A note from 2003 about unusual creatures on the territory of Ukraine. It is noteworthy that it already contains information about the Ukrainian Chupacabra, long before it became a mass phenomenon.
The inhabitants of the waters
Strange creatures inhabit the waters of the Black Sea and the coast of Crimea. The first mention of such monsters can be found in the Crimean legends.
So, in one of the Tatar legends "Chershamba" is told about a snake place near the village of Otuzy (modern Schebetovka). This place is located near the Otuzka river and is called Yulanchik. The literal translation of the word "yulanchik" is "snake's nest". And the legend itself says: “Here … in the reeds lived a snake, which, curled up, seemed like a shock of hay. True, the Janissaries killed her. Akmaliz khan discharged them from Istanbul. But the cubs remained from her …"
The closer to our days, the more, oddly enough, there are rumors and eyewitness stories about the mysterious dragon snake. So, for example, in 1828 the Yevpatoria police chief filed a report about the appearance in the district of a huge snake "with a hare's head and a kind of mane." The snake attacked the sheep and sucked the blood out of them. Two such snakes were killed by the Crimean Tatars, about which the police chief also informed the authorities.
Other evidence relates to the Kerch Peninsula. “The one-armed shepherd noticed something shining under a bush, like a ram's skull polished by rains. Just like that, out of nothing to do, he hit the skull with a stick. And suddenly something incredible happened.
There was a kind of noiseless explosion: a thorny bush, torn from its roots, flew up, a cloud of dust flew up, pieces of stale earth flew in all directions. The shepherd became numb and no longer understood where he was and what was wrong with him. He saw only this cloud of dust, and in it his own, as if mad, shepherds and something huge, wriggling with monstrous strength and speed. When the shepherd came to his senses, one dog was killed, and two survivors furiously tore at the still convulsing body of some huge reptile.
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It turns out that in a historical retrospective, the existence of an unknown snake-like animal can be traced for thousands of years up to the present day. In his description, most often two options alternate - a giant snake or an amphibian with small limbs and a mane. By the way, two types of monsters were also painted on ancient icons - "snakes" or "dragon".
However, there is a lot of evidence from the Black Sea coast of Crimea and modern eyewitnesses. The famous poet Maximilian Voloshin and the writer Vsevolod Ivanov also saw the sea monster, who later recalled:
- In the middle of the bay, 50 meters from the coast, I noticed a large, 10-12 meters in circumference, a stone overgrown with brown algae. Is it a stone? I leaned back and noticed that the stone was sloping to the right. So it was not a stone, but a large ball of seaweed.
However, the algae began to lose their round shape, and then the ball lengthened, turned around and stretched out …
The formed creature swam in undulating movements to the left side of the bay.
It was large, 25-30 meters, and as thick as a desk top if turned sideways. The bottom of it was apparently white, as far as the blue of the water made it possible, and the top was dark brown, which made me mistake it for algae. I was one of the many people who saw the monster. But our upbringing, which did not accustom us to the manifestation of miracles, immediately began to interfere with me.
The monster, wriggling in the same way as swimming snakes, slowly swam towards the dolphins. They immediately disappeared. This happened on May 17, 1952.
Polina Kartygina also saw a monstrous snake on the shore near Feodosia.
“At first I thought it was a log,” she says. - And my friend thought so too. We walk along the sand, paying no attention to the log. And it suddenly whips in the air - and in the sea. Only the breakers went.
In the 1970s, the journalists of the Yalta "Kurortnaya Gazeta" and the Feodosia "Victory" were seriously interested in the monstrous snake. After all, the number of witnesses who saw the strange creature continued to grow rapidly. Were collected materials about the Crimean version of Nessie. But a command followed from above: put aside, there is nothing to do with bad sensations, better focus your attention on socialist competition.
In the 1980s, Grigory Tabunov, a vacationer in these parts, met with a sea serpent. And he saw him not from the tail, but from the head. Here's what he said:
- I ran to the beach in the morning, while there are no people. So it was that day. I swam into the sea and was just about to swim back, when I noticed a dark spot in the waves. Dolphin? What is there! A huge flat green head appeared above the water. I screamed and barely made it to the shore …
Another attempt to draw public attention to the Black Sea mystery was made by journalist Vladimir Shcherban. He talked about the incident that occurred during the immersion of the underwater laboratory "Bentos-300".
- At a depth of about 100 meters, one of the hydronauts noticed a long shadow flickering along the starboard side. Some creature, wriggling lazily, swam up to the window. The creature resembled a huge silver-colored snake. In a split second, the creature swiftly went deep.
What is this riddle? The Black Sea is traveled far and wide, the line of the hydrogen sulfide layer rises higher and higher. Where does an unknown creature come from in the lifeless depths of the pool? Who knows …
No. 1 of "Geological Journal" for 1994 published an article by the director of the Karadag reserve P. G. Semenkov, which says that on December 7, 1990, a team of fishermen who went out to check the nets abandoned in the Crimean coastal waters faced a strange riddle. The networks were broken. When they approached the ragged edge, they found a tangled dolphin - the Black Sea bottlenose dolphin.
Pulling the dolphin up to the nose of the motorcycle, the fishermen saw that its stomach had been “bitten out” by one bite. The width of the bite along the arc was about a meter. Along the edge of the arc, the teeth marks were clearly visible on the dolphin's skin. The footprint is about 4 centimeters. The distance between the marks of the teeth is about 1.5-2 centimeters. There were 16 tracks in total along the arc.
The dolphin inspection lasted no more than three minutes. The sight of the animal and the flowing blood caused the strongest panic among the fishermen. One of them cut the net, the dolphin fell into the sea, and the fishermen left the area at full speed.
In the spring of 1991, fishermen brought another dolphin with similar tooth marks on its body. They pulled him out of the net, which was installed in approximately the same place where the previous bitten dolphin was found.
In the light of the above, the incident that happened on August 12, 1992 attracts attention. On this day, an employee of the Feodosia City Council V. M. Volsky swam in the sea. Emerging, he looked around and, to his horror, saw nearby a huge snake head up to half a meter in size.
The swimmer with all his might rushed to the shore and, jumping to the ground, hid behind the stones. A moment later, in the place where he was earlier, the head of the monster appeared. Volsky saw her clearly, even made out the skin and gray horny plates on the head and neck. As he later said, the general feeling is terrible.
Notes on meetings with a mysterious large sea animal are read, on the one hand, with great interest, and on the other, of course, cause a certain distrust. Is it possible in our time the existence of some large creatures unknown to science?
The facts sometimes speak for themselves. Lake Komsomolskoye in the Lviv region is also considered to be the habitat of a relict elusive animal. Eyewitnesses tell how a strange animal about 4 meters long sometimes crawls ashore and moves in leaps. The scuba divers who arrived at the place of the search for the mysterious lizard combed the entire lake up and down, but did not find anything.
At the same time, ichthyologists can cite many examples of the discovery of new species of fairly large fish in recent years. Thus, in principle, in the ocean, seas and lakes, animals can exist that are not known to us, especially if they float to the surface rather rarely.
Monkey-like creatures
Of all the mysterious animals sought by cryptozoologists, the most mysterious are the giant monkeys. Many have heard about the Himalayan "Bigfoot", North American "Bigfoot", Australian "Yaui", Japanese "Hiba-gon", etc. These gigantic ape-like people are surprisingly omnipresent.
The traditional habitat in Ukraine for such strange animals is the Carpathians - the oldest mountains on Earth. Filled with legends, from time immemorial they were considered nesting places of evil spirits. It is noteworthy that the peoples inhabiting the Carpathians, in fairy tales and legends, have one common, very curious character - a dog-head: a large shaggy humanoid creature with a dog's head. The character is not evil, but lives by his own laws, sometimes very tough.
If we add to this also predation and the possession of supernatural abilities, in particular, to reincarnation … a person with this is better not to face. In the villages there are many tales and legends associated with the dog-head. In addition to them, there are real witnesses who claim to have seen a creature or at least a trail similar to a human or bear. There are tens and hundreds of such witnesses from Volyn, Yaremche …
Anthropoid apes are also found in the central regions of the country, which actually confuses the problem even more. On February 23, 1991, A. S. Tkachuk from the city of Kremenchuk, after a shift at the bakery, came home to her one-story house and was about to fall asleep when she felt that someone was squeezing her throat with her hands. Thirty centimeters away, she saw a creature with a face “similar to a human, only all hairy. On the face near the black eyes, the hair was somewhat shorter.
I thought it was devil, but he had no horns. I grabbed his hands with my hands. Their hands were short, with human fingers, they looked more like hands than paws. They had wool like a monkey, they were warm. The color of the coat is dark brown … It was visible to me a little above the waist. Its size in the shoulders corresponded to the size of a child 5-6 years old. I tried to tear my hands off my throat, but the creature was stronger than me …
I realized that it was a male creature … I could not scream, as my throat was still squeezed. When I realized that I would not be able to tear his hands off his throat, I stopped resisting. It immediately released me and disappeared. After that I, paralyzed by fear, could not scream …
Other curiosities
In Ukrainian cryptozoology (it is legitimate to use the term "anomalistic", since such a subject area of research has not yet been formed in Ukraine), one can count a lot of references to strange, amazing and incredible creatures, which can hardly be attributed not only to any known zoological species, but also in Cryptozoology, such bizarre creatures are extremely rare, which means they are difficult to classify.
In the early 1930s, in one of the villages of the Zhytomyr region, people began to often see some strange creatures that usually appeared after sunset. According to eyewitnesses, they looked like people, but only up to the waist, that is, they had legs, and above the waist there was a kind of “flame” that pulsed. People called them "lights." It was noticed that in those houses near which the "fire" passed, people either died or moved to another place.
In the Odessa region there is an amazing defensive structure and a network of underground communications - the Belgorod-Dnestrovskaya fortress. Anomalous and little-explained phenomena were repeatedly observed here. Since the post-war period, in the area of the former ancient Greek fortress of Tyra at night, local residents met unknown "horned and strongly stinking dark personalities" who attacked people, but at the same time only took away food and drink.
The appearance of "underground stinkers" ended in the late 1960s, after an earthquake and underground explosions in these places. “Horned and strongly stinking dark personalities” were explained by the degraded branch of Australopithecus, “snow people”, the descendants of people born from earthly women and aliens, and a very prosaic version: the soldiers of the Romanian occupation army who did not have time to leave the city hid in the catacombs.
The Chupacabra creature, which is very widespread in Latin American ufology, was also observed in Ukraine. Chupacabra is an animal that is the subject of study of both cryptozoology and ufology: some researchers consider the chupacabra to be the result of complex genetic manipulation performed by humans; experts and journalist-chroniclers of South America link the appearance of the chupacabra with UFO visits, and many are inclined to think that the chupacabra is an alien biorobot; some at the same time do not exclude that we are talking about an animal unknown to science.
In early August 1990, on the southeastern outskirts of the city of Kremenchug, a group of teenagers, including the girl Lena Barkhotina, went in the evening to swim on the Dnieper. The place the guys chose for swimming was pretty remote. The shore there is sandy, overgrown with willow thickets. Not far from the coast, parallel to it, there is a long island, also overgrown with bushes. When everyone went to swim, Lena stayed on the shore to watch things. She stood at the water's edge, facing the river, watching the swimmers.
Suddenly, the girl heard a strange sound from somewhere on the side, similar to the cry of a small child. Turning her head, she saw a strange creature standing about ten meters away from her. It was about a meter tall and resembled a kangaroo.
The creature had small forelimbs and a small tail. Lena managed to get a good look at the face of the creature: very large, red eyes, a small nose, ears were not visible. The creature made a short, clumsy leap towards Lena. Here the girl's nerves could not stand, and with a cry, right in her clothes, she ran on the water to a group of swimming comrades.
They could not understand the reason for such a strong fear, because the creatures did not see. When Lena told about what she had seen, they approached the ill-fated willow bush and saw on the sand a clear three-toed footprint about 25 cm long, similar to a bird's.
Upon further research, they found out that in the summer of the same year, interesting traces appeared on the island: small traces, similar to human ones, gradually transformed into birds, and then disappeared at the very edge of the water …
There are also similar messages closer to our time. Take, for example, the daily information and political newspaper "Ukraine Moloda", which is not inclined to jokes (dated January 24, 2004, No. 13 (2307), p. 7). The facts are very interesting:
In the spring of 2003, strange things began to happen in the village of Gnizdichnoye, Zbaraz district, Ternopil region. Someone began to massively destroy only rabbits in rural yards, and it is unusual - the owners found the animals strangled, neatly arranged nearby cages in piles and … with sucked blood. The villagers initially suspected forest animals and people with manic inclinations. But they did not try to catch the attacker and failed.
But here and there in the Gnizdichny dark time, different people began to meet a strange creature that did not look like some well-known terrestrial animal, which the village dogs were afraid of in panic and which suddenly materialized, as if from nowhere, disappearing without a trace. The police were also looking for this evil spirits, whose workers were convinced that someone was joking in this way, but also to no avail.
The situation was described by one of the local newspapers, and already from it about rural horrors (other incomprehensible visions appeared in Gnizdichny) began to speak and discuss those interested in studying the paranormal. So, during the strange events in a village in the Ternopil region, there were many materials on the Internet about the "Chupacabra" - a mystical creature, similar to a large dog with a bull's face and a crest on its back, which similarly hunted for rabbits and other domestic animals, but in the distant Latin America.
And one of the versions of local researchers was like this: "… This is the external form that aliens choose to hide their real essence." As for the Ternopil creatures, in the weekly "Misto", Lilya Gilova and Vasily Vitvitsky (well-known local bioenergyinformtherapists) explained: “This is nothing else but an entity from a parallel world that makes its way into ours through energy“holes”- gaps. Why she chose the rabbits is hard to say, it is clear that something suits her the most”.
Yaroslav Sochka, UFODOS, 2004