Leaving forever, the water revealed at the bottom of the dying Aral Sea mysterious traces, as if left by giant multimeter instruments: strokes, stripes, lines merge into incomprehensible, but clearly distinguishable figures.
The first to draw attention to them was an employee of the Kazakhstan Research Hydrometeorological Institute (now the Research Institute of Environmental and Climate Monitoring) Boris Smerdov - a man whose scientific work consists of endless expeditions, from which he rarely gets out. According to Boris, he first saw the signs in 1990 on aerial photographs made on his order for a completely different purpose. At first I thought: a defect in the film. But when I tried to combine the frames, I was convinced: all the details are exactly the same!
Incomprehensible lines, as if drawn along the coast and bottom of the sea, visible due to the shallow depths and transparency of the water, occupy about 500 square kilometers in the survey area. Their shapes and sizes are very diverse. Some look like potholes, stripes, random scratches. Others resemble the trail of a gigantic comb: several dozen parallel lines furrow the sand, each exactly repeating all the features of the shape of the neighbors. The width of the lines varies from 2 to 50 meters in the images, but along each of them remains strictly constant. The width of the figures formed by them reaches a kilometer, the length - from several tens of meters to 6-8 kilometers. Most of the lines - "furrows", like scratches, are left by a solid object on the surface of wet clay. Narrow strips of strictly constant width with edging that can easily be mistaken for a soil dump,are very similar to the channels stretching along the bottom of the sea and its coast, which until recently was also the bottom. Judging by the relief of the lines, they were "scratched" not so long ago - tens, perhaps hundreds of years ago.
What he saw amazed and carried away Boris Smerdov. During these six years, he meticulously examined hundreds of photographs. In the process of work, he shared and consulted with colleagues, geologists, geophysicists, geographers, mathematicians, designers (including in the field of underwater military equipment), astronomy and, finally, with ufologists. The fact that all his consultants were unambiguous in their opinion made it necessary to turn to the latter: no natural forces and bodies known on Earth could leave traces similar to those captured on aerial photographs. How could not leave them and the mechanisms created by the hands of people.
But why? Couldn't drifting ice floes leave bizarre scratches on the bottom of the shallow Aral Sea? Or tornadoes? Or fishing boat tackle? Or some "bells and whistles" of the military, for example, small submarines, bathyscaphes or torpedo tubes? It has long been no secret to anyone that our priceless lakes in the past were reliably chosen by domestic military-industrial complexes to test anything. For example, at Issyk-Kul, a special flotilla experienced the same torpedoes for decades. And on the Aral island of Vozrozhdeniye (a suitable name!) There was a training ground where the effect of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, and maybe biological - was tested on monkeys, crocodiles and other imported animals. Yes, all this, in fact, has never been a secret. In Kazakhstan, about seven years ago, the Vozrozhdeniye Island was remembered only in a whisper,but in Moscow in the late 80s, a taxi driver told me in detail about him: he served an emergency on that island.
So is there really nothing on Earth that could leave all these mysterious traces?
- Judge for yourself, - says Boris. He pulls out a photograph from a pile of a giant's comb tracing what looked like the number 2 in my son's diary. Then he puts a sheet of paper in front of him, arranges three pencil stubs in his fingers at once like a comb and, moving his hand, but not turning it relative to the table, draws almost exactly the same "two". The lines from all pencils are strictly parallel to each other, but at the same time they retain a certain spatial orientation - relative, for example, to the Earth's magnetic field, north and south, meridians and parallels.
Indeed, it is impossible to assume that an ice floe walking at the behest of the wind and waves could scratch something like this on the bottom. Some kind of trawl, submarine or torpedo - all the more so, because this body would have to move either nose forward, then sideways, then stern … Or change its geometric shape along the way, which is even more incredible.
Promotional video:
“That's not all,” says Boris. And he puts dozens of pictures on the table, combining them and arranging them into one whole. The result is an impressive picture. “The spatial patterns of these traces suggest that we are dealing with a certain information field,” he continues. - The elements of this field - lines - set the offsets of the module, allowing you to calculate very accurate coordinates of some conventional point. At this point, 6 kilometers to the north and 39 to the east of the information field, I discovered another sign - unusually clear and embossed. These are some kind of corner elements that resemble the double end of the arrow symbol. You know, like in a pioneer game, when they are looking for some hidden message, moving from one symbol to another …
No one knows where and what the “arrow” points to, what new surprises the study of mysterious traces can bring. Due to their large spatial dimensions, these traces can be effectively studied only in photographs taken from a great height. However, Boris Smerdov is busy not only with this. For example, now he has left for another expedition to the Aral Sea to study his life-size find, to look at strange signs from an airplane, but not with the help of a lens, but with a living eye. All the research that he conducts is the work of a lone enthusiast, and how strange it is that the world of serious science has not yet become interested in it, even after B. Smerdov's publication appeared in one Kazakhstani scientific newspaper.
Boris Smerdov gives his find a purely ufological explanation: in his opinion, it is nothing more than information that representatives of extraterrestrial civilization are trying to convey to us. We will refrain from commenting: this topic looks too hackneyed and fantasies about this can lead too far. There is a huge field of work for scientists, and I would not like to anticipate its results with any speculation. At the same time, the fact remains: so far, even the most furious anti-uphologists have not been able to refute either the assumption of the extraterrestrial nature of the origin of the mysterious traces, or the thesis about their intellectual origin.
And yet … One cannot but say. The dying Aral is nature's eternal reproach to man and its formidable warning. For the first time in human history, a whole sea is disappearing before our eyes from the map of the Earth. Is this the last loss of this magnitude? Maybe mysterious signs are screaming about this silently?
From the book by Nikolai Nepomniachtchi "XX century: Discovery after discovery"