When Flying Saucers Attack!

[Celesta]

Ha! Possums! You've been reading way back up the line, haven't you, Ron?

Nice to see you and can't wait for the possum news, from the land of the marsupials.

The Letters from Hell book is nice. I've been reading it also.

There's a new fiction JTR out, with Sherlock Holmes. I saw it today but it's still new and in hardback, so I've decided to see how both Ripper and Holmes officianados feel about it.

[Mike Covell]

Hi gang, still no word on the alleged Hull UFO sighting that was supposed to have crashed over the docks. The more people I speak to, the more I become convinced it was nothing more than a chinese lantern!

[Doppelganger]

hi gang, found this story on a ufo site about 9 skiers killed in russia 50+ years ago after strange lights were seen in the sky the official report list them as killed by a "unknown compelling force".



50 Years ago and a day something unusual happened in the Ural Mountains. 5 decades is but a flash for the Count, but for the mortals who visit this website, it is possibly a lifetime. This event was significant enough that the pass on Ortorten Mountain where it happened was officially named for one of the 9 poor souls who hiked in, but never hiked out.

On February 2nd, 1959, Igor Dyatlov and 8 of his friends who were all cross-country skiers set themselves out to go on a camping trip roughly 1260 miles northeast of the aforementioned Battle of Kalka. They were killed. The only man, who survived, did so because he fell ill and had to break off from the ascent. His name is Yuri Yudin, and he is still alive today. He has no clues about what happened to his friends any more than anyone else, but whatever did happen was a state secret for quite some time. The matter was classified by the Russian government until 1993. Their first campsite on the mountain after hiking in was set up in the evening, 50 years prior to the very moment I am committing these words to my personal computer. Mr. Yudin knew that they were planning to stay out longer than originally intended, and he shared that news with the friends and relatives of the group, so there was no concern for their absence until 18 days later on February 20th.

This is where the mystery begins, and there are more details to be found in the cited references below, but the camp was found abandoned and their tent was cut open from the inside, as has been determined by forensic analysis. Everyone seemed to have fled the tent in varying states of disarray. Some of the party was barefoot and some of them had only one sock on, others a single shoe. The trail of the fleeing skiers lead towards a forest, where they could have easily set their original campsite for cover, and simply disappeared. 2 young men were found at the edge of that wood, barefoot and in their underwear. 3 more bodies were found between those 2 and the camp. Those 3 were apparently trying to go back to the ruined tent. 2 months later the other 4 were found 82 yards away. These 4 suffered the worst trauma with broken ribs, and a crushed skull. 21-year-old Lyudmila Dubinina had her tongue cut out.

The official report states that the 9 were killed by an ‘unknown compelling force’. Witnesses camping 31 miles away reported seeing bright orange spheres in the approximate area the Dyatlov party was located. Reportedly the victims were all found to have an unusally darkened tone to their skin.

Many have posited the theory that the group was inadvertently killed by a poorly planned military exercise, including the possibility of a missile launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It was the only base in range at the time, but extensive and legitimate research shows that there are no records of anything having been fired. The most prominent investigator of what happened believes that it was a military exercise. He cites the skin tone, and compression damage that some of the bodies had. He is of course predisposed, and rightfully so, to think it is a state secret or a cover-up.

The Count is not so sure. He bears witness to a particular type of aircraft that is not of our standard realm that may have created all of these symptoms. The craft is nuclear powered and man-made, although the men who made it are not part of the world you and I know. He feels that one must take note of one of the most unusual aspects of this mystery. Why was poor Lyudmila’s tongue removed?

When trying to determine an accurate level of radiation poisoning in an animal of any species, the best tissue to test is dense tissue and the easiest place to find it is in the tongue, eyes and genitals. Nerve centers are the densest tissue sources. Why does one test for radiation? Some would say to evaluate what exactly happened to any subject that may have inadvertently been exposed to a nuclear blast. If the subject was present, why not collect the data? Others might also measure that radiation to try and determine what kind of device might have created it and was it known to man’s known world? Perhaps some of you are familiar with cattle mutilation in the southwest of the United States. Cows and even buffalo are sometimes found dead, drained of blood and with their eyes and tongues removed.

The Count tells me the Ural mountains are exceptionally beautiful. He marched throughout a great part of the range when he served directly under Subedei Ba’adur, known throughout history as ‘Subotai the Valiant’. Most notably at the Battle of the Kalka River in late March of 1223, where Ghengis Khan and his Mongols defeated the dog Prince Mstislav and the 78,423 men he brought from Kiev, even though they had only 36,212 men to fight them with. The Count feels that if Xerxes, as he is known today, had had Sebedei under his command, he would have conquered all of the Earth. Time however often prevents great men from co-existing, and Sebedai and Xerxes missed each other by 800 years. What would have happened if they had met? That story is for another time.

[Mike Covell]

Hi Doppleganger, the story was covered in Fortean Times earlier this year, and we discussed it a while back, it's certainly very strange, and still sadly unexplained.

[Celesta]

Hi Doppleganger,

Nice to see you again. Good story. There's a story like this, but the orange glow, I didn't recall. That part about the tongue being cut out is the eeriest part. I wonder what really did happen.

[Mayerling]

Hi all,

I have to try to keep closer in touch these days than I have been in the past.
Too much time on FACEBOOK, WIKIPEDIA, and imdb Boards.

Doppelganger - It's an interesting story about that massive killing incident in the Ural Mountains in 1959. I find it fascinating how many really violent actions (including a rocket launching disaster in the early 1960s, and the sinking of a battleship in the Black Sea in the middle 1950s were covered up by the Communist Russian government. But then so were many mishaps and odd deaths covered up by the U.S. and its allies. We still don't know what happened to Commander Lionel Crabb at Portsmouth in 1956.

Jeff

[sdreid]

Hi Jeff,

Was that a "proper" battleship that sunk or a pocket battleship like the Graf Spee or a battle cruiser like the Hood?

[Robert]

This must be the ship :

http://www.bobhenneman.info/soviet.htm

[sdreid]

Thanks Robert. The book I have lists her at 29,000 tons displacement so she was certainly a "proper" battleship when she was launched in 1911 but by WWII standards she was closer in size to the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee than to the likes of Vanguard, Bismark, Iowa and Yamato.

[Mayerling]

A Ship to Forget!

Hi Stan, Robert, and Celesta (I have not forgotten you):

Thanks Robert, it was the Novorosisk (formerly the Italian battle cruiser Julius Caesar).

A similar piece of lying occurred in 1914 just as World War I began. One of the newest dreadnaughts was H.M.S. Audacious, which while on a minor cruise hit a German mine off Lough Swilly off Ireland. No lives were lost but the ship sank. Unfortunately this was after a series of naval losses, headed by Otto Weddingen's day of triumph in U-9 over H.M.S. Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue, and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill decided to hide the fact that the Grand Fleet lost one of the newest vessels. Unfortunately for Churchill and for reality the White Star Liner R.M.S. Olympic (sister of the Titanic and Britannic) and several other liners headed for America were passing the area and stopped. Passengers took photos of the sinking Audacious, and when they got to the U.S. they were published in the newspapers here. Eventually these papers got to Wilhelmine Germany, and the enemy was fully aware of the success of their mine. It was not until the closing days of the war (four years later) that the Admiralty admitted that one of their dreadnoughts had been missing for the entire war. For some reason the "news scoop" did not impress many people.

Jeff

[Robert]

Blimey, Jeff, if that happened now it would be twittered worldwide within hours.

[Mike Covell]

Thanks for that Jeff, you learn something new everyday!

Been a busy one over here again,
I appeared in todays Hull Daily Mail, which can be found on my blogg and I have not stopped answering the phone all day!
I was also on Radio Humberside earlier, and now plan the rest of the day with my feet up reading a book!

[Celesta]

Hello Gang,

Hope you're all well. Everyone is so busy!


Hiddy-ho, Jeff. Nice to see you. How is it that this was kept quiet if there were no lives lost in the sinking? I mean, it made the U.S. papers. There were the survivors, the crew and passengers of the Olympic, etc., in addition to whoever picked up the survivors. Even in those days, word should have gotten back to the British people within days. In addition, I would think the Germans would have made an issue out of the success of their mine.

[Mayerling]

Hi Stan, Mike, Robert, and Celesta,

You got me Celesta about how they kept it quiet. The sailors were the easiest - they were ordered on pain of death (for treason) not to talk. But you are right that the Americans should have been screaming. My suspicion is that the British Government did the same thing regarding Audacious with American newspapers that they did in late 1936 with foreign press coverage (U.S., Russian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, etc.) of the political mess from the love affair of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. The Baldwin Government clamped down on the sale or transport of any foreign newspapers until late November 1936. Then the Archbishop of Canterbury (Mr. Ramsay or Cosmo Lang, I believe) found out about it, and roundly condemned what he considered the irresponsible behavior of the man who was supposedly head of the Church of England. Baldwin could not do anything about that. Then officially the British public were aware of it.

As for the Germans in 1914, if one studies German espionage and propaganda in World War I it becomes apparent they were far from as effective as in World War II. They had no Dr. Goebbels handling the propaganda machine in the First World War.

By the way, I remembered that in World War II the British Government repeated the same thing again, when in November 1941 H.M.S. Barham was sunk by a torpedo in the Mediterranean Sea. Again, they hid the loss of Barham and nearly 800 men on her from the public. What gets me about this is that there were actual films of the sinking (one of the few battleships whose loss was recorded on film) that were not released until post May 1945.
If you look at You Tube and the H.M.S. Barham website you can see the film
(which is quite startling).

Jeff

[Mike Covell]

On the subject of ship wrecks, we were in Whitby recently and our hosts took us to a ship wreck just below the Abbey.

Here are our pictures, click on the image to move to the next,

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=82663&id=586989665&l=4f2003efd8

If you manage to get to the last shot, there are some photo's of me next to a genuine pirates grave! You can see the skull and cross bones on the gravestone!