Tag Archives | Soviet Union

Former KGB Officer Describes The Soviet Union’s Secret UFO Studies

By on April 16, 2013 in News 0

soviet ufoThe earthly or extraterrestrial origin of the UFOs was never determined, but some military officials  believed they knew how to summon them, Russia Beyond the Headlines writes:

The Soviet Union took UFOs seriously. The KGB and the Soviet Defense Ministry had dedicated units collecting and analysing information about paranormal activity. Military experts even claimed to know how to “summon” UFOs and make contact with them.

The source for this is a retired FSB major general and researcher, Vasily Yeremenko. Yeremenko was in charge of the KGB division overseeing the air force and aircraft manufacturing. This division was entrusted with the task of collecting all reports of UFO sightings.

[In the 1970s], as Yeremenko told RBTH, there had been an accumulation of reports on numerous paranormal incidents. Missile Troops units were even instructed on how to behave in the event that they spotted a UFO: the main thing was not to act in a way that could create an opportunity for a retaliatory aggression.

… Read the rest

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Lake Karachay: The Most Toxic Place On Earth

By on October 3, 2012 in News 9

Basement Geographer on a lake in the Russian mountains which may be the single most concentrated spot of environmental desecration:

Imagine a lake so polluted and contaminated that spending just an hour on its shores would result in certain death, and the only way seen fit to deal with it is to fill the entire water body with concrete blocks to keep the toxic soil underneath from moving onshore. That lake is Lake Karachay in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast, and it is considered by many to be the most polluted place on the planet.

Lake Karachay lies within the Mayak Production Association, one of Russia’s largest and oldest nuclear facilities and a major source of plutonium during the Soviet era. Built immediately following World War II, Mayak has been the site of numerous nuclear-related accidents throughout its history, some approaching the size of the Chernobyl meltdown but far more concentrated.

Statistics reveal that by the 1990s, there had been a 21% increase in the incidences of cancer, a 25% increase in birth defects, a 41% increase in leukaemia, and a rendering of 50% of the population of child bearing age sterile in the Mayak region.

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The Soviet Synthesizer That Bridged Electronic Music And The Occult

By on July 3, 2012 in News 17

Boing Boing on a bizarre, pioneering musical instrument, suppressed in its day, which built on occultist concepts and attempted to unify the senses:

You don’t play the ANS synthesizer with a keyboard. Instead you etch images onto glass sheets covered in black putty and feed them into a machine that shines light through the etchings, trigging a wide range of tones. It’s a nearly forgotten Russian synthesizer designed by Evgeny Murzin in 1938. The synth was named after and dedicated to the experimental composer and occultist Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872–1915).

Today it sits behind a rope at the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture, almost forgotten and seldom used. A few artists have recorded albums with it over the years, mostly notably the late occultists/electronic musicians Coil who traveled to Russia in 2002:

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The Last Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on the Moon in 1976

By on May 31, 2012 in News 0

Moon Landing MapCold War politics. Via the Technology Review’s Physics arXiv Blog:

The last Soviet mission to the moon, Luna-24, returned to Earth with water-rich rocks from beneath the lunar surface. But the West ignored the result.

The possibility of water on the moon has excited scientists and science fiction fans for decades. If we ever decide to maintain a human presence on the moon, clear evidence of water will be an important factor in the decision.

In recent years, that evidence has begun to mount. The data comes from several sources. First there was the pioneering Clementine mission in 1994, America’s first return to the moon in twenty years. Clementine looked for water by bouncing radio waves off the surface—the returns giving a strong indication that water ice must lie beneath the surface…

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