Message #19165

[Bianca]

There is a host of tales from people who came across similar constructions by accident, but without precise directions it is extremely difficult to find these again in the depressingly monotonous terrain.
Once some old men said that flowing in the place called Tong Duurai is a stream called Ottoamokh ("holes in the ground") and that around it there are incredibly deep openings known as "the laughing chasms". That same name also crops up in legends that state that this is the dwelling of a fiery giant who destroys everything around. Roughly every six or seven centuries, a monstrous "fireball" bursts out from there and it either flies off somewhere into the distance and (judging by the chronicles and legends of other peoples) explodes there, or it explodes directly above its exit point—as a result of which, the area for hundreds of kilometres around has been reduced to a scorched desert with shattered rocks.
Yakut legends contain many references to explosions, fiery whirlwinds and blazing spheres rising into the air. And all those phenomena are somehow or other associated with the mysterious metal constructions found in the Valley of Death. Some of them are large, round, "iron houses" standing on numerous lateral supports. They have neither windows nor doors, only a "spacious manhole" at the top of the dome. Some of them have sunk almost completely into the permafrost, with only a barely noticeable arch-like protuberance remaining on the surface. Witnesses who are strangers to each other describe this "resounding metal house" in the same way. Other objects scattered across the area are the metallic hemispherical lids that cover something unknown. Yakut legends say that the mysterious blazing spheres are produced by "an orifice belching smoke and fire" with a "banging steel lid".

                                     

This is also the source for the fiery whirlwinds that from the descriptions sound very similar to the effects of present-day atomic explosions. Roughly a century before each explosion or series of explosions, a fast-flying fiery sphere emerged from the "iron orifice" and, without causing great damage, soared upwards in the form of a thin column of fire. At the top of this, a very large fireball appeared. Accompanied by four claps of thunder in succession, it soared to an even greater height and flew off, leaving behind a long "trail of smoke and fire". Then a cannonade of its explosions sounded in the distance...
In the 1950s, the Soviet military cast an eye over this area, evidently due to the exceptionally sparse population on its northern fringes, and conducted a series of atomic tests there. One of the explosions produced a great puzzle, and foreign specialists are still speculating about it. As the German radio station Deutsche Welle reported in September 1991 that, when a 10-kilogram nuclear device was being tested in 1954, for unknown reasons the size of the explosion exceeded the calculations by a factor of 2,000 to 3,000, reaching 20–30 megatons, as was registered by seismic laboratories around the world. The cause of such a significant discrepancy in the power of the explosion remained unclear. The newsagency TASS put out an announcement that a compact hydrogen bomb had been tested in airburst conditions, but it later emerged that this was incorrect. After the tests, restricted zones were established in the area and secret work was carried out for some years.