When God created the world, having painted it with all the colors of the rainbow, the rest of the paint splashed out on the sands no one needed, not far from the present-day Olkhovka. So I thought as we drove along bumpy country roads in an editorial car to one of the most mysterious objects in our region - colored sands, which are located approximately on the border of two districts, Kotovsky and Olkhovsky. Or to the Devil's merrymaking, as the locals call them
When only a few kilometers remained to the target, it turned out that the further road was plowed up. We had to get out of the car and go straight through the arable land and steppe, where on the ground we could see only the tracks of an elk, or even a wolf. From a distance, the mysterious object to which we were walking looked just like hills in the steppe. But we ascended them, and our breath stopped!
Before us opened up an impressive size, four hundred meters in diameter, a crater, fenced on all sides by high earthen dumps in several tiers. Inside it is a solid carpet of colored sands shining with all the colors of the rainbow. They are here mainly fiery red, boiling white, yellow. But there are all other colors, up to green and even purple - as if a rainbow had fallen to the ground.
Interestingly, the sand of Devil's merrymaking is constantly damp, it does not warm up even in the heat.
And not far from them, on one of the slopes of the surrounding hills, a small stream flows. The water in it is cold, it tastes like rotten eggs. This means it contains hydrogen sulfide.
Nearby, in the lowland, there is a small river. Its name is to match the Devil's merrymaking: Chertoleika, or Devil, as her name is in the surrounding farms. Not for nothing, perhaps … Water is in it now only in high water, in spring, and the rest of the time it is just a small ravine overgrown with grass.
In some places you can see here low white-barked birches, but they do not make a joyful impression - their trunks are often as if twisted, covered with a painful growth. There are many such trees here. If not for them, the landscape here would be almost exactly what it looks like in the pictures taken on Mars. And one
of the first, at the beginning of the second half of the last century, Viktor Brylev, now a Doctor of Geography, Professor, Head of the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology of VGSPU, was one of the first to investigate this mysterious object.
- This material, - says Viktor Andreevich, - I have reported for a long time at the Academy of Sciences, in defense of my doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Geography. We began to study colored sands back in the fifties, and by the end of the seventies we came to the conclusion that these were bottom sediments of an ancient river that once flowed through the territory of our present region. It came from the Tambov region, went to the Novonikolaevsk area, went beyond the bed of the present Volga and followed further to the south of Kalmykia. It was the oldest river in the history of our area. After her, others appeared - paleo-Don, paleo-Volga.
- Viktor Andreevich, but why, if the river was large, then bottom sediments in the form of multi-colored sands were preserved only in one place?
- Because tectonic movements changed the structure of the earth's crust. Depressions arose, mountains rose …
This is the opinion of the famous scientist about the origin of the mysterious colored sands. There are other points of view, we will also present them today.
“The first impression I got from this object was that a meteorite hit here,” says Gennady Belimov, a writer and researcher of anomalous phenomena from Volzhsky. - But why, then, is the multi-colored sand here? We dug it deep. Layers of different colors are interspersed. Moreover, when the white sand, taken from the depths, was taken on hand, after a while it turned yellow before our eyes, became bright yellow. Either the sun affected this, or the warmth of the hand …
- Our second version, - continues Gennady Stepanovich, - was even more exotic: could it be a consequence of an atomic explosion?
Why did this bold assumption come about? We once took Sergei Antonov, a serviceman from Kamyshin, on a trip to the Devil's games, he once served at the Semipalatinsk test site, where atomic explosions were carried out. Seeing the sand crater, he said:
- This is one to one similar to what had to be observed at the site of atomic explosions. There, too, different colors of tarnishing are obtained, caked sand is formed at the site of the explosions.
Gennady Belimov from this fact developed and expressed a rather interesting theory.
“It is possible,” he believes, “that the ancient civilizations that existed once experienced the atomic bombings. In support of this, we can recall at least the biblical story of the death of two ancient cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, located near the Dead Sea. The Bible says, "brimstone and fire from the Lord fell on them like rain from heaven, and he overthrew these cities." If you think about it, it is very similar to the description of atomic explosions. And the dead city of Mahenjo-daro, located in India, - there you can see in all details the epicenter of a nuclear explosion. I have a version that the present territory of our region was once subjected to just such a bombardment, and the colored sands near Olkhovka are nothing more than the epicenter of a nuclear explosion many thousands of years ago. Why do I think so? In the present Russian North there was once a mysterious highly developed country called Hyperborea, the legends of which are associated with the theory of the polar ancestral home of mankind. There is a version that there was once a nuclear war between its inhabitants and the Atlanteans. The dates are assumed to be different - from forty to twenty thousand years ago.
It is interesting that in the anomalous zone on the Medveditskaya ridge, when we were digging the pits, we found a lot of ash at the depths - the ground there is black and our hands are black. It is not so far from the colored sands - several tens of kilometers, if directly. So I wonder if this ash was the result of the same atomic bombing in ancient times?
They also say that from time to time local residents see flights of unidentified flying objects or strange flashes of various kinds near the colored sands.
It is impossible not to tell about such an amusing fact. Several years ago, in the last decade, not far from colored sands, during the harvest season, a combine wheel suddenly fell into the ground. Combine operators were amazed to see two large holes in the field, resembling wells. They were each fifteen meters deep, ideally cylindrical in shape, with smooth walls. Moreover, neither earth emissions, nor in general any traces of earthworks were found here.
How can this fact be explained? Devilishness, except what?
Or, perhaps, all the same by the intervention of aliens, extraterrestrial beings?
“As a historian, I can say,” Yulia Poleva, Candidate of Historical Sciences, senior lecturer of the Department of Philosophy of the All-Russian State Academy of Physical Culture, also shared her opinion with us. - After the defeat of the uprising of Kondraty Bulavin there, on the colored sands, his associate Ignat Nekrasov (the same Bulavin ataman who later took the Cossacks to Turkey) gathered the surrounding peasants and on the slopes of these games taught them to storm the fortress walls.
Yulia Poleva also says that when one of her friends brought home a seemingly ordinary stone from the colored sands and put it on his computer, after a while the computer burned down.
Julia also brought such stones to her home. After that, she had a severe headache in the kitchen where they were lying. Then she threw them in the far corner of the yard, under the cherry. After that, the tree stopped bearing fruit and gradually withered.
Bloody games, and only …
- It is possible that there, on the colored sands, there are emissions of radioactive radon gas from the soil into the air, - Yulia believes.
A resident of the village of Moseevo, Kotovsky district, artist Ivan Kovalenko, who was there many times, told us this version:
- I suppose, many years ago here some large cosmic body crashed into the earth, and it is there, underground, under the sands now. I think so, because there was once a powerful explosion here. There was a terrible temperature here, the stones were melting. But to prove this version, it is necessary to drill the ground here.
Somewhat earlier, an experienced chemical engineer from Volzhsky, Yuri Peskishev, visited the colored sands of the Olkhovsky district. Yuri Pavlovich took sands for all kinds of analyzes. He did not detect any radiation or any magnetic anomaly - even in Volgograd, the radiation background is perhaps higher than at the Devil's merrymaking.
Peskishev had the opinion that this object, most likely - an ancient underwater paleovolcano, left from the time when there was a sea here - it is no coincidence that seashells can be found there during excavations. And the organic substances that have survived since then - the remains of algae, perhaps - the inhabitants of the sea depths, located somewhere under the sands - give the water a taste of hydrogen sulfide. It is no coincidence that some people, when they stay for a long time in the location of colored sands, start to have a headache, their health worsens - this can also be explained by the presence of hydrogen sulfide in the air.
Yuri Peskishev explained the origin of different colors of local sands by the presence of oxides of various metals and other substances in them, as well as their compounds with sulfur - nickel, copper, zinc, tin, silicon, manganese …
“This is a truly unique corner of nature, still little studied,” concludes Yuri Pavlovich about the colored sands of the Olkhovsky district. - I would like to believe that the Devil's merrymaking, despite their terrible name, is still just an attraction of our region, one of its most beautiful natural objects with sources of medicinal mineral water, perhaps also medicinal mud, and not some anomalous zone representing danger to visitors.
We can only join these words of an experienced specialist. And at the same time to say at the end that this unique natural object of our region still needs, of course, research, in the attention of enthusiasts.