In extreme situations, when a person is on the verge between life and death, time begins to flow in a special way - it stretches or contracts.
In 1976, the crew of test pilot Marina Popovich, during a flight on the An-12, got into an extremely dangerous situation: inside the cargo compartment, the fuel tank from the Mig-29 was depressurized, about 4 tons of kerosene spilled on the floor. The plane has turned into a large flying bomb, ready to explode from any spark.
In addition, at that moment the An-12 got into a powerful thunderstorm front; bright flashes of lightning surrounded the defenseless plane literally from all sides … And just at that time all 12 crew members felt that their plane seemed to freeze in the air, the time on board suddenly stopped …
Another test pilot, Mark Gallay, did fire in the air during the tests of the La-5 fighter.
Subsequently, he described this incident in the following way: “Suddenly, from somewhere under the hood, a long tongue of flame was knocked out … Acrid gray smoke crept into the cabin from below … The time scale shuddered, shifted and crept along some strange double count. Each second has acquired the ability to expand indefinitely as required: and at this moment a person manages to do so many things like at no other time. It seems that the passage of time has almost stopped!"
Several years ago, at the international air show, the engine of the MiG-29 aircraft failed. The fighter crashed into the ground and exploded. Subsequently, when deciphering the records of the "black box", it turned out that the pilot Kvochur, a second before the ejection, managed to do so many operations to control the faulty aircraft that under normal circumstances it could take minutes. And the story of the test pilot himself about this event took several hours!
Even more different situations related to the time factor occurred during the war years. So, the soldier Fyodor Nikolayevich Filatov, an instant before the explosion, survived several tedious minutes, watching, as if spellbound, as fiery cracks run along the steel shell of the shell, how the metal cracks and slowly, like in a dream, fragments fly away (the description given to him during the Second World War exactly matched the later high-speed video recordings).
Paratrooper A. Konakov, falling in 1992 from a height of 35 meters without a parachute, claims that he was able to group and land correctly only thanks to an unnaturally extended time …
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The Propeller newspaper in 1992 investigated and timed the testimony of another skydiver, who described one of his jumps in 1988:
“There was only one meter left to the high-voltage transmission line, and it seemed impossible to turn away from it. But suddenly my descent stopped, and I hung in the air, almost touching the deadly wires with my feet. Strange! I looked up - no, the canopy of the parachute never caught on, all that holds it is air!
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed people running across the field; they, too, froze in one place and seemed to hang in the air! Then I remembered everything that I had been taught, pulled a few lines with force and … the parachute led away from the wires! I don’t remember the landing, but the people who ran up later said that I sat with my eyes open for several minutes and didn’t answer any questions …”.
Thus, in critical situations, when a person is on the verge between life and death, time begins to flow in a special way - it stretches. And the stronger the fear creeping up to a person, the more the moments stretch, providing extra seconds for making saving decisions.
Then, of course, the body relaxes, the time in it after acceleration first slows down and only then comes back to normal. After the danger has passed, people are in shock, do not react to anything, that is, they seem to fall out of our usual time. First, a minute lives in one terrible moment, then a minute of shock is felt as one moment of your life!
The consequences can be the most incredible: the watch on the hands of eyewitnesses suddenly starts to rush; people nearby, not even aware of the danger, just as unexpectedly for them begin to see "slow motion"; those on the brink of death increase not only speed, but also muscle strength!
The last statement will have to be clarified: the muscles do not become faster, they just work over a longer period of time; the impulse of force increases, and at the same time as the time is stretched.
Now it becomes clear why, fleeing from wolves, people sometimes climb up completely smooth trunks; why, having seen a bear, you can jump over a high fence from a place; which helps in the event of a fire to pull out massive things or take out heavy wounded from the battlefield.
It also happens the other way around: when the danger is close, but has not yet arrived, time does not stretch, but contracts. As if the body needs a reserve of unused time. So, just in case!
… In the summer of 1974, in Kyrgyzstan, in the Tien Shan mountains, Sergei Ratnikov almost fell into the abyss. My brother helped - in Sergey's opinion, he instantly covered several tens of meters and held out his hand …
Thus, an almost obvious conclusion suggests itself that strong stress, when a person is truly frightened, and a great desire to live, change the density of time: they either squeeze or stretch it.
And this phenomenon even found experimental confirmation. It turns out that even trained testers get the strongest stress when moving on centrifuges at high acceleration (up to 9g) and at the same time clearly feel the slowing down or speeding up of time.
And premature aging and lethargic sleep are also, most likely, phenomena from the same series as those listed above. It's just that this phenomenon has not yet been practically solved, and science is only on the way to its disclosure.