In August 2002, the press around the world reported that in several areas of the eastern part of the state of Uttar Pradesh, due to the attacks of some mysterious creatures, a real panic began, which did not subside for more than a month. The Hindustan Times reported, for example, that fears caused great unrest in Khurdmau and other villages in the state.
The angry crowd decided not to appeal to the authorities and arbitrarily dealt with those who, according to the villagers' conviction, were sending a mysterious creature called the fly-throat against them. Residents of Khurdmau set fire to shops and stalls belonging to those who were allegedly secretly associated with these creatures.
It didn't help that the police arrested nine people. On the contrary, the crowd blocked the roads, protesting against the detention of their fellow villagers. The police barely managed to disperse the protesters, and then only after numerous reinforcements arrived. They even had to place pickets everywhere to keep the raging masses under control.
What caused such a surge of popular indignation? In August 2002, at least seven people died from unexplained injuries, many were injured.
Attacks were especially frequent in rural areas near the city of Mirzapur. It was there that the nocturnal flying creature got its name - the fly-throat, meaning "the one who tears his face with his claws."
In the worst-hit area, 600 kilometers southeast of New Delhi, people were afraid to sleep outside, although the heat was hellish. In Shangwa, villagers formed self-defense squads and regular patrols. They walked through the village, beat drums and shouted: “Battle alarm! Beware of attacks!"
In some villages, the inhabitants were so intimidated that after sunset the villages looked completely deserted. The locals did not go out into the street, and if someone from outside appears, then they quickly become a victim of the fly.
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One of the villagers, who nevertheless decided to sleep on the roof, woke up on the night of July 21 because he was attacked by a "monkey-like creature one and a half meters tall." Fortunately, everything turned out to be only scratches. However, after this incident, the people resumed night patrolling in the streets - groups of residents walked all night with lighted torches.
Torches were placed on their verandas and terraces to make the streets brighter: it is known that in most cases attacks are carried out under cover of darkness. As one of the doctors at a public hospital in Basuan said, the entire city had become insomniacs.
The state government, in an attempt to dispel rumors, asked a group of experts to investigate the problem on the spot. This was entrusted to specialists from the Indian Institute of Technology in the city of Kanpur, and they were determined to find out what was behind this whole nightmare.
Invisible claws
On August 6, hundreds of people rushed to Birhai, as it became known that another victim had appeared there: a 16-year-old girl Rajni Sahu was bleeding from deep scratches inflicted on her by an invisible flyweed.
Rajni's left hand was deeply torn apart, which caused the girl great suffering. Atul Harband's doctor, who provided assistance to Rajni, could not understand what led to such an injury?
There are no descriptions of such cases in the special medical literature. No flies, or khashochvy (another local name for the creature), are not mentioned there. However, the girl was bleeding. The fact remains.
After this incident, the panic intensified. Many people gathered near the house of the Sahu family who came to look at Rajni and ask her how it all happened.
Rajni said that while helping her mother that day in the kitchen, she suddenly noticed that blood was oozing from the numerous scratches on her arm that had come from nowhere. It was Monday - August 5th.
“At first we thought that maybe Rajni was bitten by some kind of insect,” explains the girl’s father, trader Site Lal Sahu. - I took it and poured kerosene over the wounds. The bleeding from those scratches stopped, but new ones appeared immediately.
On Tuesday morning, Rajni was horrified to notice new wounds on her elbow. Then the hand began to swell, and the girl was urgently taken to Dr. Harband. At first, the doctor decided that Rajni was self-mutilating, but now he is completely convinced that the wounds appeared on their own.
And what really intrigued everyone was the continuation of the story. On Tuesday evening at five o'clock, Rajni was sitting at home with her parents. Her left arm was bandaged. And then suddenly she noticed that blood appeared on the outside of her left hand!
The household saw that the wounds were quite fresh. By nightfall, the scratches began to hurt. Neither Rajni nor her parents could understand what was happening, who is this invisible man, crippling the girl?
And the day before the incident with Rajni in Mirzapur, an 18-year-old boy named Chandan was attacked. On Sunday evening, August 4, the young man was riding a bicycle somewhere, and a fly-eagle attacked him. The injuries were so serious that the young man had to be hospitalized.
Later, when the doctors washed off the blood and cleansed the wounds, Chandan's face was clearly marked with scratches in the form of the letters "LIF".
Around the same time, a mysterious creature attacked two other Indians - Sudhari from Vhodapur and Shardu Dubey from Babhni.
Everyone was waiting for the authorities to do something. But the state administration could not understand with whom to fight, and even more so - how. Maybe at least something was found out by the group of researchers? At least, at least to know what this creature looks like?
Who is this?
Doctors for the most part did not want to hear about any fly. They blamed everything on mass hysteria.
“More often than not, people unknowingly inflict these injuries on themselves,” assured Narrotam Lal, a physician at the King George Medical College in Lucknow.
The police have their own explanation - beetles.
“This is a winged insect about 7 cm long, which leaves rashes and supposedly supernatural wounds on people's skin,” Senior Police Inspector Kavindra P. Singh confidently told the Press Trust of India.
Where such confidence? It turns out that the inhabitants of one of the villages have found extremely large insects that have never been seen before.
But the Associated Press, referring to its correspondent, reported on August 12, 2002 that the inhabitants of the poor Shanwa district were attacked at night not by an insect, but by some round flying object emitting red and blue lights.
Those whom he does not kill later complain of very severe burns. And judging by the reports that were received by scientists from Kanpur during the first few days of the investigation, people saw how "a strange and brightly lit object flies up to the victims, and when it flies away, claw marks are found on their bodies."
According to the same reports, the object sometimes scared off even the police. Some eyewitnesses describe the mysterious creature as looking like a soccer ball, others claim that it resembles a turtle. But everyone agrees that it is brightly lit.
“A mysterious flying object attacked him at night,” says Rajuraj Pal about his neighbor, who died recently in Shanwa. - His belly was ripped open. And two days later, the poor man died.
Many others had scratches and superficial wounds. People claimed that the attack was carried out while they were sleeping. In the village of Darra, a mysterious "something" attacked 53-year-old Kalawati, leaving blisters of burns on the victim's blackened forearms.
“It was like a big soccer ball with sparkling lights,” says Kalawati. “It burned my skin. And now, because of the pain, I cannot sleep.
And on August 13, an article appeared in the American press, which was called: "Indians are accused of UFO attacks." In particular, it said that residents accuse the local authorities of inactivity and unwillingness to catch the newcomers.
Amrit Abhijat from the district magistrate in Mirzapur claimed that he was able to capture the UFO on film, and therefore has no doubt that all this is connected with the aliens.
On August 14, an article appeared with a new version - ball lightning is to blame for everything! This conclusion, it turns out, came to Professor Ravindra Arora from the Indian Institute of Technology, when he studied the pictures sent to him.
He calculated that during a drought, ball lightning strikes the ground constantly, their brightness is about the same as a 100-watt lamp, and the size is from a tennis ball to a soccer ball. They are usually harmless and go into the ground unless they bump into a person. When the monsoon begins, all this must stop, said the professor. In the meantime, there is heat and drought, the electrical conductivity of the earth decreases, lightning can "wander". By the way, they come in different colors - blue, green, yellow or red. And there is no mystical riddle here.
However, after about a year's break, stories began again pouring in about how some "monkey-man", that is, a monkey-man, pounces, bites until it bleeds, and scratches terribly with its claws. According to the descriptions of eyewitnesses, the figure of this creature is human, and the physiognomy is a monkey.
Panic this time gripped the area around the Indian capital, and no reassuring explanation was presented to the victims.
View from the outside
Well, what is the reaction of people to these messages outside India? Some people wrote in their reviews on the Internet that all this resembles stories from a cheap tabloid book. But there were also many who took someone else's misfortune to heart, expressing a lot of sound assumptions.
Such a disease, they said, was already known to science. And what happened to the 16-year-old Rajni Sahu, who had new wounds on her hand in the presence of eyewitnesses, can be explained by a viral disease. When the virus invades the skin through an open wound, it begins to multiply rapidly, as if eating away tissue from the inside.
The affected area of the body actually swells, and tissue necrosis occurs extremely quickly, right before our eyes. The disease destroys the tissues of the human body at a rate of three centimeters per hour, and in some cases, death occurs in less than a day, starting with the first painful sensations.
The disease is provoked by the bacterium of the streptococcal group A, the very one that causes scarlet fever, skin infections, rheumatic fevers. You can pick up such a nasty thing through common items - spoons, forks, etc. Fortunately, this disease is extremely rare. In the so-called civilized countries, no more than 2-3 people per million people fall ill per year.
So is it really that this rare disease began to affect the people of India en masse? Where do these stories of flying biting creatures come from?
Minister Dipti S. Vilas spoke on August 7, 2002 and said that there was no direct evidence yet to support the version of the attacks by the creature known as the fly-tailed fly. Moreover, checks show that a lot of these stories are invented. He cited the example of a woman in Hardoi, who said that the scratches on her face were the result of an attack of a fly fly, and the doctors determined that it had nothing to do with it, and the woman herself admitted that she had scratched her face when she fell.
Minister Vilas also recalled the case of an 11-year-old boy who died in Jonpur: the cause of death is still unknown, the autopsy did not clarify anything, but residents continued to claim that the flyweed was to blame. The minister believes that until the competent persons understand the situation, the rumors will not stop.
Presumably he's right. In the meantime, there are many questions to which there are no answers. If this is a viral disease, then why do external signs most often resemble bloody scratches? Where do deep burns and blisters come from? Why do people see strangely shaped objects of light?
Ufologists are inclined to believe that the flying "balls" are probes sent from the board of a UFO, because they shine so brightly with multi-colored lights.
Well, local residents, of course, tend to suspect evil spirits and try to get rid of it by any means. Minister Vilas confirmed that in the first month that the "attacks" began, agitated and intimidated villagers lynched half a dozen people, mistaking them for accomplices of the fly. Indeed, the terrible becomes twice as terrible if it is inexplicable …