Transcript
Ben (0:00)
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Brian (0:45)
Russia it is a country bigger than three continents, and it is a dark place. Or so it seems to be. It seems to me so unknown, a fairy tale place stuck in a different time and world where immeasurable wildernesses are interrupted by the odd settlement. And those settlements could range from a few ramshackle houses to forgotten brutalist concrete ruins from a checkered past and even up to colorful castles that inspire the mind. It's a dream world, an ocean of unknowns painted green and brown and gray. It is a rope tugged between the two poles of Europe and Asia, the Great west, the greatest of the East. And the strain of this tug of war has left its marks on the land, a tossing here and there between pagan history and Christian settlement, and godless communist uprisings has beaten the country to a pulp time and time again, leaving it bloodied in the face and bleeding out from the vitals. Yet it remains. It lingers on, sometimes confusedly, dancing its dance of Orthodoxy and dealing still with the rampant sin that few have been immune to in this modern age. Even its modernity shows signs of its incompleteness, for that is what Russia really feels like incomplete somehow. The metropolitan titans of Moscow and St. Petersburg shine with lights as bright as any major center of modern human development in our day. But bright as they may be, they cannot cover up the shadow over the bulk of the land again. It's like a fairy world, caught between what modern man wants to pigeonhole it into and what it actually is, what it perhaps used to be. And despite the body of glorious work it really can point to in the past, its courageous stands against the onset of Islam, its conquering of the Mongol hordes by the Christian czar, its tragic fight to the death in the first great war to end all wars. The thing it is perhaps most known for is a thing entirely separate from it, its time as the same land that bore the name of Soviet Union. The scars of the Iron Curtain remain today, both in its infrastructure and its lineages of people. How far back did Lenin and Stalin and the Bolsheviks set those Rifian countrymen? Well, who can say? But it must certainly be a long way. It was in this way, a library of Alexandria writ large, burning in the fires of a communist realm, losing uncounted volumes of tradition and knowledge and wealth and ethos with each passing minute that time of mystery, of debauchery, of death and of intrigue is perhaps what fuels so much natural speculation about what sorts of things could be lurking in that place that we haven't seen before. But it isn't just that. There's something in Russia's deep past that paints it all fuzzy as well. In southern Siberia, tucked tightly into a limestone cave, scientists found a fragment of bone in 2008. They took it for study, thinking it may be the remains of some very early human survivors in the region. But what they found struck them dumb. Closer inspection made them wonder whether or not the bone fragment was human at all. The DNA tests were all over the place, leading them to believe the finger belonged to a young female who was more related to Neanderthals than modern man, but who was nonetheless not a Neanderthal. Eventually, this subspecies of man, for that is what the materialist scientists called them, took on the colloquial name the Denisovans, after the cave in which they were first found. A race of humans or humanoids from the deepest stretches of time that could be imagined. And my disagreements with the evolutionary narrative and timeline aside, it is a fascinating find. Some other ancient cultures talk about a people who some think to be the old Denisovans, sages from the far north who bring knowledge and technology to the budding man in the Fertile Crescent. Giants and demigods of great power and lore. But of course, this is probably an overblown thing among the Graham Hancocks of the world. I would place very little stock in it and think it relies too much on a deep time view of history that I flatly rejected. However, it can't be denied that it is fascinating. Perhaps it betrays a longing in the collective subconscious of man to make sense of all the strangeness that comes to us from the badlands of Russia, because, my goodness, there is a great deal of strangeness there. In 1953, Vinyamin Dodin was wasting away in exile in the rugged lands of southern Siberia. In his past life, he had been a prominent Soviet scientist and lecturer whose contributions to the defense sector and the college education of the USSR's youth could not be overstated. In 20 years, he had authored 26 books on a wide range of engineering adjacent topics while teaching military engineers. But in 1940, that life came to a violent end. He somehow ran afoul of the government. The reasons for this falling out are unclear. Perhaps he discovered something he didn't like and threatened treason. Perhaps he said the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong tone, with no ill intent at all, whatever it was. Doden learned firsthand of the knife's edge. Everyone walks along at all times. Under a totalitarian communist regime. For 12 years, he drifted from Google gulag to gulag and prison to prison. He was put to harsh labor in even harsher elements and watched other prisoners he had come to love as comrades die under the iron rod of evil that was a constant black cloud above their country. Finally, he was placed in exile in a small hut next to a river called Ishimba, which was in a place whose precise location is difficult to determine from reports. It was either in the backwoods woods to the neighboring city of the modern day Zeleznahorsk, or it was in a defunct and abandoned territory to the north and west of Kirovskill. For my money, I'm going with the latter solely for the reason that it is a blurred out spot on Google Earth and therefore must have something to hide. At any rate, Dodin began living out his days in lonesome solitude in his hut on the banks of the small river. Too valuable to kill, too risky to keep near anyone else. And over a short course of time, the man started to settle into his new life. He learned to embrace the quiet, and he learned to find fulfilling enough company in himself and the animals that frequently came near to his home. He foraged and hunted. He cut wood and stoked a constant fire. He fished in the Ashimba and explored the forest. But he never got too close to the only settlement that was close to him, a place forgotten to time called Oimoilon. It is said in this place the Soviets would carry out unrecorded experimental weapons testing. Dodin did not know for sure whether those rumors were true, at least not at first. But he did think it strange that his overlords would let him live so close to a place with such a reputation. Yet he contented himself with exile and did not seek to thwart whatever it was the regime was or was not doing in Oimoilan. He had made peace with his life, but the objective truth was that it was no life at all. A part of him still knew that, and it aided his mind like a virus. On a June evening, Dodin walked on the shores of his river towards the alcove in the trees that contained his hut. The humidity of the day had given way to an almost crisp breeze as the last traces of the sun sank below the western inferno of trees. That same breeze, a torrent higher up in the heavens, had chased away all the clouds and faint pricks of twinkling light could already be seen dancing beside the moon in the royal blue sky. Night was coming on fast, but it was not there yet. Doden climbed a small hill which he knew would allow him to look over the river and trees for miles. On the opposite bank it was a small bald meadow of shinhai grass and wildflowers and scattered granite boulders from some disaster of yore. Often he would see deer there, but not on that night. While he climbed, he began to experience a ringing sensation in his ears. He was not hearing the ringing per se. Rather, he was experiencing it inside of himself. He figured it for a change. In his hearing that is always accompanied by a whine of recalibration from the brain. Only it didn't stop. The ringing grew in volume as he summited the knoll, and he soon discovered what he thought to be the source. But just what the source was, he couldn't actually say. I know it's confusing. Above the trees, over the river, a line of sight blocked by the sloping hill until moments before, there was a massive cylinder floating in the sky. It sang out with a hum that sat down deep beneath the high pitched whine he could still feel inside of his head in that first moment of seeing the strange thing. He also realized that nothing else was making noise in the forest of his prison. No bugs, no nesting birds or night owls, no rustling rabbits or squirrels. His world was eerily devoid of any noise besides the humming and the ringing. He turned his focus back to the unprecedented thing he spotted in the sky. The tubular body was turning quickly about itself. On its outside, it was entirely blank. Not a seam could be seen on the massive thing, save a sort of perforated ring around its perimeter near what Dodin assumed to be its aft side. In the growing darkness, it seemed to him to glow somehow in a dull, dim light that pulsated with the body's own rotation. As his eyes adjusted to the oddity, he found that he could send suddenly see inside of that aft end, the. The end closest to him, as if it was hollowed out and like a limbless tree that was opened at one side. Now, caught as if in a trance and unable to look anywhere else, Dodin watched as the craft moved towards him in the right mind he had remaining. He assured himself that what he was seeing was a test flight from some top secret aircraft being developed at Oimoilon. But he couldn't shake the worry that it was perhaps more than that. Or if it was that, that it was no mere test flight, and that it carried a payload meant for his ultimate destruction. But any doom he waited for never came. Instead, what happened next was entirely unpredictable. A solid disk, a few meters thick, but nearly as wide in diameter as the main cylinder slid out from the open end that faced Dodin. It spun and hovered near the craft as it reoriented itself to be perpendicular to the ufo, such that its two faces were pointed, one towards the sky and one towards the earth. Then it rocketed into the heavens and vanished entirely out of sight in an instant. Doden had never conceived of such motion before. He watched on, the noise in his head growing rougher and harder to endure. More disks exited the cylinder and flew up quickly, as did the first. Then, unceremoniously, the open end of the object closed, and the massive thing flew away into the night until it too vanished, but much more slowly. As Doden snapped out of his stupor, he began to hear the sound of animals again. The familiar noise of the breeze brushing reeds and grasses against one another were like white noise to his now immense fatigue. Suddenly he felt his body back grow warm, and he watched his shadows stretch out before him towards the west. He turned quickly to find that the sun was rising far away behind him. He had stood there watching this thing, an event he thought was only mere minutes for the entire night. He walked the short distance to his hut down the hill, too tired to think of what he had witnessed. When he arrived inside, he threw himself automatically down on a caught and slept in a dreamless sleep until the long summer day had gone deep into the afternoon. When he woke, he didn't have any conclusions. Indeed, he had few coherent thoughts about the matter at all. But he did have an irresistible urge to return to that hill again, to watch and wait should the strange craft come back. And it did. For many nights in a row, Dodin observed and documented the object with the vanishing discs that exited it. He took photographs. A thing that was perhaps the bravest thing Doden ever did in his life, given the circumstances and estimated the size and propulsion methods and purpose of whatever it was he was looking at. But these were mere guesses, and uneducated ones at that. Dodin knew nothing man made could move the way that this thing did, this zeppelin from another world. As the encounters piled up, the disks that exited the craft began to diminish in size, until they poured out at a size of what Dodin thought was 80ft in diameter compared to the much larger cylinder that he figured for over 650ft in diameter. As his nerve grew and he shook the trance that tempted him to hold still. Anytime he saw the object, he started trying to approach it closer. These attempts failed. However, each time Dodin began to descend the hill towards the thing, he became violently ill and suffered sharp pains in every single joint on his body. The thing had defenses, or some offensive, malicious wish to oppress him. Each time he came within range, one or the other or both must have been true. And then one day, the encounter stopped. Life went on for Dodin, back to the solitary monotony of exile in a forsaken land, until about a month after all of these things took place, KGB officers arrived at Dodin's door to rudely wake him one morning. Hearing the voices made him sure they had come to kill him. But they had not. They questioned him extensively about the things he had seen. He saw no compelling reason to lie, as death was nearly welcome to him at that point. And they took his camera from him and smashed it into some rocks outside before ripping up the film into tatters. Of course, he. This caused Dodin to conclude that he had seen some very secret military operation or test taking place. He assumed his life was spared out of goodwill or out of some remaining respect for the work that he had once done. Later, however, he was proven wrong. Later on, a man named Cheveleyov discovered the truth. Deep inside the records of the unrecorded site near Oymoylan that he had uncovered during. During the chaos of the toppling regime, he found reports of the very same events Dodin had written down in his journals. The reports, far from clearing the air, added instead to the dread of it all. The military had seen the craft and its disk children as well. They had feared them. They had experienced radio jamming and electromagnetic anomalies under the object's onset. They had even ordered the full evacuation of all personnel in the area. All except Dodin, of course. At one point, it was said they even tried to engage with the object to defend themselves. Two fighter jets fired missiles directly upon it, only to have the missiles turn course directly down to the earth at the final moments before impact. To this day, nobody knows what was seen over the trees of Siberia on those summer nights in 1953.