New times, but the discs are the same. - Objects over Europe before the First World War. - Procession of Cyrillides. - Fireball burns Chicago. - What could have exploded over Podkamennaya Tunguska. - The British battalion strides into the sky. - Russia has begun to search for "unidentified bodies." - "The Miracle of Fatima".
As we approached our days, people were armed with more modern optics, which made it possible to track anomalous phenomena with greater reliability.
New times have not introduced a variety of plot in cases of UFO sightings, but the increased level of observers and the quality of the observation itself has made UFO tracking more systematic and scientific. The new history, as is commonly believed, begins with the French Revolution of 1789 and covers the 19th, 20th centuries and the beginning of the third millennium.
Of the reports of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, curious are those that were the fruit of observations of the Sun. Astronomers observed dark discs that crossed his bright face: in 1777 Messier, in 1802 - Fritsch, in 1819 - Gruythausen, in 1834 - Pastorf, in 1860 - Russell. And in 1892, the Dutch astronomer Müller saw a black disk crossing the lunar disk.
Another unusual phenomenon that could not fail to attract attention was the appearance of a large star emitting rays over Bukovina. The star cruised in the direction of Russia and back all four months while Napoleon's armies invaded Russia.
In 1851, over a hundred luminous objects appeared over Hyde Park in London. Since this coincided with the opening of the World's Fair here, visitors considered the extraordinary parade one of the attractions.
In November 1882, astrophysicists Maunder and Capron at the Greenwich Observatory observed a greenish luminous disk that turned into an elongated ellipse in the direction of travel. The observation lasted two minutes, but the scientists managed to measure the data and came to the conclusion that the object was moving at an altitude of 200 kilometers at a speed of 16 kilometers per second. It was 110 kilometers long and 16 kilometers wide.
And the astronomers of the Oxford Observatory saw in July 1868 a luminous disk that stopped and then resumed its flight, repeatedly changing direction.
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In Madrid in August 1863, a reddish disk with a ball of flame hanging for a long time was observed.
A giant disc appeared over Marseilles in 1871. It hung motionless for 9 minutes, and then moved north for 7 minutes. Then he hovered again and flew east.
In the late 19th - early 20th centuries, bursts of UFO sightings were first recorded. In 1896-1897, their flights and hovering were observed over many cities in the United States, some objects were in the form of "cigars" and sent their rays to the ground. The second wave of appearances came in 1909. 43 objects were seen over England alone. In May of this year, for example, a dark torpedo-shaped object was seen in Essex, sending two bright beams to the ground.
Similar reports came from the United States, New Zealand and Russia. In July 1909, a round object was observed following the current over the Volga. And in October, residents of Odessa saw a cigar-shaped object unfolding over the city and flying to the estuary. In August, the luminous object made two circles over Tallinn.
The object also attracted attention, which in May 1909 illuminated the ship "St. Olaf" with five searchlights.
The new wave falls at the end of 1912 - beginning of 1913. Flights of objects with strong searchlights were observed over Dover, Liverpool, Thames, over Austria-Hungary, Romania and Western Russia. Objects with two searchlights were seen in Kamenets-Podolsk, Bialystok, in the Gaivoron, Gaisin, Zhmerinka regions.
They were called airplanes, although then aviation was just beginning to develop and was not equipped with light sources. The governments of Germany and Russia were forced to deny their involvement in these flights
The most colorful phenomenon was seen over North America and the western Atlantic Ocean on February 9, 1913. On the evening of this day, a fiery red object with a long tail appeared over Canada. It was followed by up to 10 "waves" of 20–40 objects each, up to 300 in total, which emitted a rumbling sound and glowed. They flew from the Saskatchewan area through New York, Bermuda to Brazil. The phenomenon could be observed from 143 points, and it received the name "Hunt's Fireballs", after the name of the scientist who described it, or "Cyrillides Procession". For observers, this "procession" lasted only 3 minutes.
After 5 hours, several more groups of similar objects flew along the same trajectory. They were called fireballs because the concept of "unidentified objects" did not yet exist. But the speed of objects (8-10 km / sec), the height of their flight (40-80 km) and the length (9000 km) would be inconceivable for fireballs, as a rule, falling to the ground in the end. Hunt believed that it was a group of cosmic small bodies, carried away by the Earth into its circular orbit.
Even now, after so many years, an intriguing question arises: where did these heavenly flotillas go, according to the audience, “majestically and unhurriedly”? To a meeting with another civilization? Was it a courtesy visit or was it a battle formation before the battle?
The "Great Fire" in Chicago, which arose after the passage of a huge fireball on October 8, 1871, stands apart from the UFO phenomena. On the same night, fireballs swept over the states of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Illinois. Several thousand people died, and not from fire, but from some other reason.
What and why did UFOs do then? And did they always know what they did?
A series of mysterious events of the early twentieth century also includes the Tunguska meteorite, over the true essence of which scientists have been fighting for almost a hundred years. The explosion of this body took place on the morning of June 30, 1908 in the Podkamennaya Tunguska area, in the Chamba river basin, north of Kansk. The circumstances of the event were described in different ways by various eyewitnesses.
The teacher from the village of Sosnino G. Zyryanov saw under the clouds a body "like a log", shining brighter than the sun and emitting sheaves of sparks. For residents of the village of N.-Karelinsky, as reported by the Irkutsk newspaper "Siberia", "the body was presented in the form of a pipe." They watched him there for 10 minutes. It appeared from the southeast or from the south (eyewitness testimonies do not match), then flew north. There were suggestions that during the flight, before exploding, it changed its trajectory. F. Siegel on this basis suggested that the body was controllable. The writer A. Kazantsev went further and put forward the version that the spaceship exploded, and the explosion was atomic.
The body exploded, as it turned out, in the air. The epicenter of the explosion was examined by several expeditions. The initiator of the search for the Tunguska meteorite was L. A. Kulik, who worked in the meteorite department of the Academy of Sciences, created on the initiative of Academician V. I. Vernadsky in 1921. In the same year, Kulik undertook the first expedition to the upper reaches of the Katanga River (Podkamennaya Tunguska). Its participants traveled 20 thousand kilometers in search of body fragments, but did not find anything significant. But the approximate weight of the "log" should have been about a million tons. A second expedition took place in 1926, and this time Kulik managed to drive to the epicenter of the explosion, where the forest fell radially. He again did not find anything, although he tried to dig out crater craters, which, as it seemed to him, were formed as a result of falling fragments of the Tunguska body. Kulik took only soil samples with some small inclusions, in which silicate balls with balls consisting of iron and 10 percent nickel were sintered. Everyone, however, was looking for some larger fragments.
Nevertheless, there was enough material evidence of the explosion. The forest was fanned out over an area of 30-50 square kilometers, although in the very epicenter the trees remained standing. The hypothesis of a nuclear explosion fell away after it was proved that the gamma background was 100 times less than it should have been for such an explosion. But the magnetic background was extremely high. The soil has been remagnetized over a huge area. This refuted another version - the version of the explosion of the ice comet nucleus. At the same time, the strongest glow of the stratosphere arose at an altitude of 85 kilometers in the zone that included all of Central Europe and England, Central Asia and South Russia, where the white nights came, which lasted for three days. The evening dawn lasted until the beginning of the morning, the northern part of the sky remained illuminated all night. This phenomenon was noted in Brest-Litovsk, Penza,Tambov, Atkarsk, Tsaritsyn, Slavyansk, Tiraspol, Kerch, Simferopol, as well as in Berlin, Copenhagen, Konigsberg and on the entire Baltic Sea coast. Bright nights were also observed throughout Western Siberia up to Yeniseisk. The glow coincided with the appearance of noctilucent clouds that covered a huge area.
The explosion itself was strange too. It appears that not the entire body exploded at once. The newspaper "Voice of Tomsk" wrote: "In Kansk, Yenisei province, on June 17 (30), at 9 o'clock in the morning, an underground blow followed, everything began to rock. There was a rumble as from a distant cannon shot. After 5–7 minutes, a second blow followed, stronger than the first, accompanied by the same rumble. And a minute later another blow, but weaker than the first."
For scientists, one thing was clear - the energy of the explosion is huge, the speed of the body's movement indicates that this is not a fireball that would fly along a steeper trajectory to the ground and could not give such a significant effect over a vast territory. Some unfamiliar types of energy were nevertheless released, and there was probably also radiation.
The last time L. Kulik came to the area of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite was in July 1939. But the war prevented further research. Kulik joined the ranks of the people's militia, was wounded, captured and died there in 1942. After the war, several more expeditions were undertaken. All this time, the samples taken by Kulik on the first expeditions lay unprocessed in the cramped quarters of the Committee on Meteorites. It was only in 1957 that a member of the committee A. Yavnel took up their processing. Small, droplet-like balls turned out to be extremely interesting, since they contained iron, nickel and cobalt, sintered masses of silicon. This suggested that the meteorite was iron. At the same time, experts pointed to different melting temperatures of the materials contained in the samples, which contradicted the logic of a simple meteorite falling to the ground. Explosion version,which melted these components, sticking together after falling to the ground, returned scientists to the version of the death of the spacecraft (which could have been covered with a heat-shielding ceramic wall, like the current spacecraft). The scientists could not agree on the final conclusion.
The energy of the explosion, according to updated calculations, was about 40 megatons - 2 thousand times more than the energy of the atomic explosion that devastated Hiroshima in 1945!
The analysis of the captured particles gave an interesting result - cosmic dust, which was part of the noctilucent clouds that formed over the explosion site, contained a large amount of rare earth elements, especially ytterbium. Recall that rare earth elements are closely related to the life of aliens and their flights.
The version of the death of a large spacecraft, which before the sad ending tried to maneuver, but could not correct the situation, remains one of the possible, although it has many opponents who put forward weighty arguments. But no one could explain the whole complex of events of 1908, which caused a strong earthquake, the glow of the atmosphere over such a long distance, and also left giant areas of fallen forest. The Tunguska meteorite, or, as it is also called, the "Tunguska phenomenon", remains a mystery.
Among the unusual events of the early twentieth century, another mystery awaits its solution. We are talking about the disappearance of an entire battalion of the British army during the Dardanelles operation of the First World War. Here are the extraordinarily intriguing recollections of the English General Cunningham:
“On a cloudless day on August 21, 1915, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, over a height of 60 in the location of the British troops, seven strange, completely identical“clouds”, similar to loaves of bread, hung. Despite the wind, they were completely motionless, and their shape did not change. On the ground below them there was another similar "cloud" about 250 meters long and about 60 meters wide and high. It seemed dense, as if made of solid material.
At this time, a battalion of the 14th Norfolk Regiment, numbering 800 people, was sent to reinforce the British troops at Hill 60. In front of many eyewitnesses, the battalion approached the "cloud" on the ground and entered it, but not a single soldier left it. An hour after the last soldier disappeared into this "cloud", it slowly rose from the ground and joined the other "clouds", after which they all moved north-west towards Bulgaria and disappeared from sight 45 minutes later. And in the place of the "cloud" there was no one. An entire battalion of the British army disappeared and was reported missing.
After the surrender of Turkey in 1918, the British command demanded the return of the disappeared battalion, believing that its soldiers had been taken prisoner, but the Turks proved that there was no fighting in the area that day, and they had nothing to do with the disappearance of this battalion..
When Russia entered the war with Germany and her allies on the side of England and France, anomalous phenomena did not pass her by either. Academician L. Melnikov raised the archival documents of the Russian hinterland for 1914-1916. The book of two Tomsk scientists - radio engineer E. Protasevich and geophysicist V. Skavinsky “Geophysical background objects and phenomena” dates back to this time. Melnikov mentioned the most interesting find in an article on this topic in the Interfax-VREEMYA newspaper dated August 15-21, 2001. In fact, the book of Siberian scientists is the first scientific generalization of anomalous phenomena, which stands on a par with modern studies of unidentified flying objects. It retains enduring value for UFO studies, as it was the fruit of a systematic collection of information about unusual phenomena,in which at first they guessed some kind of espionage activity of the Germans, but nevertheless drew attention to some characteristic features that cannot be explained by espionage. To their credit, Russian officials, who were busy clarifying these phenomena, did not fall into mysticism and did not follow the lead of anti-German suspicion.
The countdown of these phenomena began in the very heart of Russia - in Siberia and in the Urals. The earliest documentary evidence is contained in a telegram sent by the Russian War Ministry on July 21, 1914:
"Orenburg. Turgai Governor. There are obviously aircraft in the area of the district. Flights in the area of factories were repeatedly noticed at night and cities were even illuminated by a searchlight. Please take measures to detect airplanes. If possible, he ordered the troops to fire at the aircraft. I ask you to suggest that the guards do the same. Arrest the pilots when descending. The order is to notify the population. Telegram number 1461. Signature - Mavrin."
One of the first to receive a report was from the head of the police unit of the Tokmak village of the Semirechensk region. It reported that on September 28, 1914, at 9 o'clock in the evening, the peasant of this village I. Makhonkov saw an object flying across the sky, the size of a cart, "egg-shaped". Three girls, residents of the same village, clarified this testimony and said that the flying fireball was large and "oval in shape." And he was not alone. And flying "devices, then slowing down, then increasing it, and during the flight had a wave-like motion, then increasing the distance above the ground, then decreasing."
L. Melnikov compares this description with the one given by Arnold Kenneth in 1947. Kenneth, who is considered to be the author of the term "flying saucers", when describing their movement, noted that they "seemed to dive, slightly changing the direction of movement."
In response to the directives of the Ministry of War, there were messages from the field, but it was not possible to catch the pilots of the mysterious vehicles. True, the descriptions became more and more specific. For example, two workers from the Borisovo-Romanovsky village of Aleksandrovskaya volost saw how at a height of “30-35 fathoms something black, round, in the form of a vat, was flying and they could clearly see two people sitting there on both sides”. Other eyewitnesses came across lights, balls, "cigars", from which the light emanated, as from a searchlight, so that "in the forest it was possible to count all the birches." These reports of unseen aircraft seriously alarmed the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. In early August 1914, it sent a circular to the governors instructing them to track this phenomenon:
“According to the available information, in some areas of the empire, aircrafts appeared, flying mainly outside populated areas over the storage of military supplies. The appearance of such devices was observed in the Kazan, Perm and Vladimir provinces. There is reason to assume the presence of secret enemy aeronautical stations, workshops and gas depots within the empire. I ask you to take the most energetic search measures. Anything that is important to facilitate the search, immediately report to the police department and military commanders. Minister.
The version about airplanes gradually faded away. German airplanes began to penetrate into the remote provinces of Russia only at the end of the war. But the version about the connection of these phenomena with the Germans living in the Volga region remained. Celestial phenomena in these regions were especially closely monitored. Here is the memo dated February 9, 1915, classified as "secret":
“I report to Your Excellency that rumors are circulating among the population of the Petropavlovsk district of the appearance of some mysterious lights near the village of Mikhailovsky in the Petropavlovsk district at night.
On my order, an investigation was carried out, and from the questions of local residents, it was possible to find out the following:
The peasant sat down. Mikhailovsky, Sergey Kirillov Dikiy, walking down the street at about 9 pm on December 30 last year, noticed in the direction of the German settlements located 8 miles from the village, a cone-shaped pillar of fire of yellowish-red color, belted in the middle with a black ribbon, five vershoks wide. After a while, this fire disappeared, and three fireballs appeared in that place.
The fire began to recede towards the villages. Yavlensky, and then, climbing higher, changed direction in the direction of the German settlements located on the officer's section of Alexandrov …
The rural municipality administration and police officers have established secret surveillance of the German settlements."
The fact that the police got stuck on the Germans can be explained by the war and the peculiarities of the police mentality. Nevertheless, the reports give good informational material.
All religions are based on "signs" from heaven. The best world is placed in heaven, the righteous go to heaven alive, and the saints have a glowing halo around their heads. Taking into account our current knowledge, it is not so impossible that behind these "signs" there were real events related to UFOs, which even made a strong impression on not the most inspired or deeply religious people.
One such phenomenon, which some researchers associate with the actions of aliens, is the "miracle of Fatima." It happened in the fall of 1917 in Portugal and got its name from the village, near which it was observed by local shepherds and later by the population of neighboring places. Jean-Claude Bourret, the author of a book about “flying objects” published in France, gives the events of those years a peculiar interpretation (Bourret JC La Nouvelle vague des soucoupes volants / Le dossier OVNY de France-Inter. Ed. De France Empire, 1975). So, in September 1917, two girls and a boy grazing cattle near Fatima, near one of the trees, "appeared" balls of light, lightning and a luminous creature, in which they identified the Mother of God. She warned them about the miracle, which will take place on October 13 of the same year. On this day, tens of thousands of people filled the valley near this tree. It was a sunny day, but the valley was plunged into darkness. Then an object appeared that looked like the sun. Burre writes: “Suddenly the expected 'miracle' began: a UFO approaching the earth, which resembled the sun and changed its brilliance and color. The crowd was seized with terror. Then the object zigzags upwards …"
Burre explains the darkening in the valley by the fact that on the approach to people, the UFO opened its "umbrella" so that it hid the sun. We will not analyze this phenomenon further, for this there is not enough documentary data. They claim that the pictures were taken, but they ended up in the archives of the Vatican. This does not sound very convincing, since photography was not so widespread at the time to reach a small village. But the fact that the vision of the luminous masses could be perceived by believers as a miracle, a supernatural event, is quite likely. What other interpretation could they give to what they saw?
One might wonder why people, dealing with such phenomena, did not think about where these balls, "cigars", fast-moving objects actually come from. Moreover, aircraft appeared only in 1903, and rigid airships were created only in 1883. Let us recall, however, that the successes of science then were relatively modest, space flights were not even in the project, as well as the idea of the existence of another civilization, whose representatives could freely fly in space and in our atmosphere. Only science fiction writers have such hypotheses. But even Jules Verne portrayed the flight to the moon as a journey in a cannon shell, which seemed then the fastest means of transportation. And H. G. Wells limited himself to a scary story about the Martians, who safely died out from terrestrial bacteria,not having time to carry out their sinister plan to conquer our planet.
But we can no longer make an excuse for the lack of information and the backwardness of scientific thought, for everything has its time. The time has come to comprehend anomalous phenomena.
"UFO. They are already here … ", Lolly Zamoyski