The explosions that thundered in 1991 and 1992 near the town of Sasovo in the Ryazan Region shocked the whole country at one time. The first explosion took place on April 12, 1991, on Cosmonautics Day.
At night, at exactly 1 hour 34 minutes, a growing rumble was heard from somewhere above. The ground shook as if in a fever. Multi-storey buildings swayed from side to side, furniture fell in the apartments, chandeliers flew to smithereens. People were thrown from their beds, showered with broken glass.
Thousands of windows and doors were knocked out of their nests. From incredible pressure drops tore off the hatch covers, light bulbs burst. Water pipes burst underground. When the rumble died down, the shocked people heard the rumble again. Now receding …
4 hours before the explosion (April 11, at 21.20), a shunting diesel locomotive was located on the access roads at the Sasovo station, waiting for a permission signal from a traffic light. The locomotive driver Ivan Kurchatov suddenly saw from the cockpit window "a ball of bright white color." Station workers and numerous passengers came out to look at the UFO.
The huge balloon hung motionless directly over the train station, and then slowly flew northeast. An hour before the explosion, a strange glow spread over the place of the future crater. For half an hour, residents of the outskirts of the city saw two bright red balls, which slowly crossed the sky.
Luminous balls, with a roar dissecting the sky, appeared in the village of Chuchkovo (30 kilometers from the epicenter). During their flight, people heard a hum and felt the earth shake. Unusual objects in the sky were seen by the cadets of the civil aviation school, railway workers, fishermen.
Police inspector P. N. Panikov and district police officer N. N. Ryabov, who were part of the night patrol group of the Sasovskiy GROVD, saw in the sky behind the railway (in the direction where the explosion took place later) a ball or cloud emitting a bluish glow. Just before the explosion, two bright blue flashes were observed over the city.
As soon as the explosion thundered, a "cloud" with clearly defined edges appeared in the sky, flying against the wind. It glowed with white light from within. And after 3 - 4 minutes, far from the city, a round bright red glow was observed, which gradually faded away.
Promotional video:
“The fact of a 5-minute break in telephone communication at the railway station immediately after the explosion is unusual,” wrote the city newspaper Prizyv. Moreover, at the moment of the explosion, the engine of the ChS-7 shunting locomotive stalled. Such phenomena, as a rule, are observed during UFO flights."
Many recalled that before the catastrophe they had lost sleep, and had an unreasonable fear. Someone seemed to be warning: get out of here as soon as possible! The terrifying power of the first explosion, equal to 25 - 30 tons of TNT, generated a crater 28 meters in diameter.
The shock wave threw open the windows in Igoshino, located 50 kilometers from Sasov. But even in the city that took the brunt of the blow, almost no one was hurt. Only four people were taken to the hospital, cut by broken glass. The explosion seemed to be controlled by someone, not wanting to cause too much damage to the city. The oil depot was located very close to the funnel. It's scary to even think what would happen to the city if the explosion affected thousands of tanks with fuel!
No one was able to understand what had exploded after all. At the site of the explosion, there were about 30 tons of fertilizers - someone dumped paper bags with saltpeter right on the wet ground.
The explosion scattered it in different directions, lifted it into the clouds, from where it spilled onto the city in a sticky oil rain. But … the epicenter of the explosion was not in the place of the pile of fertilizers, but 70 meters from it. No saltpeter was found in the samples from the funnel, and it became clear to everyone that it was not she who jerked, but something else.
Then they began to suspect the accidental fall of a bomb from a military plane. But where are the pieces of it? “As a result, no metal objects were found on the surface of the earth within a radius of 100 meters from the epicenter of the explosion and in the crater at a depth of five meters,” reads the official report on the investigation of the scene. Then the search radius was expanded to 500 meters, but not a single fragment was found.
Was it a vacuum bomb? The destruction in the city gave the impression that the shock wave was coming not from the funnel, but towards it. Glass flew out not only inside houses, but also outside. The pillars on the field moved in the direction of the explosion, but the vacuum bomb is primarily fire. Meanwhile, there was not the slightest trace of flame in the funnel or around. The fire here appeared later, when the soldiers standing in the cordon began to burn bonfires at night.
Funnel at the site of the explosion then and now
The leadership of the Moscow Military District assured that at the time of the explosion near Sasovo there was not a single military aircraft, and there was no rocket fire. Is it possible that an ice meteorite exploded, as suggested by Doctor of Sciences A. Portnov?
Correspondent I. Chernyak contacted the duty general of the Central Command Center of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces E. Yaroshenko. He was not surprised at the accusations against the military:
- You will listen to others, so the army is to blame for everything. But I - a former pilot - can testify that even the most powerful bomb will not leave such a huge crater. In addition, the explosion occurred at 1.30 am - at that time, our aircraft did not fly unambiguously within a radius of 50 kilometers. In the morning a helicopter with the military was sent to the scene of the explosion. They recently announced that they are coming back. Judge for yourself: if there was something on our part, they probably would have stayed. We have three assumptions: the saltpeter, which was prepared for fertilization, exploded; detonated ammunition lying in the ground from the war, or a meteorite fell. The investigation will show which of them is correct.
For two nights in a row, the funnel glowed as if it was illuminated from below. Severe headaches and dizziness knocked down people who dared to descend into it, their electronic watches and microcalculators malfunctioned. Some photographs were damaged, covered with strange reflections. Finally, someone dug a groove, the waters of the overflowing Tsna River rushed inward, and the glow in the flooded crater died out …
A little more than a year passed, and a second explosion burst out in the vicinity of Sasov! Several residents of the village of Frolovskoye on the night of June 28, 1992 heard a crash. This time there was no destruction: the glass shook, but did not break. Everyone thought that the plane had crossed the sound barrier and went to bed calmly.
A week later, a bell rang at the city administration. The man who refused to identify himself said: "You are sleeping there, and your fields are exploding." And he named the place … Indeed, in the corn field of the Novy Put state farm, there was another crater 4 meters deep and 11.5 meters in diameter. Clods of earth were scattered within a radius of half a kilometer! Oddly enough, the oaks that grew only 15-20 meters away did not suffer at all.
"Employees of the regional committee for environmental protection cannot explain the mysterious behavior of their device, the most advanced one available in the country," the Ryazan newspaper Golos reported. “In and near the funnel, it records short-term bursts of gamma and beta radiation levels, tens of times higher than the natural background. At the same time, at some distance from the funnel, the instrument readings are stable. Saltpeter, the official culprit for the appearance of the crater a year ago, was not in the field this time.
The investigators did not find a single trace of explosives in the ground at the bottom and on the walls of the funnel. Like a year ago, there were no fragments anywhere …
“As for the second explosion, now we can say that it was not a man who did it! - said the senior investigator of the Ryazan regional prosecutor's office, Andrei Viktorovich Shirokov. - The processes taking place inside the Earth, too, could not cause the formation of the funnel.
But if we discard the impact of man and natural processes, what remains? Only one thing: outside interference!
Mikhail GERSHTEIN