This article was sent to me by my good friend Ivan from the Check Republic.
Below is a picture of him and other explorers measuring the depth of the metal object in the tundra. You can see the circular impact area behind him. How long ago this happened is anybody't guess. It may have happened during the Tunguska event. Sorry, the drawings of the structures accompanying the article didn't copy.
by Dr Valery Uvarov
Department
N13 - National Security Academy
- St Petersburg
- Russia
December 2003-January
2004
Across a vast area of sparsely populated
Yakutia in Siberia can be found strange
metallic structures and evidence of devastating nuclear-type explosions every
six or seven centuries.
|
In
northwestern Yakutia in Siberia, in the basin of
the Upper Viliuy River, there is a hard-to-reach area that bears the
marks of a tremendous cataclysm that took place some 800 years ago, which
toppled the entire forest cover and scattered stone fragments over hundreds of
square kilometers. Distributed across this area are mysterious metal objects
located deep underground in the permafrost. On the surface, their presence is
revealed only by patches of weird vegetation. The ancient name of this area is Uliuiu
Cherkechekh, which translates as "the Valley of Death".
For many years the Yakut people have given a very wide berth to this
remote area that has played and still plays a special, powerful role in the
fate not only of civilization but of the planet as a whole.
After having systematized a large quantity of reports and material of various
kinds, we decided to inform you of something that may change perceptions of the
world around us and our place in it, if humanity can take heed of what is
stated here.
In order to provide the fullest possible picture, we have divided our account
into three sections. The first contains the facts and eyewitness
reports in the form in which they reached us. The second presents the
ancient legends of peoples living in this region and the epic poetry of
neighboring peoples who observed strange phenomena. This is important so that
you can carry out your own investigation and appreciate for yourselves every
detail of the narrative. Finally, we discuss what lies behind all this
[see Part 2].
Eyewitness Reports
The area in question can be described as a solid mass of swamps, alternating
with near-impassable taiga, covering more than 100,000 square kilometers. Some
fairly curious rumors have become attached to the area regarding metal
objects of unknown origin located across its expanse.
In order to shed light on whatever it was that, existing barely perceptibly
alongside us, gave rise to these rumors, we had to go into the ancient history
of this region to discover its beliefs and legends. We managed to recreate
certain elements of the local palaeotoponymy and these matched in an
astonishing manner the content of the ancient legends. Everything
indicated that the legends and rumors were referring to quite specific
things.
In
ancient times, the Valley
of Death was part
of a nomadic route used by the Evenk people, from Bodaibo
to Annybar and on to the coast of the Laptev
Sea. Right up until 1936, a merchant named Savvinov
traded on the route; when he gave up the business, the inhabitants gradually
abandoned those places. Finally, the aged merchant and his granddaughter Zina
decided to move to Siuldiukar. Somewhere in the land between two
rivers that is known as Kheldyu ("iron house" in the
local language), the old man led her to a small, slightly flattened reddish
arch where, beyond a spiral passageway, there turned out to be a number of metal
chambers in which they then spent the night. Zina’s grandfather told
her that even in the harshest frosts it was warm as summer in the chambers.
In days gone by, there were bold men among the local hunters who would sleep in
these rooms. But then they began to fall seriously ill, and those who
had spent several nights in a row there soon died. The Yakut
said that the place was "very bad, marshy, and beasts do not go
there". The location of all these constructions was known only to old men
who had been hunters in their youth and had often visited these places. They
lived a nomadic life and their knowledge of the peculiarities of the area—where
one could go, and where one couldn’t—was a matter of vital necessity. Their
descendants have adopted a settled way of life, so this knowledge from the past
has been lost.
At present, the only things that point to the existence of these constructions
are ancient place names that have survived in part and all manner of rumors.
But each of those toponyms represents hundreds, if not thousands, of
square kilometres.
In
1936, alongside the Olguidakh ("place with a cauldron")
River, a geologist directed by elderly natives came upon a smooth
metal hemisphere, reddish in colour, protruding from the ground with such a
sharp edge that it "cut a fingernail". Its walls were about two
centimeters thick and it stuck out of the ground roughly a fifth of its
diameter. It stood leaning over so that it was possible to ride under it on a
reindeer. The geologist dispatched a description of it to Yakutsk, the regional centre.
In 1979, an archaeological expedition from Yakutsk attempted to find the
hemisphere he had discovered. The team members had with them a guide who had
seen the structure several times in his youth, but he said that the area
was greatly changed and so they failed to find anything. It must be said that
in that locality you can pass within 10 paces of something and not notice it,
so earlier discoveries have been pure luck.
Back in 1853, R. Maak, a noted explorer of the region, wrote:
"In
Suntar [a Yakut settlement] I was told that in the upper
reaches of the Viliuy there is a stream called Algy timirbit
(which translates as "the large cauldron sank") flowing into
the Viliuy. Close to its bank in the forest there is a gigantic cauldron
made of copper. Its size is unknown as only the rim is visible above the
ground, but several trees grow within it…"
The
same thing was recorded by N. D. Arkhipov, a researcher into the ancient
cultures of Yakutia:
"Among
the population of the Viliuy basin there is a
legend from ancient times about the existence in the upper reaches of that
river of bronze cauldrons or olguis. This legend deserves
attention as the areas that are the supposed location of the mythical cauldrons
contain several streams with the name Olguidakh— ’Cauldron
Stream’."
And
here is a passage from a letter penned in 1996 by another person who visited
the Valley
of Death. Mikhail
Koretsky from Vladivostok
wrote:
"I
was there three times. The first time was in 1933, when I was ten—I travelled
with my father when he went there to earn some money—then in 1937, without my father.
And the last time was in 1947 as part of a group of youngsters.
"The ’Valley of Death’ extends along a right-hand tributary
of the Viliuy River. In point of fact it is a whole chain of
valleys along its flood lands. All three times I was there with a guide, a Yakut.
We didn’t go there because life was good, but because there, in the back of
beyond, you could pan for gold without the threat that at the end of the season
you’d be robbed or get a bullet in the back of your head.
"As for mysterious objects, there are probably a lot of them there, as in
three seasons I saw seven of those ’cauldrons’. They all struck
me as totally perplexing: for one thing, there was their size—between six and
nine meters in diameter.
"Secondly, they were made of some strange metal. Everyone has
written that they were made of copper, but I’m sure it isn’t copper. The thing
is that even a sharpened cold chisel will not mark the ’cauldrons’ (we
tried more than once). The metal doesn’t break off and can’t be hammered. On copper,
a hammer would definitely have left noticeable dents. But this ’copper’
is covered over with a layer of some unknown material resembling emery. Yet
it’s not an oxidation layer and not scale—it can’t be chipped or scratched,
either.
"We didn’t come across shafts going down into the ground with chambers.
But I did note that the vegetation around the ’cauldrons’ is anomalous—totally
different from what’s growing around. It’s more opulent: large-leaved burdock;
very long withes; strange grass, one and a half or two times the height of a
man. In one of the ’cauldrons’, the whole group of us (six
people) spent the night. We didn’t sense anything bad, and we calmly left
without any sort of unpleasant occurrences. Nobody fell seriously ill
afterwards. Except that three months later, one of my friends lost all his
hair. And on the left side of my head (the side I slept on), three small sore
spots the size of match-heads appeared. I’ve tried to get rid of them all my
life, but they’re still with me today.
"None of our efforts to break off even a small piece from the strange ’cauldrons’
was successful. The only thing I did manage to bring away was a stone. Not an
ordinary one, though: half of a perfect sphere, six centimeters in diameter. It
was black in colour and bore no visible signs of having been worked, yet was
very smooth as if polished. I picked it up from the ground inside one of those
cauldrons.
"I took my souvenir of Yakutia with me to the village of
Samarka, Chuguyevka district, Primorsky region (the Soviet
Far East), where my parents were living in 1933. I was laid up with nothing to
do until my grandmother decided to build a house. We needed to put glass in the
windows and there wasn’t a glass-cutter in the entire village. I tried scoring
it with the edge of that half of a stone sphere, and it turned out to cut with
amazing ease. After that, my find was often used like a diamond by all our
relatives and friends. In 1937 I gave the stone to my grandfather, but that
autumn he was arrested and taken to Magadan where he lived on without
trial until 1968 and then died. Now no-one knows where my stone got to…"
In
his letter, Koretsky stresses that in 1933 his Yakut guide told
him that:
"…five
or ten years before, he had discovered several spherical cauldrons
(they were absolutely round) that protruded high (higher than a man) out of the
ground. They looked brand new. Later the hunter had seen them again, now broken
and scattered."
Koretsky also noted that when
he visited one "cauldron" a second time, in the intervening
few years it had sunk appreciably into the ground.
A. Gutenev and Yu. Mikhailovsky, two researchers who lived in the
town of Mirny in Yakutia, reported that in 1971 an
old hunter belonging to the Evenk people had said that in the area
between two rivers known as Niugun Bootur ("fiery
champion") and Atadarak ("place with a three-sided
harpoon"), there is poking out of the ground the very thing that gave the
place its name—a "very big" three-faceted iron harpoon—while in the
area between two rivers known as Kheliugur ("iron
people"), there is an iron burrow in which lie "thin,
black, one-eyed people in clothes of iron". He said that he could take
people there, that it was not far away, but no-one believed him. In the
meantime, he died.
One more of these objects was, to all appearances, covered after the building
of a dam on the Viliuy, slightly below the Erbiie. According to
the account of one of the builders of the Viliuy hydro-electric project,
when they constructed a diversion canal and drained the main channel they
discovered in it a convex metal "spot". Deadlines were pressing and
after a cursory inspection of the find the project managers gave orders for
work to continue.
There is a host of tales from people who came across similar constructions
by accident, but without precise directions it is extremely difficult to find
these again in the depressingly monotonous terrain.
Once some old men said that flowing in the place called Tong Duurai is a
stream called Ottoamokh ("holes in the ground")
and that around it there are incredibly deep openings known as "the
laughing chasms". That same name also crops up in legends that state
that this is the dwelling of a fiery giant who destroys everything
around. Roughly every six or seven centuries, a monstrous "fireball"
bursts out from there and it either flies off somewhere into the distance and
(judging by the chronicles and legends of other peoples) explodes there, or it
explodes directly above its exit point—as a result of which, the area for hundreds
of kilometers around has been reduced to a scorched desert with shattered
rocks.
Yakut legends contain many references to explosions, fiery whirlwinds
and blazing spheres rising into the air. And all those phenomena are somehow or
other associated with the mysterious metal constructions found in the Valley
of Death. Some of them are large, round, "iron houses"
standing on numerous lateral supports. They have neither windows nor doors,
only a "spacious manhole" at the top of the dome.
Some
of them have sunk almost completely into the permafrost, with only a barely
noticeable arch-like protuberance remaining on the surface. Witnesses who are
strangers to each other describe this "resounding metal house"
in the same way. Other objects scattered across the area are the metallic
hemispherical lids that cover something unknown. Yakut legends say that
the mysterious blazing spheres are produced by "an orifice belching smoke
and fire" with a "banging steel lid".
This
is also the source for the fiery whirlwinds that from the descriptions
sound very similar to the effects of present-day atomic explosions.
Roughly a century before each explosion or series of explosions, a fast-flying
fiery sphere emerged from the "iron orifice" and, without causing
great damage, soared upwards in the form of a thin column of fire. At the top
of this, a very large fireball appeared. Accompanied by four claps of thunder
in succession, it soared to an even greater height and flew off, leaving behind
a long "trail of smoke and fire". Then a cannonade of its explosions
sounded in the distance...
In the 1950s, the Soviet military cast an eye over this area, evidently due to
the exceptionally sparse population on its northern fringes, and conducted a
series of atomic tests there. One of the explosions produced a great puzzle,
and foreign specialists are still speculating about it. As the German radio
station Deutsche Welle reported in September 1991 that, when a 10-kilogram
nuclear device was being tested in 1954, for unknown reasons the size of the
explosion exceeded the calculations by a factor of 2,000 to 3,000, reaching
20–30 megatons, as was registered by seismic laboratories around the world. The
cause of such a significant discrepancy in the power of the explosion
remained unclear. The news agency TASS put out an announcement
that a compact hydrogen bomb had been tested in airburst conditions, but it
later emerged that this was incorrect. After the tests, restricted zones were
established in the area and secret work was carried out for some years.
Myths and Legends
Let us try to look
into the distant past as it is reflected in epic poetry. As the legends passed
on by word of mouth testify, in the remote period when everything began, the
area was inhabited by a small number of Tungus nomads. Once upon a time,
their distant neighbours saw that their land was suddenly wrapped in
impenetrable darkness and the surroundings were shaken by a deafening roar. A
hurricane of unseen force arose and the land was riven by mighty blows.
Lightning crossed the sky in all directions. When everything calmed down and
the darkness dispersed, an unprecedented sight met the nomads’ eyes. In the midst
of the scorched land, glowing in the sun stood a tall vertical structure
that was visible at a distance of many days’ journey.
For a long time, the structure gave out unpleasant, ear-splitting noises and
gradually diminished in height until it disappeared under the ground
altogether. In place of the tall structure there was an immense, yawning,
vertical "orifice". In the strange words of the legends, it consisted
of three tiers of "laughing chasms". Its depths supposedly
contained an underground country with its own sun that was, however, "waning".
A choking stench rose from the orifice, and so no-one settled near it. From a
distance, people could sometimes see a "rotating island" appear above
the opening, and this then proved to be its "banging lid". Those who
were tempted by curiosity to take a closer look never returned.
Centuries went by. Life went on as before. Nobody anticipated anything
extraordinary, but one day a small earthquake occurred and the sky was pierced
by a thin "fiery whirlwind". At the top of it, a
dazzling fireball appeared. Accompanied by "a succession of four
thunderclaps" and leaving behind a trail of fire, this sphere shot off
along a shallow downward trajectory and, after vanishing beyond the horizon,
exploded. The nomads were perturbed but did not abandon the lands that were
home to them, since the "demon" had not caused them any harm
but had exploded over the lands of the hostile neighbouring tribe. A few
decades later, events repeated themselves: the fireball flew off in the
same direction and again destroyed only their neighbours. Evidently this "demon"
was in some way their protector and they began to create legends about
it, calling it Niurgun Bootur, "the fiery champion".
But some time later, events occurred that horrified those in even the most
distant surroundings. A gigantic fireball emerged from the opening with
a deafening, thunderous roar and exploded—right overhead! A tremendous earthquake
ensued. Some hills were cut across by a crack more than 100 meters deep. Following
the explosion, a "fire-raging sea" continued to swash about with a
disc-like "rotating island" above it. The effects of the
explosion extended over a radius of more than a thousand kilometers. The
nomadic tribes which survived on the edges of the area fled in different
directions, seeking to distance themselves from the fatal spot, but that did
save them from death. They all succumbed to some kind of strange illness
that was passed on only by inheritance. Yet they left behind them precise
accounts of what had taken place, on the basis of which Yakut
storytellers began to compose beautiful, exceptionally tragic legends.
A little over 600 years passed. Many generations of nomads had come and
gone. The precepts of the remote ancestors had been forgotten and people again
settled the area.
Then history repeated itself… The fireball of Niurgun Bootur appeared
above a fiery whirlwind and again flew off to explode beyond the horizon. A
few decades later, a second fireball rent the air (now it was called Kiun Erbiie
- "the gleaming aerial herald" or "messenger").
Then came another devastating explosion that the legends again
anthropomorphized. It was given the name Uot Usumu Tong Duurai, which
can be roughly translated as "the criminal stranger who pierced the earth
and hid in the depths, destroying all around with a fiery whirlwind".
It
is important to note that on the eve of the flight of the negative hero Tong
Duurai, there appeared in the sky the messenger of the heavenly Dyesegei—the
champion Kiun Erbiie who crossed the firmament as a "falling
star" or "dashing lightning" so as to warn Niurgun Bootur
of the coming battle.
The most significant event in the legends was Tong Duurai
bursting forth from the underground depths and doing battle with Niurgun
Bootur. This took place roughly as follows:
firstly,
a snake-like, branching, fiery whirlwind burst forth from the "orifice",
on the top of which there again appeared a fireball of gigantic size
which, after several peals of thunder, shot high into the air. He was
accompanied in flight by his retinue—"a swarm of fatally bloody
whirlwinds" that wrought havoc in the vicinity.
But
there were occasions when Tong Duurai encountered Niurgun
Bootur above the place where he took off; and following these, the area
remained lifeless for a long time. The picture painted of these events varies
quite considerably: several "fiery champions" might emerge from the
opening at once, fly some distance and explode in one place. This happened with
the flight of Tong Duurai. A study of the soil layers indicates that the
interval between explosions does not exceed 600–700 years.
The legends vividly reflect these events, but the absence of a written
tradition means that they have not been registered in documentary form. It
seems, though, that this lacuna is compensated for by the historical chronicles
of other peoples.
The Chronicles of
Other Peoples
Altogether, at approximate intervals of 600–700 years, several explosions or,
rather, a whole complex of events including the precursors, took place. All
these occurrences were painstakingly recorded in epic poetry, traditions and
legends. It is a curious fact that similar legends arose in the equatorial zone
of the planet, where explosions or "giant fireballs"
that suddenly appeared in the sky destroyed several centers of ancient
civilizations.
Judging by the results of archaeological investigations carried out in the Upper Viliuy region by S. A. Fedoseyeva,
the intermittent, wave-like settlement of this territory can be traced back
roughly to the fourth millennium BC. In the first millennium AD, the
line of historical development is interrupted—and this does not contradict the
possible date for the last historical explosion as September 1380. The
cloud it raised blotted out the Sun over Europe
for several hours. In several geo-active zones, powerful earthquakes took
place.
This event is recorded in written sources. In Russian chronicles, it coincided
with the Battle
of Kulikovo Field:
"…the
gloom dispersed only in the second half of the day. A wind of such strength
blew, that an arrow shot from a bow could not fly against it…"
This
factor made a positive contribution to the Russian victory.
However, the explosions are described in Tungus legends far more
vividly than in other sources. Judging by the accounts, they were many times
worse than modern nuclear weapons.
If we take 1380 as our starting date and go back into the past, we can trace
such moments. In 830, for example, the culture of the Mayans who
inhabited the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico was destroyed. Many of
their cities were reduced to ruins by an explosion of monstrous force.
Some passages in the Bible are akin to the Yakut legends, e.g.,
the description of the plagues of Egypt and the demise of Sodom
and Gomorrah. In one of the oases of the Arabian
Peninsula, an ancient town was destroyed and literally reduced to
ashes. According to legend, this took place when a huge fireball that
appeared in the sky exploded.
At Mohenjo-daro on
the Indian subcontinent, archaeologists discovered a devastated city. The marks
of the catastrophe—melted stone walls—clearly pointed to an explosion
comparable with a nuclear bomb. Similar events are also described in Chinese
chronicles from the 14th century. They say that, far to the north, a
black cloud rose above the horizon and covered half the sky, scattering large
fragments of stone. Stones also dropped from the sky in Scandinavia
and Germany,
where fire broke out in several towns. Scholars established that they were
quite ordinary stones, and conjectured that a volcano had erupted somewhere.
Perhaps the cause of these misfortunes was really Tong Duurai who
has been bursting out from under the ground for many centuries? While Niurgun
Bootur blotted out half of the sky at his appearance, Tong Duurai
considerably exceeded him in size and, ascending into the heavens, completely
disappeared from view.
We note that in the Valley of Death, a rise in the background
radiation is observed at certain intervals of time—a phenomenon that
specialists can’t explain.
You
