This happened over the Nyandoma forest massif in the Vologda region in 1946.
On a large four-engine Pe-8 airplane, we were returning from a long ice reconnaissance in the Arctic basin.
In the navigator's cabin at the front of the aircraft, Hero of Socialist Labor, first-class navigator N. Zubov was on watch. I, as the chief navigator of polar aviation, was checking his actions on this flight to extend his highest-class pilot's certificate and was sitting on the left side seat, three meters behind Zubov. The pilot's cabin was on the second floor, far behind the navigator's cabin. There, the commander of the aircraft, Hero of the Soviet Union V. Zadkov, and the second pilot N. Samokhin were located. Both were excellent masters of piloting in any weather conditions. Below them, at the open entrance to our cabin, was the radio operator, a true sniper of the airwaves, Hero of Socialist Labor O. Kuksin.
The flight in the clouds at an altitude of 11,200 meters was calm, without shaking or turbulence. The temperature outside was -14°C. The rigid antennas and the sides of the airplane were covered with a gray frost of light icing.
— Do you think we should change altitude? — Zubov asked.
— The icing is weak, and in an hour we will receive a command to switch to visual flight. Prepare a signal rocket for exiting the clouds. By the way, what color is it now?
— White, chief, — he reported with an understandable note of irony.
Suddenly, a blindingly white ball flared up at Zubov's head level and hung, pulsating and swaying.
— Navigator! What are you doing?! Don't you know how to handle a rocket launcher? — I shouted, but immediately realized that there had been no shot. "Ball lightning," the guess flashed. "But where from? How could it get into the airplane cabin? It's winter, no signs of thunderstorms according to weather forecasts or the actual weather conditions along the route."
Meanwhile, the fiery ball smoothly moved along the left wall of the aircraft toward me. Squinting from the sharp, painful light, I instinctively pressed against the wall, clutching a navigation ruler in my hand. "Hit it, smash it with the ruler," the thought flashed. "It's celluloid, an insulator..."
And the devilish ball, approaching my face, froze, still pulsating and swaying. Now it was only 30-40 cm away. I didn't feel any warmth, but I clearly sensed a slight tingling at the top of my head. A sharp smell of ozone filled the air. "Hit it or not? What if it explodes from the hit, like it did in the Far East, in Mogochi? But that was on the ground, and the ball was about four meters away." My muscles tensed, an unpleasant chill ran down my spine. But then the ball, changing color to a greenish hue, started to quietly float away.
Without moving, only with my eyes, I followed its movement. Descending, it headed to the hatch leading from the navigator's cabin to the radio room. There, the radio operator was working. Through the low and narrow passage from my seat, only his feet in fur boots were visible.
— Oleg! Turn off the transmitter! — snapping out of my stupor, I shouted into the laryngophone, as I knew that the contours of working radio stations attract lightning. But at that moment, the ball, rolling under the radio operator's seat, exploded with a terrible bang. Blinding sparks of fire engulfed Oleg. Black, acrid smoke filled the cabin, communication ceased, and no one from the crew responded to my calls. Then I broke through the smoke to the second floor into the pilot's cabin.
— Emergency descent immediately! The height of obstacles below the clouds is 240 meters.
— What's happened? Why is there a fire? — coughing from the smoke, Zadkov gasped for air from the open side window.
— Ball lightning!
— But it's winter! Minus fourteen... — Zadkov put the plane into a steep descent: there were no parachutes on board, it wasn't standard. The ground was both a savior and an enemy.
Below, the flames were already being extinguished from the burning skin. I headed there.
— Oleg, are you alive?
— Some kind of wild short circuit, the main radio and internal communication are out of order, — he hastily explained. We started fighting the fire together. Finally, we subdued the fire, the smoke dissipated.
— Wow, my seat is so mangled, — said Oleg, fiddling with the radio, — even the legs are melted! I don't understand why it short-circuited.
— Ball lightning exploded under you. Check the internal communication fuses.
— Lightning? Where could it come from? The airwaves were calm, no crackling in the headphones — the sure sign of an approaching thunderstorm. — He was tinkering with the electrical equipment distribution panel, replacing the burnt fuses. — Communication is restored. You can talk.
I returned to the navigator's cabin and connected to the intercom socket.
— Commander, the fire is extinguished. Altitude is four hundred, the ground is not visible.
— Got it, — Zadkov replied. Everything calmed down on board. The four engines hummed rhythmically.
Zubov took his seat, pulled out the rocket launcher, and removed the unused rocket. — Sorry, Nikolai, but it would have been better if you fired than this celestial guest.
Soon, the ground control asked why we made an emergency descent. We replied that ball lightning had entered the navigator's cabin, caused a fire in the radio operator's room, and disabled the main radio. The crew was unharmed, the fire was extinguished, and everything on board was normal. After some hesitation, ground control responded:
— Climb to 1200 meters. Proceed to your airfield... Be careful.
At an altitude of 1100 meters, the cloud cover ended, and the rays of the cold winter sun illuminated the navigator's cabin. I carefully inspected it. All windows and hatches were tightly closed, not a single gap. Even the small hole where the rocket launcher barrel is inserted was closed. I contacted the pilots.
— Did you see anything before the lightning exploded?
— Flying blind, by instruments, — Zadkov replied. — Couldn't afford to be distracted.
— And you? — I asked the second pilot.
— A bright white ball appeared on the right wingtip at the green running light. I thought it was a short circuit of the electric lamp, but the ball didn't go out; it slowly crawled along the leading edge of the wing and disappeared under the nose of the plane. I didn't have time to say anything before the explosion occurred, and smoke poured into our cabin, and communication was cut off.
— Nikolai, did you notice where it came from?
— I took the rocket launcher to check the color of the signal rocket, but didn't have time to open it when a blinding white ball flared up at my head level. It, like the eye of the devil, stared into my face, then floated towards you. The rest you saw. I also thought, maybe the rocket spontaneously exploded? You know, I've been flying for thirty years, and this is the first time I've seen this.
On the ground, I've seen ball lightning, but in flight, in a closed airplane cabin, never! I had the impression that this ball, before exploding, carefully examined and after some "thought" headed towards the radio operator, or rather, to the output antenna. But why not immediately? Why did it pass by the rigid antennas? So much is unknown about this phenomenon! And scientists still cannot confidently, worthy of their title, explain the origin of ball lightning. Only hypotheses...```html
There was no more than an hour of flight left to Moscow. There were intermediate airfields along the way, but their sizes did not suit our giant, and besides, all the systems were functioning normally. The failed long-wave transmitter was replaced with a short-wave one. And yet, there was an uneasy feeling. Unwittingly, we glanced at the sealed portholes, looked at the aircraft's wings, at the rigid antennas, expecting another intrusion. Absurd thoughts entered our minds, but the main thing was that we could not understand: how did the fireball get into the cabin? At that time, no one talked about "flying saucers" or, as they are now called, UFOs, and we did not think about visits from extraterrestrials. But we clearly saw one thing: the actions of the brightly glowing orb were incomprehensible and inexplicable; there was something threatening, unearthly, and illogical about them.
I had observed ball lightning before. On the ground, they usually appeared either before a thunderstorm front or, less often, in zones of intra-mass thunderstorms. Once, at the command post of the Mogochinsky airfield, when after a thunderstorm with a downpour and flashes of linear lightning the sun came out, we opened the windows. Suddenly, we saw a dazzling white ball fly in through the open upper part of the window. It hung over the windowsill for a moment, then silently, swaying from side to side, moved towards a two-bell telephone in a wooden case. The device hung three to four meters from the window. Our group, the crew of the R-5 aerial photography plane, was at the same distance from it. The ball floated through the air to the phone and hovered over its nickel-plated bell cups, almost touching them, then rising 10-15 cm upwards. Its color changed from white to pale blue.
— Ball lightning! — shouted our aerial photographer K. Konstantinov, and, grabbing a hefty book, threw it at the shiny ball. There was a loud explosion. The room filled with smoke, and a sharp smell of burning and ozone. We rushed to the doors but then returned. There was no fire in the room, and the phone was no longer on the wall. The table, stools, and large bench were overturned. Melted parts of the phone and the inductor, ejected from the charred case, lay on the floor. None of us were injured.
— Comrade chief navigator, — Zubov interrupted my memories, — twenty minutes to Moscow. After landing, they ask to taxi to the terminal.
On the ground, I asked the meteorologist if any thunderstorms had been observed in the Nyandoma area.
— No signs. It was a typical warm front. There were no thunderstorms in the south of the country either, after all, it’s February! — the meteorologist replied.
Since then, I began to take an interest in everything concerning the phenomenon of ball lightning and became acquainted with many cases of its appearance. One of them, particularly terrible and mysterious, happened to our climbers on August 17, 1978, in the mountains of the Western Caucasus, when a group of five people was descending from the summit of Mount Trapezia and stopped for the night at an altitude of 3900 meters. Here’s what I heard from the master of sports of international class in mountaineering, V. Kavunenko, when I visited him in the hospital.
“I woke up with the strange feeling that someone else had entered the tent. I stuck my head out of the bag and froze. At a height of about a meter from the floor, a bright yellow ball the size of a tennis ball was floating. ‘What is that?’ I thought, and at that moment, the ball disappeared into Korovin's sleeping bag. There was a wild scream, the ‘ball’ jumped out of his bag, and began to hover over the others, disappearing alternately into one, then another. When the ball burned through my bag, I felt hellish pain, as if several welding machines were burning me, and I lost consciousness.
After some time, coming to my senses, I saw the same yellow ball methodically, observing an order known only to it, penetrating the bags, each such visit causing a desperate, inhuman scream. This repeated several times. It was some kind of horror. When I came to my senses again, it seemed for the fifth or sixth time, the ball was no longer in the tent. I could not move either my arms or legs. My body burned, it had all turned into a center of fire. Then I lost consciousness again... No one noticed where the ball disappeared to.
In the hospital, where we were delivered by helicopter, they counted seven wounds on me. They were not burns: simply pieces of muscle had been torn out to the bone. The same was true of my friends Shingiev, Kaprov, and Bashkirov. But the ball killed Oleg Korovin, perhaps because his bag lay on a rubber mattress and was isolated from the ground.
In our tent — and it was closed — there was a radio, carabiners, and ice axes. But the ball lightning did not touch any metal objects, disfiguring only people. It was a strange visitor. It seemed to consciously, maliciously, like a real sadist, burn us, subjecting us to terrible torture, but killed only Oleg. And why were there no traces of burns on anyone? The entry holes in the bags were no larger than a tennis ball, but our wounds reached 15-16 centimeters in size.”
I asked Kavunenko about signs of a thunderstorm, if he had seen any lightning flashes.
— No, it was cloudy, but there were no signs of a thunderstorm or lightning. It was not ball lightning at all, — the experienced mountaineer insisted.
— What was it then?
— I don’t know. Something else. I have seen ball lightning many times. It appears and quickly disappears, but this fiery beast tormented us for a long time. We lay there, unable to defend ourselves, as if paralyzed...
No matter how many scientific hypotheses about the origin of ball lightning I read, none of them explained its strange behavior to the end.
VALENTIN AKKURATOV, Honored Navigator of the USSR
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