The UFOs of Lake Baikal

These days, it seems you can't toss your tinfoil hat in the air without hitting 20 or 30 UFO stories.

That's why I find myself drawn more to the truly strange accounts...even if they are less likely to pan out. I suppose that's somewhat antithetical to a pursuit of the truth, but I can occasionally hypocritize myself, can't I? Then again, my attraction might be to the sheer entertainment value. But I digress...

Anyway, I heard an episode of Coast-to-Coast AM last May, just before my "long dark teatime of the soul," that covered Russian USOs.  As I've blogged before, USO stands for Unidentified Submersible Object. Same thing as a UFO, but undersea. On this edition of C2C, UFO researcher Paul Stonehill was joined by Richard Dolan to discuss once-secret files from the former Soviet Union that allegedly contain details of interactions between the Russian Navy and USOs. These include accounts of naval forces tracking objects moving underwater at tremendous speeds as well as an account from Soviet Naval Intelligence of a large, cylindrical object sighted above the Pacific that broke apart into smaller pieces and then submerged beneath the waves before returning to the cylinder.

Most interesting of all was a mention of Lake Baikal and the "9-foot tall humanoids" that are said the inhabit its depths. Lake Baikal is located in Siberia and it is the deepest freshwater lake in the world, so that piqued my interest. I went googling and found this link. It quotes Vladimir Azhazha, a former Soviet Naval Intelligence Officer turned UFO researcher, as saying that the navy divers were training in the lake in 1982 when they detected several "bizarrely shaped craft" (oh how I wish either the site or Azhazha would have elaborated on that) moving at high speeds, faster than anything in either the Soviet or U.S. inventory. It gets better. These said divers then encountered a "squad" of silver-suited humanoids in depths. This resulted in the deaths of three divers and the severe injury of the other four. The site also seems to get quite excited over NASA photographs that show cracks and melting of winter ice on the lake that appear in saucer shapes.

I'm going with natural phenomenon on that one but why buzzkill a cool story, bro?

Additionally, an airliner crashed in Lake Baikal in 1958. It was said to have been pursued by a UFO just before crashing. There had also been numerous UFO sightings in the area before the incident.

Another quote in the article from Azhazha:

“I THINK ABOUT UNDERWATER BASES AND SAY: WHY NOT? NOTHING SHOULD BE DISCARDED. SKEPTICISM IS THE EASIEST WAY: BELIEVE NOTHING, DO NOTHING. PEOPLE RARELY VISIT GREAT DEPTHS. SO IT’S VERY IMPORTANT TO ANALYZE WHAT THEY ENCOUNTER THERE.”
  
In a way, I agree with his point. The deepest depths of our oceans and lakes are largely unexplored. Just refer to that old chestnut, "We know more about outer space than we do about the bottoms of our own oceans." Or something like that. If aliens wished to hide and operate undetected or if there were another humanoid civilization on Earth divergent from humans, underwater is the place for both to be. Who knows what is down there? I highly doubt it's either of the two evidence-challenged prospects I just mentioned, but there are genuine unknowns in our seas and stories like the above are symbolic of that fact.

One other point from the Cryptopia article that tickled my imagination: Lake Baikal has also been host to several sightings of a supposed lake monster. The author of the article muses that this "monster" might be connected to the presence of aliens. It may serve as a "guard dog" for their underwater base.

Oh boy, is this great.

I'm going to do more research on Lake Baikal when time allows. Head to ESE on Facebook, give it a "like," and watch for the updates.

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