Featured Issue
August 2001
February 1958
This rare, mint condition Feb. 1958 FATE is on sale now for a limited time only!
More Details >



Upcoming Events
FaerieCon International
October 10-12
Philadelphia, PA
Website

Mounds Theatre
Haunted Tours
October 1 - 31
St. Paul, MN
Website

View More
Upcoming Events

Sinister Dirigibles over Russia
by Paul Stonehill
FATE :: June 2007

Strange, cigar-shaped objects have been seen in the sky over Russian cities, villages, testing grounds, battlefields, forests, and secret installations. Surely many observations have been lost in the whirlwind of history; however, the author has been able to collect some striking reports:

1915 - Unknown dirigibles were seen at the mouth of the Volga River, over villages and towns covering a distance of 150 kilometers. A huge, dirigible-like balloon with a roaring motor and spotlights shining down was observed in the sky over the Kazan Mil­itary District. A finned, cigar-shaped object hovered over a village. Six humanoid shapes were seen in a "boat" under the ob­ject's "belly."

On September 26, the Kalmyk prince Iseren Badmayev saw what appeared to be a puff of black smoke appear from behind a hill and split into two parts. Each part, initially spherical, assumed an elongated shape in the blink of an eye. Both resem­bled gray boats. One part moved south­ward; the other headed west. For several minutes, the prince watched them move high above the horizon in the cloudless sky. He saw another "boat" about 40 minutes later. He reported that the vehicle in which he was traveling at the time stood still each time he saw a boat in the sky.

A search-and-capture expedition was dispatched, but the objects were not found. The unknown aircraft appeared to be harmless, and General Sandetsky, Com­mander of the Kazan Military District, paid little attention to the reports, though he did inform the Supreme Command General Headquarters and the Russian General Staff. When he received no response, the documents were shelved in the archives for future reference.

Similar reports came from towns more than 800 kilometers north of Astrakhan and even from the Ural Mountains. An Oc­tober 9 report from the village of Bara-novka mentioned a landing in the forest.

Information about the sightings, based on extracts from the files of the Central State Military Historical Archives of the USSR, was reported in the April 1991 edition of the now-defunct magazine Soviet Soldier.

1940s - Retired Col. Gherman Kolchin, a re-spected researcher, published an article in NLO Magazine in 2000. It mentioned recollections of A. Kovalchuk, a lieutenant colonel during World War II. A huge, dir­igible-like object 100 to 150 meters long passed over the military airfield where Ko­valchuk was stationed at an altitude of 500 meters. Air defense units fired on it with cannons and machine guns to protect the airfield. The object, which had no gondola, disappeared into the distance unharmed.

1953 - Veniamin Dodin, a writer, military sci­entist, and lecturer, was in exile in Krasno­yarsk Kray, Siberia, not far from the site of the famous Tunguska explosion of 1908. On a clear night in June, while walking, Dodin heard a high-pitched noise that seemed to be coming from inside his head. He clearly saw a long, gleaming, cylindri­cal craft hovering over clouds about two miles away. Its rotating, drum-shaped body was girded with something that resembled a moving staircase with many steps. Dodin immediately assumed it was a dirigible, but was confused by the absence of cabins or cockpit. As the slowly rotating object ap­proached him, its design appeared to be technologically incorrect. He assumed it had come from the testing area of the nearby top-secret Soviet research center known as "Box 26," where new types of super-powerful weapons were being devel­oped. The flat, drum-shaped end of the ob­ject that faced him separated itself from the cylinder and ascended rapidly, making a painful squeaking noise. Several more flat drums followed suit. Then the open end closed and the mysterious cylinder flew away. The flat drums disappeared and Dodin's earache went away.

The "dirigible" returned the follow­ing night. Dodin knew that no conventional man-made object could travel at such ve­locities as to instantly disappear from view. Was the object some advanced aircraft? He worried that those who ran the sinister Box 26 would come to the area. Inmates of local concentration camps and other exiles like him had heard horrible rumors about the projects of the secret research center. Knowing that if he were caught taking pho­tographs in the forbidden Oimolon area he would be sent back to the GULAG camps or worse, Dodin nevertheless pho­tographed the object and watched the sky for more than 40 hours as other, sim­ilar objects appeared.

The smaller, flat drums poured out of the 650-foot motherships. Each drum appeared to be about 80 feet in diameter and polished. Each mothership threw out eight perfectly smooth, flat drums. Dodin used a Zeiss theodolite to observe the strange objects. He had no other tools. The eyepiece he looked through enabled him to discern a slight luminescence em­anating from the panels of the drums. The mothership did not emit any luminescence. Dodin tried to reach the site of the nearest cylinder. He failed every time. Moreover, he became ill whenever he approached the site.....

Read the rest of this article in the June 2007 issue of FATE

Six strange and unknown packed issues of FATE for less than $20?
A full year of FATE for less than $3 a month? It's no hoax!
Don't miss out, click here to subscribe today!

FATE Magazine: True Reports of the Strange and Unknown