The UFO enigma – part 2

The Soviet engineer, Leonid Kulik, consecrated his life to investigating the mysterious explosion of 30 June 1908 which destroyed more than ten million trees.

Kulik was able to be so convincing that the exploration of the site, which had become the one and only goal of his existence, was continued and a photographic campaign was organized in 1939.  The Second World War interrupted it, and Kulik, who had enlisted, fell before Kaluga, in 1942.

Starting from 1946, A. Kazantsev took up the study of the site, this time with much superior means.  Like Kulik, he notices that, at the epicentre of the explosion, the trees situated close by have paradoxically remained upright, losing only their tops and their leaves, while those which were farther away, up to several kilometres, had been ripped up or at least lain on the ground.  So this scholar was the first to formulate this unheard of hypothesis:  the object in question did not disintegrate upon hitting the ground, but had exploded in altitude.  This affirmation of course caused a sensation and immediately had detractors.  Krinov, a reputed scholar, the Secretary of the Committee for Meteorite Studies, declared that the explosion had well and truly happened on the ground, and that if there were no traces of stony concretions, it was because the crater excavated by the meteorite had immediately filled with water.

In 1958, on the initiative of Cyril Florenski, the Director of the Committee, the most important expedition ever undertaken in the Tunguska is mounted.

Over years, a very precise map of the site is drawn up and, inside the devastated zone, the researchers determine the angle at which the trees of this zone had been touched and the exact damage that they had suffered.  What they find is stupefying…  Firstly, they notice that, on the trees which had remained standing, certain little branches protected by the shade of bigger branches had not been burnt.  Exactly like that which had happened at Hiroshima or at Nagasaki…

Cross-section of a larch cut down inside the zone of the Siberian catastrophe. The different texture of the wide rings which formed during the first years after the explosion can be seen.

In 1969, the same expedition is able to determine that the silver birches and the aspens which have grown since the explosion, and which should normally be 7 or 8 metres high, are in fact three times that height.  Those which had remained standing in 1908 saw their genetic structure profoundly modified and have grown by more than four times their circumferences in roughly fifty years, which proves that they had been submitted to a direct radioactive emission.  By analyzing the radioactivity which continues to emit inside the wood’s annual rings, the presence of  artificial radioactive isotypes are able to be detected.

Up until this moment, the school of those on the side of a natural phenomenon was not lacking valid arguments.  This discovery considerably weakens their position and leads to a series of discoveries which confirms the artificial, “intelligent” character of the phenomenon.

For a long time, it had been believed that the light which had been visible over the major part of Europe in 1908 came from clouds of dust of terrestrial origin.  It is now known that no meteorite, however big, could raise such an important cloud of dust and, as well as that, that there is no known agent capable of transporting it from Central Siberia to London in a few hours…  That the phenomenon was artificial also finds justification in the trajectory that the object followed and which was able to be perfectly reconstituted, thanks to the study which had been done on the manner in which the trunks of the trees had been knocked down.

The big meteorite which fell on 24 March 1933 in Morland, Kansas, USA, and which made a 50 metre deep crater. Another, which fell in Arizona, produced an excavation 150 metres deep and two kilometres wide.

Using miniature trees and a charge of dynamite, the Russian scholars reconstituted a great number of times in the laboratory the effects of an explosion comparable to that of 1908.  By transposing the position of the trees obtained in this way onto the actual site, they were able to determine that the energy liberated in 1908 was the equivalent of ten megatonnes and, above all, that it could only have occurred in altitude.  Which was also confirmed by a decisive fact:  the systematic sounding of the marshy ground at the epicentre of the explosion and around it does not permit the discovery of the slightest parcel of meteorite rock.  And for good reason…  By studying the electrical fields registered at the arrival of the object and by grouping all of the testimonies of the inhabitants of the region, the scholars were able to determine that, before “exploding”, “the object” of the Tunguska had changed direction several times in flight.  This singularity and the fact that no observation station throughout the world had registered the passage of a meteorite or a comet permits us to assure that the object which flew over the Central Siberian taiga on 30 June 1908 was a flying apparatus, of extra-terrestrial origin, piloted or teleguided by intelligent creatures.

The nature of the explosion and the traces left by the cosmic ship lead us to believe, as well, that it was propulsed by an anti-matter motor…

***

To be continued.

The UFO enigma

This remarkable photo of an UFO was taken in 1969 near San Jose, Argentina.

When on this morning, Evenki left his hut made of logs of silver birch, he noticed with pleasure that Summer had at last fully arrived.  It was already the 30 June and he therefore had only six weeks to verify his traps, cut down a few trees and dig the soil to build a palissade.  Then a long Winter of ten months would again fall upon the taiga, petrifying the ground and the marshes at a depth of several metres…  For a long moment, he watched his five reindeer grazing in their enclosure, then went towards a small shed which contained a meager fodder of dried grasses and lichen.  It was exactly 7:02.  Just as he was entering it, Evenki the Hunter was struck by a shaft of light more brilliant than ten suns.  He shaded his eyes and was able to understand that the terrible brightness was coming from an object which was moving very fast, obliquely to the line of the horizon.  Terrified, he clung to the doorpost and then saw an enormous sphere, which was throwing out incandescent matters, bounce above the trees of the taiga.  Then he heard a sound like crushed metal immediately followed by a formidable deflagration.  The ground, beneath him, began to dance and, before falling to his knees, he saw forming above his house an enormous cloud which rapidly took the form of a mushroom…

In the neighbouring town of Vanovara, around one hundred inhabitants of this isolated corner of Central Siberia watched, appalled, the same spectacle.  The noise of the explosion was heard as far as Kansk, 800 kilometres from there.  A mechanic who was driving a freight train stopped his convoy in a hurry and jumped from the locomotive thinking that one of the wagons had just exploded.  Over all of the Tunguska Taiga there was a tempest which lifted the rooves of the isbas and smashed through doors and windows.  Great waves went to beat against the banks of the Agara River, so strongly that enormous floating trunks were thrown up onto dry ground while strange, yellow-green clouds began to form in the sky.  A. Polkanov, from the Academy of Science of Saint Petersbourg, who was in Siberia on this 30 June 1908, saw that they rapidly took on a reddish pink tinge, and seismographs in Iena, Irkutsk and most of Western Europe’s big cities registered quakes of great amplitude.  In Paris and London, it was possible, for three consecutive nights, to read at night without the help of any light, and in Moscow, the light which was falling from the nocturnal sky was so strong that it was possible to take photographs.

On 30 June 1908, in Central Siberia, a 200 square kilometre region was devastated by the explosion of a mysterious, enflamed sphere.

When the consequences of this phenomenon were wholly known – which took years – it was noticed that the flaming sphere had completely ravaged a region of 200 square kilometres and destroyed more than ten million trees…

To the questions coming from all over the world, the Russian scholars of the epoch answered that it was a meteorite of very big dimension which had fallen to Earth.

In 1921, Leonid Kulik, attached to the Meteorological Institute of Russia, published a communication on what the inhabitants of this region of Siberia called “the miracle of the Tunguska”.  Kulik’s scientific formation is only that of an autodidact, but what he reveals then, appears so important, that the Soviets, who have been in power for five years, decide to consecrate the first post-Revolutionary scientific expedition to it.  It is Kulik who leads it, but with such reduced means that he takes months to arrive at the base of the Chakorma Mountains, beyond which it is presumed that the “meteorite” had crashed.  With its mosquitoes and its marshes, interspersed with steep hills falling into deep ravines, this region is even more inaccessible than the farthest reaches of Matto Grosso.  Summer only lasts a few weeks and, for several months of the year, temperatures of minus 60 degrees Centigrade are frequent there…

Ill, exhausted and above all discouraged, Kulik’s companions abandon in view of Vanovara.  The engineer continues alone, accompanied by a Tunguse guide, who soon gives increasing signs of worry:  he is shamanist, and assures that he will go no farther, the god who descended on the Tunguska in 1908 will kill him.  All the same, he accompanies Kulik onto the summit of the Chakorma Mountains and, after a last exhausting stage, the engineer discovers at his feet an unbelievable spectacle:  the vast expanse that his eyes embrace seems to have been laminated by a gigantic sledge hammer, flattening millions of giant pines, poplars, larches, leaving only a few trunks cut half-way up, on the edge of a vast cuvette, that Kulik, extenuated and abandoned by his guide, can only glimpse this time.

It is only the following Spring, in 1928, after having spent Winter in a little village situated 60 kilometres from there, that the engineer and a few assistants who have come from Moscow to help him, are able to penetrate inside the devastated perimeter…

Through an incredible tangle of trees and shoots ripped out by the roots, he arrives at the centre of a vast, denuded clearing, delimited by a circle of smashed trees whose roots are all pointing toward a common centre.  There is no doubt, this is the epicentre of a terrifying explosion.  Kulik falls to his knees like Evenki the Hunter twenty years before, but in a very different frame of mind:  he swears to consecrate whatever strength and life is left to him to find the solution to the mystery…

What mystery?  Hadn’t the Russian scholars given the explanation for the phenomenon, due to the falling of a meteorite of great size?

Eight months before, when Kulik had arrived for the first time in view of the site where the object had fallen, he had been troubled by the fact that no excavation was visible, either near or faraway.  Any meteorite falling to Earth produces a crater whose dimensions are in proportion with its weight, one of the biggest being the one in Arizona which is more than 150 metres deep and two kilometres wide…

Kulik and his companions scoured the vast region for days, wherever the phenomenon’s effects were visible, but found no hole in the ground, nor any projection of stones, as should have been the case for an aerolith which could not have weighed less than a few hundred million tonnes.  He concluded that the waters of the surrounding marshlands had filled the crater which had formed at the epicentre of the explosion, and that pieces of the object must be about twenty metres under the surface of the frozen ground, covered by a layer of water, or rather ice, which only melted for a few weeks every year.  He was nonetheless very troubled at not having been able to find the slightest solid particle coming from a stone from Space, after several weeks of searching…

To be continued.

Death of a Tree

Cover of the invitation to the opening of the exhibition.

On Friday, the tree outside my fence was massacred.  The people who did it were laughing while they lopped and chopped.  I could hear the branches hitting the ground and was very distressed because it reminded me of something similar which had happened in France.  The tree was across the road from my apartment.  There were three of them and that part of the municipal hospital was named after them.

Something strange happened to me while the tree was being slaughtered.  I couldn’t watch but, along with the dreadful noise of the machine and the voices of the men, I could “hear” the tree screaming and feel its fear.  At the same time, I could feel the waves of love coming from the other two trees as they tried to comfort it.  I was sobbing with them.  It was an extraordinary connection with the trees but it is not one that I ever want to renew.  At least, not in those circumstances.

A few months later, an Art exhibition on the theme of “Trees” called, ironically, Une envie d’arbre en vie [Wanting a tree alive], from a poem by Pierre-Hugues Robieux, was held and I decided to add a text about this dreadful experience to the others that I had prepared for the opening of the exhibition.  Naturally, it was in French, so I have translated it.  It is not really a poem.  I am an actress and I often write texts in lines like poems because it helps me with my interpretation.  I have kept the same lay-out as the original.  However, bear in mind that this is only a translation.  The original is better.

Pierre-Hugues Robieux' poem (which he dashed off in slightly under three minutes, right before my eyes - so much talent is unfair to the rest of us).

I started to cry before it was finished and there was deathly silence afterwards.  The Mayor and several Councillors were present and nobody dared to applaud.  Only one of the artists, a sculptor, had the courage to step up to me and say sympathetically, “You feel everything, don’t you?”  The answer to that is unfortunately yes, I do.  “And in Spring, too.”  He shook his head.  The Mayor swooped on me, babbling several times, “It’s not true!”  just like a little boy.

The papers did not mention “the incident” but there were references to my words, including this text.  The scandal was minor and I included the text in the closing reception.  This time the Mayor wasn’t there and it was applauded.

 

Death of a Tree

*

It’s dead.

They killed it.

They chopped off its branches one after the other.

The tree was screaming.

They heard nothing.

They were joking, telling each other funny stories between blows from the chainsaw.

The tree’s brothers were crying with it.

They were sending it waves of love to support it in its ordeal.

***

It was Spring.

The birds had barely started their nests.

The leaves were of that tender green of renewal.

***

The men and their noisy machines massacred the old oak.

At noon, tired, they left for lunch, leaving the trunk of bleeding stumps standing in the sun,

Its sliced branches spread out at its foot.

***

In the afternoon, refreshed, the executioners came back to cut down the trunk and chop it up.

Oblivious.

They are paid to do it.

To obey, no questions asked.

***

Today, it’s Summer.

The birds of the two other oaks have squeezed their brethren from the dead tree in with them.

Sometimes, quarrels erupt;  they have less room.

The cars, which used to park in the shade of the missing tree,

Have pulled back to the parking lot outside the kitchen at the hospital.

In full sunlight.

***

There are only two oaks left

At Three Oaks Domain.

But not to worry!

“They” do not intend to change its name!

***

Perhaps, in the future, when our grown-up grandchildren are puzzled by this name,

We shall evoke again the third oak,

Sacrificed for a roundabout.

***

There is an epilogue to this story.  A few months after this exhibition, I was called to Australia, where my mother was dying.  In 2005, having bought a house here, I popped back to France to organize the move.  Upon opening my shutters, the first thing that I saw was a young oak tree, recently planted on the other side of the road near the roundabout.  I know that there had been no plans to replace the murdered oak before I read my text, so I conclude that I had some influence on it.

While writing my letter of resignation from various municipal commissions, I thanked the Council for planting the oak and hoped that it would be a reminder of my dozen years in their town.

I like to think that the little oak hasn’t died and is strongly growing, despite the trucks that rumble past it to deliver supplies to the hospital.

Invitation to the exhibition. My name is not with the poets because I was exhibiting as well, so I'm in with the visual artists.

John of Jerusalem – Prophecy Number 11

11

 

When the Year Thousand that comes after Year Thousand begins

Man will make mechandise of everything

Everything will have its price

Trees, water and animals

Nothing more will be given and everything will be sold.

 

But then Man will be no more than his weight of flesh

His body will be bartered like a side of meat

They will take his eye and his heart

Nothing will be sacred, neither his life nor his soul

They will compete for his dead body and his blood

Like a dead animal to be cut up.

 

This prophecy is very clear.  A price has been put on everything, including those things which, in the past, were freely available to everyone, rich or poor.

Where there is still free-flowing fresh water, governments are damming it or re-directing it, so that they can sell it.  People who relied on it now have to pay for it.

Trees are seen only as merchandise.  They are no longer respected for their role in the ecological harmony of the planet, in spite of warnings from experts.  If money can’t be made from them, they have no value.  The same can be said of animals.

The logical result of this is that Man’s body parts are now being seen as a source of profit in some countries, where people are even kidnapped and killed to provide organs for those willing to pay for them.  Once again, scientific advances are being misused just to make money.

Twelfth prophecy tomorrow.