very strange periodicity - the period was about ten minutes. However, this study could not shed light on the nature of the explosion that took place here: the scientist soon had to curtail his work, since his magnetometer for some unknown reason was out of order.
Subsequently, many different studies were carried out here. Ufologists, scientists, military men, employees of state security agencies came here. But the question of what happened in Sasovo and its environs in 1991 and 1992 remains open to this day.