The Dalnegorsk UFO Crash of 1986
By Paul Stonehill and Philip Mantle
“Out of the corner of my eye I saw something that fell on the mountain. There was an indistinct impact, not reverberating, but quite strong. The noise of the impact lasted less than a second. There was an explosion, and large reddish-white flames. It seemed something was engulfed in powerful fire. The sphere was approximately one meter in diameter. The fire roared. I observed all of it for about 5 minutes. The fire burned for 1 to 2 minutes, and then stopped.”
Source: Inoplanetyane v Moskve article, published in Lipetskaya Nedelya newspaper, issue dated April 7, 2004.
Dalnegorsk
The Primorsky Krai region occupies the South Eastern extremity of Russia. Primorsky means “maritime” in Russian, therefore the region is sometimes referred to as Maritime Province. Primorsky Krai is bordered by China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan. The picturesque town of Dalnegorsk (a former mining settlement) is located in the Primorsky Krai, in a narrow valley by the Rudnaya River, surrounded on all sides by forests and hills. These hills are also riddled with a number of deep caves.
International fame came to Dalnegorsk in 1986, on January 29; at 7:55 p.m. to be precise. Some have called the event that occurred there on that winters night the Roswell Incident of the Soviet Union.
That cold January day an orange-reddish sphere flew over this town from the southeast, crossed part of Dalnegorsk, and crashed at the Izvestkovaya (Lime) Mountain; also known as Height or Hill 611, because of its size. The object flew noiselessly and parallel to the ground. Its shape was described of being near perfectly round with no projections, wings or windows and its color was similar to that of burnished stainless steel.
The Crash
Some local witnesses at the time assumed it was a meteorite, while others thought it was something quite out of the ordinary.
One eyewitness, Yevgeny Serebrov, a schoolboy at the time (nowadays he’s a scientist), mentioned that the object had neither tail nor trail behind it. There was no explosion, only a powerful impact when it hit the mountain. Scientists, who arrived later in Dalnegorsk from Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, used a chronometer to determine that the object moved at 15 meters per second. They told Yevgeny and other boys that meteorites and fragments of rockets cannot fly in such fashion. Source: Shariki iz parallel’nogo mira, article by N. Leskova, published in a Russian newspaper Trud (Moscow), January 17, 2003.
Duration of the Fire
V. Korotko, editor of the local newspaper Trudovoye Slovo, was near the mountain during the crash of this mysterious object. He stated that a small fire broke out at the impact site but that it burned for only a short while.
Height 611 is located across from a local bus station (avtovokzal).V Kondakov, a local mechanic, was at the bus station at the moment the sphere flew over the town. He said the sphere was flying so low that it seemed it would cut off part of the chimney of Dalnopolimetall industrial enterprise. It was round, without any protrusions or holes. It seemingly was made from metal, and its color resembled slightly incandescent stainless steel. Kondakov thought the sphere a shell, a projectile. He did not hear any noises. Kondakov observed how the object crashed down on the hill, but heard no sounds of the impact. The ground at the site of the impact began to burn.
According to Mikhail Gershtein, Russia’s top UFO researcher and author of numerous books about ufology and paranormal phenomena, many eyewitnesses compared the fire burning at the site to electrical welding. The extent of the fire was alternatively described as one to two minutes, about an hour, or even late into the night.
Recovery of the Fragments
On February 2, 1986 a parent of one of the children that observed the crash, accompanied by an adult and some schoolchildren, made an excursion to the site. They found a burned tree stump, a hollow that was not deep, and branches that seemed to have been cut off the tree by the object as it descended. There were no large fragments of material like that of an airplane crash.
They collected, very methodically, melted drops of some substance that had a metallic tint, rocks, and a piece of the tree stump. They took everything to the local museum of regional studies. Its director was Valeri Viktorovich Dvuzhilni. The drops resembled soft metal. Several various acids were used on them, but there was no reaction. Then they decided to obtain further scientific opinion from V. Berlizov, a local expert, and a member of the 1947 scientific expedition to the site of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite. V. Dvuzhilni wanted an expert opinion on what this material could be. Source: Dalnegorskaya zagazka, article by S. Glukhov and V. Popov, published in Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya newspaper, issue dated April 5, 1986.
There was no quick reply from the experts, and Dvuzhilni decided to use the other means at his disposal. His group was able to climb the mountain three days after the crash. The UFO, Dvuzhilni told Soviet journalists from Magadansky Komsomolets, broke off a terrace of the rock, about two cubic meters of it, and 10 square meters of snow had ‘evaporated’ at the site. The vegetation had been burnt away and the ground seemed to have been burnt as well.
The newspaper revealed that the team found magnetized fragments of silicic shale. Can you imagine a brick that attracts metal? High temperatures annul magnetism, but in this case it was quite the contrary. This, mentioned Dvuzhilni, once more confirmed that it was not a ball lightning or a plasmoid that arrived in Height 611, but a UFO. Source: Puteshevstviye v Dal’negorsk article, author A. Molchanov published in Magadansky Komsomolets newspaper, issue dated June 24, 1990.
The team was amazed that the area burned by fire was strictly defined, as if separated. A rhododendron bush growing at the very edge of the area burned to ashes remained absolutely untouched by fire. But the rock, composed of light brown silica shale, cracked and fissures were formed, and it turned black as coal. A thin layer of soil was mixed with ashes. Careful examination of the site turned up some thirty grams of an unusual substance. It consisted of solidified droplets of dark colors. Most droplets were tiny, from half a millimeter to two millimeters in diameter, and some were larger, from three to five millimeters.
Dvuzhilni contacted the laboratory of Bor and Dalnopolimetall industrial enterprises. The analyses performed there revealed that smaller droplets consisted of an incredible alloy of lead, and it contained up to 17 elements of the Mendeleev Table.
Large-sized droplets turned out to be compounds of chromium, nickel, and aluminum. Only a diamond saw blade was able to cut through them. Another incongruity was revealed: the alloy of metals had to have crystalline structure but was actually amorphous, like soap. Such amorphous metals can be produced in laboratory settings (using liquid helium to cool melted extremely hot metal), but the crash took place on a naked rocky mountainside.
Analyses of Recovered Objects
The objects collected at the site were later dubbed as “tiny nets” or “mesh), “little balls,” “lead balls,” “and glass pieces” (that is what each resembled). Closer examination revealed very unusual properties. One of the “tiny nets” contained torn and very thin (17 micrometers) threads. Each of the threads consisted of even thinner fibers, tied up in plaits. Intertwined with the fibers were very thin gold wires.
The study of the droplets determined that the distance between atoms in the crystalline array of metal balls was 3.84 angstroms, not the usual 3.86 angstroms, as is usual in metal. Most of all the specialists were amazed by items which were dubbed “net” (“mesh”). They were composed of amorphous carbon. The rare earth atoms there were distanced from each other. Scientists calculated 18 elements in the “net”. The gold content of the “net” was equivalent to 1100 gram per ton (only 4 grams per ton are needed for industrial exploitation of ore-deposit); and silver content was equivalent to 3100 grams per ton. Using electronic microscopes, scientists discovered that the surface of the “net” contained quartz threads of 17 microns in thickness. The threads intertwined and tied together into a precise cord. One of the threads revealed a sort of golden section: an extremely thin gold line somehow placed in the very middle of the “net”.
