In the north-east of the Volgograd region, at a distance of 15-18 kilometers from the city of Zhirnovsk, there is a chain of hills with a height of 200 to 380 meters, located in an oval with a length of twenty kilometers. This is the Medveditskaya ridge, one of the most anomalous places in Russia.
WHERE LIGHTNINGS LIVE
The ridge, which got its name from the nearby Medveditsa River, is an ancient and mysterious place. Millions of years ago, in the Cretaceous period, it was at the bottom of an ancient deep sea, but then the movement of tectonic plates literally pushed the ridge to the surface. Today these low hills are dissected by ravines, gullies, and trees grow densely on their slopes.
However, it is not the geological history and the beauty of the landscapes of this corner of the Volgograd region that attracts the attention of mystery lovers and scientists (since 1982, about 35 expeditions from all over the world have visited the ridge), but the firmly entrenched glory of the anomalous place. It is connected, first of all, with a huge number of lightning - both ordinary and ball - appearing over the hills, regardless of whether there are clouds in the sky or not.
The largest number of discharges falls on the Sinyaya Gora Upland, one of the slopes of which was nicknamed by the locals “The Slope of Mad Lightning”. The place is like attracting electricity to itself; here many times ball lightning was noticed, which for tens of hours could fly along the same route, moving at a walking speed at a height of a meter from the surface.
Birches grow on the Slope of Crazy Lightning. Only now they look strange, unusual: the trees are absolutely bare, without a single leaf, the trunks are severely twisted, as if they were twisted by some unknown force.
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Many trees are thoroughly burnt. Most are in the lower part of the trunk, but some plants have the entire core burned out; in some cases, only a charred stump remained from a massive tree.
Sometimes the tree looks almost intact - with the exception of a small hole burnt in its trunk. Researchers agree that all of this damage was caused by lightning strikes.
Blue Mountain is the most famous place in the area, where frequent occurrence of electrical discharges is observed, but far from the only one. Scattered throughout the Medveditskaya ridge are areas of dead scorched earth on which nothing grows.
Other anomalies also became widely known - the "Drunken Grove", full of twisted, as if drunk, trees, which, however, grow calmly and have no traces of burns.
"Devil's Lair" is a lost place that locals have been avoiding since 1990, when the shepherd Bisen Mamaev died here in front of his partner's eyes, as if he had been burned out from the inside.
In such places, equipment often begins to malfunction, the clock shows the wrong time. It is also interesting that triangular UFOs are often observed near these anomalies, making the ridge an attractive location for UFO research. However, there is no definitive evidence yet whether these unidentified flying objects are of alien origin or not.
UNDERGROUND TUNNELS
Similarly, the origin of another Medveditskaya anomaly is unclear - a network of mysterious underground tunnels that pierce the local hills along and across.
People may have known about the existence of mysterious dungeons from time immemorial. In the area of the supposed entrance to one of them, a T-shaped structure from the first century AD, strictly oriented to the cardinal points, was discovered - most likely a temple. It can be assumed that the ancient inhabitants of the surrounding places knew about the anomalies and associated them with the cult of a certain deity.
You can still hear stories that in the old days, while the entrances to some tunnels were not yet blocked up, horse thieves used them to hide from the pursuit.
Residents of the surrounding villages are still sure that there is a whole labyrinth under the ground, and the last passage into it was blocked only during the Great Patriotic War.
There is, however, one hole - only no one managed to go far along it. Only going a little deeper into the bowels of the earth, people begin to experience unreasonable fear, auditory hallucinations begin - and as a result, the researchers run headlong from the tunnel, recovering only on the surface.
The exploration of this cave, carried out from the surface by means of acoustic sounding, showed that it turns into a corridor, gradually expanding to 120 meters, while sinking more and more underground.
In the end, the instruments showed that somewhere deep underground there is a huge cavity, and directly above it is one of the anomalous fields, where lightning strikes.
Too little is known about the mysterious underground caves, but something can be assumed already today. Firstly, their existence is somehow connected with anomalous lightning activity. Secondly, the passages are almost certainly artificial. Studies have shown that all underground tunnels are straight, like an arrow, which would be impossible if they were naturally formed.
On the territory of the Medveditskaya ridge, there are also such anomalies as a place where grass does not grow
Indirectly, the artificiality of these passages is also indicated by the presence on the territory of the Medveditskaya ridge of zones with an increased background radiation, as well as an abnormally high content of metals in the soil.
Who built this underground labyrinth? There is no definite answer to this question yet. Ufologists believe that local anomalies are the result of alien activity, and suggest that the underground complex serves as a base for UFOs. However, not all researchers agree with these findings.
Some of the specialists who have visited the Medveditskaya ridge are inclined to believe that the structures in its depths belong to some ancient civilization, now firmly forgotten. Lemurians, Hyperboreans or the inhabitants of the mysterious continent of Mu come to mind. Is it so? Today we are not ready to answer this question. The mystery of the Medveditskaya ridge is still waiting in the wings.
Last week, a new anomaly was found in the Medveditskaya ridge, a huge stone disc