Scientists are looking for a clue to the secret of underground communications of the Medveditskaya ridge - the most unexplored area in Russia
In the north of the Volgograd region, perhaps the most mysterious place in our country is located - the Medveditskaya ridge, a chain of small hills stretching along the Medveditsa River. As eyewitnesses say, ball lightning bursts out of the ground here and springs with distilled and radioactive water beat out, glowing objects of bizarre shapes often appear in the sky. And also, they say, mysterious tunnels go into the depths here, the purpose and length of which no one knows to this day. After three months of studying anomalous phenomena, an expedition of Moscow researchers returned from a mysterious area. According to them, if even a small part of what is happening on the Medveditskaya ridge could be solved, it could be of invaluable importance for science.
Strange tunnels
Medveditskaya ridge was discovered largely by accident. In the 80s, specialists from the Moscow Aviation Institute were entrusted with the task of state importance: to investigate all the facts of the appearance of unidentified flying objects in the country at that time in order to unravel the principle of their flight and create a working theory for the development of their own aircraft in the future. The scientific group was led by associate professor, professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute Felix Siegel. All this work eventually boiled down to a short formulation: "The appearance of unidentified flying vehicles cannot be explained from the point of view of modern science." Research has reached a dead end. New ideas were required. And then one of the students - it was Vadim Chernobrov - suggested taking a different path and starting to study the routes of movement of mysterious flying objects. I liked the idea, and the work began to boil. And here's what turned out: most of the flight routes crossed in the Volgograd region, in the area of the so-called Medveditskaya ridge. Since then, her secret has not left Chernobrov alone.
In some old guide to the Russian Empire, in its volume, which tells about the Volga region, it is said about two strange caves, supposedly keeping countless treasures. Mentions of the two Volga straight lines like an arrow of caves are found in other historical sources.
But the whole point is that there are no straight caves in nature. Only artificial tunnels can be straight. In the history of the Golden Horde, Chernobrov managed to find evidence that the Mongols used the captured Russians to excavate some kind of caves, or tunnels. And even the place where it happened was indicated - the banks of the Bear. An active search for these semi-mythical underground structures began, and very quickly it became clear that their existence was not a myth at all, but the very truth.
We managed to learn a lot of interesting things from local residents. What was true in these stories and what was fiction - go and figure it out. For example, they say that during the time of Catherine II, Germans lived on the ridge, who knew well about the tunnels and used them for their needs. They built religious buildings exactly over the exits from the tunnels, most likely to control them.
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In later times, underground structures were chosen by robbers who used the tunnels, firstly, as transport communications, and secondly, to transmit light messages. For example, at the entrance to the tunnel they made a big fire, and somewhere about thirty versts from this place - at one of the exits - their accomplices could observe the signals of alarm being given. In order for light to propagate over such distances, Chernobrov believes, the tunnel must be perfectly straight and with a large cross section, and its walls must have a good reflective surface.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the tunnels served as a shelter for Borodai's White Cossack gang. There was such a dashing chieftain who terrified the entire district. For a long time the Red Army could not liquidate the gang. And Borodai was elusive because he entered the tunnel with his people on horseback, and left in another place tens of miles away.
The time has come, and NKVD officers became interested in unknown tunnels. The peasants said that, having arrived here, the operatives sent all local residents, whose houses were located above the tunnels, to Kazakhstan, and they themselves began to search. What they found (and what exactly is still unknown) was carefully packed, sealed and sent by plane to Moscow.
In one of the villages in the vicinity of the Medveditskaya ridge, Chernobrov met Nikolai Doroshenko, a former regional leader. When he was asked about the tunnels, he was not at all surprised: “There were some, but they were blown up in 1942. The deserters hid in them. They blew up the entrances to the tunnels wonderfully well.
As the practice of scientific research shows, the most reliable method to look through the earth has been and remains seismic exploration. An accurately calculated charge is detonated or a powerful vibrator is turned on, and seismographs installed in different places record sound waves that have passed through the study area and are reflected from it. The results very accurately give the density distribution in the earth. Seismic data is mapped. So, such maps exist for the entire territory of Russia, except for two small blind spots, one of which falls just on the Medveditskaya ridge! Sound waves here seem to "get stuck", do not return.
According to Chernobrov's story, he and his like-minded people tried to open one of the entrances to the tunnel, but this business turned out to be hopeless. Last autumn, the work was interfered with either by the emerging groundwater, or by an incomprehensible glow from the ground, which disappeared when approaching the excavation. "The excavations were becoming dangerous," says Chernobrov, "and we decided to temporarily stop them." However, enthusiasts do not despair and in 2002 they will certainly plan to “walk” through the mysterious tunnels.
Ball lightning node
Solving the mystery of the Medveditskaya Ridge, the researchers faced many difficult to explain phenomena. So, for example, no one has yet given an answer why very strange keys are beating over underground tunnels. In one place, distilled water comes out of the ground, and in another, a radioactive spring beats. Both are nonsense.
There is another oddity here, thanks to which these tunnels started talking in the Academy of Sciences. The fact is that in summer, right above the tunnels at a height of half a meter to two meters, like route taxis, fireballs fly almost every day. Moreover, they do not just fly along strict lines, but go into and out of the ground! On the ridge, dozens of vertical wells with a diameter of up to 20 centimeters were discovered, which go 15-20 meters underground. The walls of the holes seem to be vitrified. Almost every tree along the path of lightning is burned. The blow falls not at the top, as happens with linear lightning, but in passing.
In Moscow, in various institutes, where Chernobrov had a chance to show photographs and video of the Slope of Rabid Lightning, it was the explanation of the burns that caused the most doubts among scientists. Few agreed that these are ball lightning and not linear lightning. And no wonder. Nowhere in the country, and in the world too, there was and there is no place where there would be so many traces of ball lightning at once and in a small area. No one has seen such (and, moreover, numerous) traces of the impact of ball lightning, therefore scientific ethics demanded not to believe the first explanation that came across, but to prove at least the opposite. Finally, wishing to calm the passions, at one of the lectures at MEPhI, Chernobrov promised to sacrifice one of the disastrous trees, cut it down and look for a charred canal on the saw cut. If there is a channel, then it is still a stroke of linear lightning, albeit an unusual one,but linear (the channel is necessarily formed when such a lightning strikes, since the electric charge must go into the ground). If there is no channel, then it is ball lightning. As a matter of fact, this simple experiment was carried out. There was no charred or any other channel in the cut below the burn site!
Attempts were made three times to record the spectra of ball lightning flying along the tunnel with the help of a spectrometer brought from the camp, but due to the large distance to them (about 1 kilometer), this did not succeed … The expedition turned out to have three low-power red lasers at once, which could just come in handy … With their help, the researchers wanted to test the hypothesis of MEPhI professor Boris Rodionov, who argued that ball lightnings are formed at the ends of ultrathin strings connecting pairs of unlike monopoles. It is impossible to cut these strings with any instrument, according to Rodionov, but if someone did cut, then two more monopoles and … two ball lightning would immediately form at the place of the gap. So we decided to test the hypothesis. But no matter how many tried to "water" the sky with laser beams in thunderstorms,ball lightning did not form after that. Which is not surprising. Indeed, ideally, a laser beam should not just be randomly conducted across the sky, but circle around a short-flying ball lightning. And such a case was never imagined. So this experience is still considered unfinished …
Scientists believe that the "nest of lightning", which can be called the Medveditskaya ridge, has a low electrical resistance due to a water source hidden in the ground or deposits of metals. And it is also possible to assume the existence on the Earth of certain lines of force of electric fields, along which ball lightning fly. There are knots where they go. Perhaps one of these nodes is the Medveditskaya ridge. How else to explain that it is here, again in summer, that strange glowing triangles appear in the sky almost every night, for some reason hovering clearly above the entrances to the tunnels and moving away strictly from north to south? Local residents are not surprised at such phenomena: "We have so many things flying here!" - and long ago they hung special signs on the ridge, similar to road signs, only with the image of a UFO …
Perhaps what researchers have already found on the Medveditskaya ridge is only the tip of a scientific iceberg, and its base is hidden deep underground. What exactly is in this mysterious place: traces of an ancient civilization or some super-powerful energy source? Nobody knows this yet. But the researchers promise: the solution to these secrets is close …
Stepan Krivosheev