Start: Balls of Fire over the Mountain of the Dead
Prosecutor Lev Nikitich Ivanov, who opened a criminal case into the death of tourists, worked as a lawyer in Kustanai many years later.
“As a criminal prosecutor, I was obliged to be involved in the investigation or to lead the investigation on the most difficult cases,” he recalled. - So I ended up in the impenetrable Ural taiga, in a canvas tent, in the fiercest winter time, since February, sweat …
Inspection of the tent showed that the outer clothing of the tourists - jackets, trousers, backpacks with all their contents - remained intact (Fig. 6). It is known that tourists take off their outer clothing even in winter when they settle in a tent for the night. By the way, we did this in our tent, although the temperature in it never rose above minus four degrees …
8 tent and. there was not a single drop of blood near her, which indicated that all the tourists left the tent without bodily harm. The latter circumstance will be of great importance in the future.
Sometimes 8, sometimes 9 tracks of footprints went from the tent from the mountain to the valley. In the conditions of mountains with supercooled snow, the tracks are not swept away, but on the contrary, they look like columns, since the snow under the tracks is compacted, and around the track is blown out. The presence of nine tracks of footprints confirmed that all the tourists walked on their own, no one was carrying anyone. And then a riddle happened. 1.5 km from the tent, in the river valley, near the old cedar, the tourists after fleeing from the tent lit a fire and here they began to die one by one.
Based on the developed films exposed by tourists before overnight, taking into account the density of the negatives, the sensitivity of the film (since the boxes from it were preserved), the aperture and shutter speed settings on the devices, I managed to "tie" the frames to the shooting time and get a wealth of information, but this did not answer to the main question: what caused the tourists to flee from the tent.
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When investigating cases, there are no minor details - investigators have a motto: attention to trifles! A natural trace was found near the tent that one man went out for a minor need. He went out barefoot, in only woolen socks (“for a minute.”) Then this trace of bare feet can be traced down into the valley.
There was every reason to build a version that it was this person who gave the alarm and he himself did not have time to put on shoes. This means that there was some kind of terrible force that frightened not only him, but all others, forcing them to emergency leave the tent and seek refuge below, in the taiga. Finding this force, or at least approaching it, was the task of the investigation (Fig. 7, 8).
On February 26, 1959, below, at the edge of the taiga, we found the remains of a small fire and here we found the bodies of tourists Doroshenko and Krivonischenko, stripped to their underwear. Then, in the direction of the tent, the body of Igor Dyatlov was found, not far from him two more - Slobodin and Kolmogorov. Without going into detail, I will say that the last three were the most physically strong and strong-willed individuals, they crawled from the fire to the tent for clothes - this was quite obvious from their postures. A subsequent autopsy showed that these three courageous people died from chilling - they froze, although they were dressed better than the others.
Already in May, near the fire, under a five-meter layer of snow, we found the dead Dubinina, Zolotarev, Thibault-Brignolle and Kolevatov. On external examination, there was no damage on their bodies. The sensation came when, in the conditions of the Sverdlovsk morgue, we performed an autopsy on these corpses. Dubinina, Tibobrignol and Zolotarev had extensive bodily internal injuries that were completely incompatible with life. Lyuda Dubinina, for example, had 2, 3,4, 5 ribs on the right and 2,3,4, 5, 6, 7 on the left. One rib fragment even penetrated into the heart. Zolotarev had 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ribs broken. Note, all this is without visible external bodily harm. Such injuries, as I described, usually occur when a strong directed force acts on a person, for example, a car at high speed. But such damage cannot be obtained from falling from a height of one's own growth. In the vicinity of the mountain … there were boulders and stones of various configurations covered with snow, but they were not in the way of tourists (remember the tracks of footprints), and naturally, nobody threw these stones … There were no external bruises. Consequently, there was a directional force that acted on individual people …
When in May EP Maslennikov and I examined the scene of the incident, we discovered that some young trees on the border of the forest had a burnt track, but these tracks did not have a concentric shape or other system. There was no epicenter either. This once again confirmed the directionality of a kind of heat ray or a strong, but completely unknown, at least to us, energy, acting altogether - the snow was not melted, the trees were not damaged. It seemed that when the tourists walked more than 500 m down the mountain on their own feet, then some of them were dealt with in a directed manner …
When, together with the regional prosecutor, I reported the initial data to the first secretary of the regional party committee, L. P. Kirilenko, he gave a clear command - to classify all the work and not a single word of information should have leaked out. Kirilenko ordered to bury the tourists in closed coffins and tell the relatives that the tourists died from hypothermia …
When the investigation was going on, a tiny note appeared in the newspaper Tagilskiy Rabochiy … This luminous object moved silently towards the northern peaks of the Ural Mountains. The author of the note asked: what could it be? For the publication of such a note, the editor of the newspaper was charged this topic is not to be worked out.”The second secretary of the regional party committee AF Eshtokin took over the direction of the investigation in my case.
At that time, we still knew very little about unidentified flying objects, and we did not know about radiation either. The ban on these topics was caused by the possibility of even accidentally decrypting information about missile and nuclear technology, the development of which at that time was really just beginning, and there was a period in the world that was called the period of the "cold war".
And the investigation must be conducted, I am a professional forensic scientist and must find a solution. I nevertheless decided, despite the prohibition, with the preservation of the highest degree of secrecy, to work on this topic, since other versions, including the attack of people, animals, falling in a hurricane, etc., were excluded by the extracted materials.
It was clear to me who died and in what sequence - all this gave a thorough examination of the corpses, their clothes, and other data. Only the sky and its filling remained - an energy unknown to us, which turned out to be above human strength.
In agreement with the scientists of UFAN (the Ural branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences), I conducted very extensive studies of clothing and individual organs of those killed by “radiation.” Moreover, for comparison, we took the clothes and internal organs of people who died in car accidents or died of natural causes.
The results were amazing. For non-specialists, the results of the analysis will not tell anything, and I will name only these: the brown sweater of one tourist who had bodily injuries gave 9900 decays per minute, and after washing the sample - 5200 decays, that is, these data indicate the presence of radioactive "dirt", which I must say that before the discovery of these corpses they were intensively washed with melt water under the snow, whole rivers flowed there. Consequently, the radiation "mud" at the time of the death of the tourist was many times greater … ".
Is it a lot or a little - 9900 decays per minute? Here is the answer given to the corresponding request by specialists from one of the laboratories of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences:
“Unfortunately, there are not enough expert data on the contamination of the clothes of the deceased tourists in the case. They raise new questions … Based on the maximum pollution level of 9900 Rpm per 150 sq. cm of the surface, the calculations show that the level of "vibroacoustic radiation" of the sweater is only slightly higher than the natural background in Yekaterinburg - 10-18 mcr / h. that it was on the sweater that the maximum levels of contamination were found. Perhaps this is due to the rather high sorption properties of the material, which could absorb radioactive substances from melt water."
Where did the radioactive dust come from? The version of a nuclear explosion can be immediately discarded: at that time there were no nuclear tests in the atmosphere on the territory of Russia. The last explosion before this tragedy occurred on October 25, 1958 on Novaya Zemlya. The very fact that the films taken from the cameras of the victims were not exposed to light speaks against the version of death due to radiation.
Already today, they remembered that Alexander Kolevatov, on duty, had more than once dealt with radioactive substances, and Yuri Krivonischenko worked in Chelyabinsk-40 and literally miraculously survived in 1957, when a large container with radioactive waste exploded near Kyshtym. Most likely, he brought deadly dust on his clothes: the items mentioned in the protocols, contaminated with radiation, were on different people, but mostly belonged to Krivonischenko. At that poor time, sweaters served for many years, and they were rarely washed. Prosecutor Ivanov, not getting to such details, suspected that it was the flying objects that were radioactive:
“As a prosecutor, who at that time already had to deal with some secret defense issues, I rejected the version of testing atomic weapons in this zone. It was then that I began to closely study the "fireballs".
I interrogated many eyewitnesses of the flight, hovering and, simply put, visits by unidentified flying objects to the Subpolar Urals. By the way, when aliens are necessarily associated with UFOs, that is, unidentified flying objects, I do not agree with this. UFOs must be deciphered as unidentified flying objects, and only so. Many data suggest that these may be energy bunches not understood by modern people and unexplained by modern data of science and technology, affecting living and inanimate nature that meets on their way. Apparently, we met with one of them …
It was already a matter of technique - to find other people who did not sleep at night and in the evenings in January-February 1959 due to their duty, but were on duty in the open air. Now it's not a secret for anyone that the Ivdel zone was at that time a continuous "archipelago" of camp points that formed Ivdellag, which was guarded around the clock …
The study of the case is now completely convincing, and even then I adhered to the version of the death of student tourists from the impact of an unknown flying object. On the basis of the collected evidence, the role of UFOs in this tragedy was quite obvious … man.
When I reported to A. F. Eshtokin about my findings - fireballs, radioactivity, he gave absolutely categorical instructions: to classify absolutely everything, seal it, hand it over to the special unit and forget about it. Needless to say, all of this was definitely done?
So that the current generation does not judge us very harshly for our work, I will say that even today they do not tell the whole truth about old cases, when eyewitnesses are still alive.
I recently read in the central press that when Powers' reconnaissance plane was destroyed near Sverdlovsk, a Soviet plane led by pilot Safronov was also shot down. The former commander of the battery, who shot down both planes, at that time Major Voronov, writes about this. But thousands of people knew that two planes were shot down, including ours. Thousands of people saw how our fighter crashed into the ground near the town of Degtyarsk, which is not far from Pervouralsk, but for 30 years our press did not write anything about it. I, like many others, saw how first one and then the second rocket went, how the downed planes dispersed in different directions: one in the direction of Sysert (Powers), the second in the opposite direction, in the direction of Revda (our plane). But they published about it only after so many years.
For 40 years of work in the prosecutor's office, and most of this time I was admitted to super-closed information, I still cannot understand why it was necessary to lie to the people?
I do not want to justify my actions to classify events with fireballs and the death of a large group of people. I asked the reporter to publish my apologies to the relatives of the victims for distorting the truth, hiding the truth from them, and since there was no room for this in four issues of the newspaper, with this publication I bring my apologies to the families of the victims, especially Dubinina, Thibault-Brignoles, Zolotarev. At one time I tried to do everything I could, but at that time the country was, as the lawyers say, "an irresistible force", it became possible to defeat it only now.
And again about fireballs. They were and are. It is only necessary not to hush up their appearance, but to delve deeply into their nature. The overwhelming majority of informants who met with them talk about the peaceful nature of their behavior, but, as you can see, there are also tragic cases. Someone had to intimidate, or punish people, or show their strength, and they did it, killing three people.
I know all the details of this incident and I can say that only those who were in these balls know more about these circumstances. And whether there were "people" and whether they are always there - this is still no one knows …"
The same reason for the death of tourists is named by another investigator - Vladimir Ivanovich Karataev. In 1959, he worked in the Ivdel Prosecutor's Office and also began to conduct an investigation, but was then dismissed:
“I was one of the first at the crash site. Quite quickly, I identified about a dozen witnesses who said that on the day of the murder of the students a ball flew by. Witnesses: Mansi Anyamov, Sanbindalov, Kurikov - not only described it, but also painted it (these drawings were later removed from the case). All these materials were soon demanded by Moscow … I handed them over to the Ivdel Prosecutor Tempalov, who took them to Sverdlovsk.
Then the first secretary of the city party committee Prodanov invites me to his place and transparently hints: there is, they say, a proposal - to stop the case. Obviously, not his personal, only an instruction from “above” … Literally a day or two later, I found out that Ivanov took him into his own hands, who quickly turned him down …
Of course, this was not his fault. They pressed on him too. After all, everything was done in a regime of terrible secrecy. Some generals, colonels came, they strictly warned us not to let our language go in vain. Journalists were generally not allowed to shoot a cannon …"
In another interview, Karataev stated:
“… I just told the first secretary: there is murder! Because he himself dug up the corpses and laid out the insides of the guys in the boxes. Two died under the cedar, three froze on the slope, and four more - by the stream. They were killed by something that fell from the sky, I have no doubt. Apparently, there were two blast waves. One covered Dubinina, Zolotarev, Kolevatov and Thibault. They died first. The second wave caught up with the others. Apparently, she turned out to be weaker, or the guys, running away, were able to take cover. At least they remained conscious. The first step was to make a fire. They broke such thick cedar boughs that we, healthy men, could not even bend. Apparently, it was not the instinct of self-preservation that worked, but a deep emotional shock. The most dressed went to the tent. But no one got there: perhaps they were blinded by the flash. Zina Kolmogorova got closest to the camp. It was discovered 400 meters away. Below - Igor Dyatlov and Rustem Slobodin …
I refused to attribute the death of tourists to hypothermia. But this is exactly how they reported to Khrushchev. I was dismissed for intractability, and after 20 days the case was already closed. When I found it in the archive, there was no longer any forensic data, no eyewitness accounts who repeatedly observed the appearance of strange, flying, luminous objects in the sky …"
However, it was not possible to completely clear the criminal case from references to "fireballs" on the night of February 1-22. In the radiogram of E. P. Maslennikov, dated March 2, 1959, it is said: “… The main mystery of the tragedy is the exit of the entire group from the tent point. The only thing other than an ice ax found outside the tent, a Chinese flashlight on its roof confirms the likelihood of one clothed person coming out This is a reason for all the rest to hastily throw the tent at the point. The reason could be some extraordinary natural phenomenon, the flight of a meteorological rocket that was seen on 1/11 in Ivdel and was seen by the group of Karelin point. Tomorrow we will continue the search.
Rimma Kolevatova, sister of the deceased Alexander Kolevatov, said during interrogation at the prosecutor's office:
“I had to bury each of the dead, found tourists. Why do they have such dark brown hands and faces? How can one explain the fact that four of those who were around the fire and remained, according to all assumptions, alive, did not make any attempt to return to the tent? If they were much warmer dressed (for those things that are missing among those found in the tent), if this is a natural disaster, of course, having been around the fire, the guys would certainly crawl to the tent. The entire group could not die from the blizzard. Why did they run out of the tent in such a panic?
A group of tourists from the Pedagogical Institute, the Faculty of Geography (in their words), which was on Mount Chistop (southeast), saw some kind of fireball in the early days of February in the area of Otorten. The same fireballs were recorded later. What is their origin? Could they have caused the death of the guys? After all, the group gathered hardy and experienced people. Dyatlov was in these places for the third time. Lyuda Dubinina herself took the group to Chistop in the winter of 1958, many of the guys (Kolevatov, Dubinina, Doroshenko) were on campaigns to the Sayan Mountains. They could not die only from a raging storm."
Alexander Dubinin, the father of Lyuda Dubinina, during the interrogation expressed everything he thought about the death of the group. Then the last four were not found yet:
“I heard the conversations of UPI students that the flight of naked people from the tent was caused by an explosion and large radiation … the statement of the head. by the administrative department of the regional committee of the CPSU comrade Yermash, made to the sister of the deceased comrade Kolevatova, that the remaining 4 people who were not found now could live no more than 1.5-2 hours after the death of those found, makes us think that a forced, sudden flight from the tent due to the explosion of a shell and radiation … whose "filling" forced … to run further from it and, presumably, influenced the life of people, in particular, vision.
The light of the projectile 2 / I was seen at about 7 am in the town of Serov. Observed this, according to the stories of UPI students, and a certain group of tourists, who were at that time on a hike near Mount Chistop …"
Moisei Abramovich Axelrod, one of the search engines, nowadays also remembered the flights of the "balls" - unfortunately, without an exact date:
“Many observed an unnatural glow of some celestial objects in the Middle and Northern Urals at the beginning of 1959. Famous tourists G. Karelin and R. Sedov saw bright balls flying in those days across the sky. I myself saw a pulsating circle moving horizontally …"
Could the guys just flying past "fireball" scare them? It is unlikely: they would calmly climb out of the tent to admire the beautiful spectacle, but they would not cut it. Yes, and such a spectacle lasts much less than they spent on overcoming 1.5 km barefoot. On February 17 and March 31, the "ball" was observed for 15-20 minutes. After running for so much time in the cold in only socks, you will inevitably get away from panic and think: where am I running, what awaits me there? This means that "something" was advancing on them from the side of the pass, pushing them back to the forest.
Stopping by the cedar, the guys could not go back: "something" was still there. What to do? Of course, make a fire in order to somehow warm up: experienced tourists do not part with matches in sealed packaging. Everyone lit the fire together: the volume of work was too great. The testimony of one of the search engines, G. Atmanaki, says:
“The side of the cedar, facing the slope, on which the tent stood, was cleared of branches at a height of 4-5 m. But these raw branches were not used and were partly lying on the ground, partly hanging on the lower branches of the cedar. It looked like people had made something like a window so that they could see from above the side they came from and where their tent was …
The amount of work done near the cedar, as well as the presence of many things that obviously could not belong to the two found comrades, indicate that most, if not the entire group gathered around the fire, which, having made a fire, left some of the people with him. Part decided to go back to find a tent and bring warm clothes and equipment, and the rest of the comrades started making something like a hole, where they used the harvested spruce branches to wait out the bad weather and wait for dawn …"
The Dyatlovites understood that staying in the piercing wind was tantamount to death, so they sent three of them to reconnaissance - Slobodin, Dyatlov and Kolmogorov. "Something" remained in the immediate vicinity of the tent or towards it and illuminated it, since the three who had left clearly saw the purpose of the movement. It is not known whether they went to the tent in a group or left one by one. In my opinion, they left one by one, and Dyatlov was the first to leave, as responsible for the group. But he did not make it, lost consciousness and died. Slobodin and Kolmogorova followed him in turn, repeating the fate of Dyatlov.
When a person dies of hypothermia, he instinctively curls up "into the fetal position", trying to keep the heat out. Three of those who had gone to the tent were lying in "dynamic" positions: they lost consciousness due to some kind of influence and only then froze. Kolmogorova went the farthest …
The remaining six tourists split up - Krivonischenko and Doroshenko stayed by the fire and supported him as a guide to those who had gone to the tent, Kolevatov, Tybo, Dubinina and Zolotarev dug a snow cave on the slope of the hollow and made a flooring of fir branches in it, where they hid from the wind. The fire near the cedar burned for a long time - about two hours. Those who remained near the cedar climbed a tree to see what happened to the departed, why they did not reach the tent, disappearing from sight - falling on the snow, for this they made a "window" in the crown of the tree towards the tent.
Then it was the turn of those who remained below. Judging by the clothes found on the corpses, they were wounded at different times. After the appearance of the first wounded, Dubinina was still intact and shared her clothes, giving some of the things to one of the two - Krivonischenko or Doroshenko. They were in the wind by the cedar, supporting the fire, and the four of them in the shelter were not as cold as them. This happened before Dubinina was injured, and, of course, before the death of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko. And then she herself was among the victims, her clothes were already lost, and they had to cut warm clothes from other corpses for her. Judging by the location of the victims, two of them, found side by side, as if in an embrace, were moving towards the floor. Zolotarev carried Thibault-Brignolle on his back, throwing his comrade's hand over his shoulder - Kolya was injured before him. And Krivonischenko, apparently,died even earlier: it was his watch that was the second on the hand of Thibault-Brignol. All this excludes the version of the explosion and shock wave.
One more circumstance haunted all the search engines: the guys behaved somehow irrationally at the cedar, as if they were in deep shock or were blind. Writer Anna Matveeva, author of the documentary story “Dyatlov Pass”, remarked: “Why did Krivonischenko and Doroshenko, experienced tourists, light a fire so ineptly and generally acted as if they had a bad sight? “They tried to break off the thick, tall branches, and there were also lower ones: did they not notice them?”
Slobtsov also shares her opinion: “To be honest, I did not notice anything unusual on the terrain that could be relied on. Only there was a feeling that the guys acted by touch. For example, two trees stand at a foreseeable distance. One is more suitable for a fire, the other is less. Why create additional difficulties for yourself, break thicker branches ?! It turns out that it was this tree that the person stumbled upon, and missed the more convenient one. At some point, they lost the ability to see?.."
Yuri Krivonischenko's father was not at the scene of the tragedy, but he asked for details from his son's friends who participated in the search. His statement to the prosecutor's office can also be viewed as a fairly reliable source of information. This is what attracted his special attention: “The guys say that the fire near the cedar went out not from lack of fuel, but from the fact that they stopped throwing branches at it. This, obviously, could be because the people who were around the fire did not see what to do, or were blinded. According to the students, a few meters from the fire there was a dry tree, and under it was a dead tree that had not been used. In the presence of a fire, not to use ready-made fuel - it seems to me more than strange …"
However, the "observation deck" on the cedar and the fact that the three departed clearly saw where they were going, somehow does not fit with the version of blindness. We can only assume that the impact on Doroshenko and Krivonischenko was not fatal, they did not even lose consciousness, like those who crawled to the tent: they first became blind and only then, being unable to support the fire, they froze to death. Those who were in the snow shelter ran blind, and “something” had to resort to more radical measures.
What was the reasonable "something"? In 1959, investigators rejected versions based on the "human factor". Fugitive convicts, Mansi or soldiers with machine guns would stir up the tent, steal money, and drink alcohol. And they could not have a complex technique capable of stunning a person at a distance. Breaking the ribs of a living person without damaging the skin or shedding blood is impossible with either a leg or a butt. In addition, when someone is caught, he usually instinctively covers himself with his hands, protecting his head, but the Dyatlovites did not have either broken hands or shattered fingers.
If they wanted to kill them, they would have killed them immediately and without long, complicated dramatization. They would have stripped naked and driven out into the cold, without allowing them to take with them any knives or matches. Or they would simply shoot, and the corpses were taken out by helicopter and thrown together with the tent into one of the countless swamps.
In 1957-1959, the USSR tested the first ballistic missile R-7 (the famous "seven" by Sergei Korolev). The rockets were launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in such a way that their warheads fell on the Kamchatka Kura range.
Coincidence or not, but it was on February 17, 1959, when thousands of residents of the Urals saw something mysterious in the sky, that the first launch of a serial model of the R-7 rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome was carried out. After 28 minutes, the head of the "seven" reached its target in the Kura region.
Was it possible to see the launch of the "seven" from the vicinity of Ivdel, mistaking it for a UFO? It is possible, because under certain conditions, the launching effects of ballistic and space missiles are visible thousands of kilometers away. In this case, one more observation of the "ball" on February 17, 1959, this time in Ulyanovsk, hundreds of kilometers from Ivdel, becomes clear:
“Reader Pavlov from the Bogdashkinsky region addressed the newspaper with a letter in which he asks to explain an unusual celestial phenomenon.
“On February 17, early in the morning,” he writes, “we saw a ball of fire fly past in the eastern part of the sky, leaving behind an arc-shaped bright light. The residents of our village were very interested in this phenomenon. I ask you to answer, what could it be?"
Comrades Gimatov, Moskalev, Kharitonov, Klopkov and others addressed us with the same letters. Below is the answer to these letters …"
N. A. Demokritov, a teacher at the Ulyanovsk Pedagogical Institute, did not hesitate to answer:
“… On February 17, a bolide flight was observed in the Ulyanovsk region. The bolide had the appearance of a fireball the size of the full moon, with a brighter center. It flew at about 6 am local time in the eastern part of the sky, heading north."
6 hours local time in Ulyanovsk is 7 hours in the Urals.
On March 31, another G7 started from Baikonur, but this time the launch was unsuccessful. And on February 1-2, nothing was launched at the cosmodrome …
A resident of Syktyvkar, V. Lebedev, a participant in the search work, who knew all the victims well, decided to find out if a rocket was launched on February 1, 1959 towards the Arctic Ocean and was it destroyed in the Northern Urals?
“In the period of interest to you (from January 25 to February 5, 1959), - read the answer, - there were no launches of ballistic missiles and space rockets from the Baikonur cosmodrome … We unequivocally affirm that the fall of a rocket or its fragments into the area indicated by you is impossible”.
"Royal" rockets from Kapustin Yar and Baikonur were launched exclusively to the east and in no way touched the Urals. The Plesetsk cosmodrome was still under construction. Even if we imagine that some hypothetical rocket flew into the Urals … It doesn’t make any threatening maneuvers, it just flies. Or falls. In the first case, people don't need to run away for 1.5 km. In the second case, they simply will not have time to do it. If the rocket sank so low that the fiery tail reached the ground, then it will fall somewhere close. This means that the fallen taiga, a funnel, everything that is nearby is scattered to shreds. This was not at Holatchakhla.
Samples of soil and cuts from trees growing at the site of the tragedy did not show the presence of any remnants of rocket fuel.
All that remains is the "inhuman factor" that the former prosecutor tried to tell us about: the impact of UFOs.
The most common emotion in close UFO sightings is fear, terror, and panic. Ufologist AS Kuzovkin, having studied 2000 UFO reports, noted that in 141 cases (as much as 7 percent) "there are indications that eyewitnesses experience a feeling of fear, sometimes very strong." And this is not just fear of an unknown phenomenon - people are seized by a terrible, irresistible feeling, before which the mind is powerless. Scientists suggest that this is how infrasound can act.
In early July 1975, four young people: Shavkat Uteshev, Svetlana Kalinchuk, Natalia Grigorieva and Alexander Shapovalov - also met with the "ball". They survived, but the memories of the "contact" engraved in their memory for the rest of their lives.
The guys rested near the village of Yusufkhona on the shore of the Charvak reservoir in U36ekistan. Time passed imperceptibly, twilight fell. We spent the night right on the shore. At about 3 am, all four woke up feeling unaccountable fear. The first thing they saw was a luminous ball slowly, smoothly emerging from the water at a distance of 700-800 m. It emitted "cold and dead" white light, reminiscent of fluorescent lamps, but hundreds of times brighter. It became as light as day around, every blade of grass was visible.
“We watched such an incredible spectacle in absolute silence for 6-7 minutes and all the time felt a sense of animal fear,” said Alexander. - This eerie feeling can be compared to that which a person experiences during earthquakes. We experienced precisely animal fear, because it is impossible to express in another word the feelings and shock that everyone experienced then. Only after half an hour we were able to talk to each other ….
Shapovalov and his friends could not escape anywhere, paralyzed by a terrible feeling, but no one was going to kill them. Probably, the UFO, which was hovering over the slope of Holatchahla, did not have such a task either: it simply frightened off unexpected guests who appeared in this place important for aliens. Only the appearance of Dyatlov, Slobodin and Kolmogorova, walking to the tent, provoked the UFO to eliminate them, and then to search and destroy the remaining six. Temporary blindness and discoloration of the skin also fit into the "extraterrestrial" version.
Today, a rare tourist group making a hike in the described places passes by the "Dyatlov Pass". What happened then at Kholatchahl is gradually becoming a legend, forever entering the folklore. Now new generations are singing with a guitar around the fire, remembering the guys who have remained young forever:
Mikhail Gershtein
Next part: Forgotten tragedies