Summary
➡ A Russian UFO expert, Vladimir, shared a story about a mysterious incident involving divers at Lake Baikal, but the story’s reliability is questionable due to multiple layers of hearsay. Despite some intriguing NASA photos of the lake and numerous unexplained UFO stories from Russia, there’s no concrete evidence to support this particular tale. Russian officials have denied the incident and no declassified documents could be found to confirm it. While it’s an interesting story, it’s likely not true, but given the history of government disinformation, it can’t be completely ruled out.
Transcript
My name is Face, and welcome to Project Conspiracy. In the later days of the Soviet Union, its military would conduct periodic training of recon divers, who were also known as frogmen. The frogmen were part of the Soviet naval infantry and composed of highly trained and elite marines. And many of their training exercises would take place at Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal is located in southeastern Siberia in Russia, and the lake itself is a little bigger than Belgium. It’s a rift lake in a seismically active fault zone, and it’s the deepest lake in the world, with a maximum depth of over 1,600 meters and over 5,300 feet, over a mile.
Lake Baikal is also the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume, and contains about 1 fifth of the freshwater on Earth’s surface. It also has diverse plant and wildlife species, many of which can only be found at Lake Baikal. And some say that Soviet divers encountered unknown creatures in the lake. During the summer of 1982, some Soviet divers were performing standard training exercises at Lake Baikal when they witnessed huge underwater craft that moved at speeds the divers had never seen before. No contact was made at that time. But a few days later, a group of frogmen were on a training dive when they encountered mysterious underwater creatures, what are now known as the Lake Baikal Swimmers.
The appearance of the swimmers was human-like, or at least humanoid, except that they were about 3 meters or 10 feet tall. The encounter took place at a depth of 50 meters or 164 feet, where the water was very cold. But the swimmers didn’t have any recognizable diving equipment that would be expected at this depth. They wore only tight-fitting, silvery suits and sphere-like helmets that are said to look like an open umbrella being held over the creature’s heads. Despite this unusual and frightening encounter, the divers were able to surface and reported the incident to their higher-ups. One military commander was alarmed at the report and made a plan to capture one of the creatures.
He ordered a special group of seven divers back into the lake to try to catch one of the swimmers with a net. The divers were able to locate the creatures again and try to capture one as ordered. But that would be the last mistake several of the divers would ever make. When they tried to catch one of the creatures with a net, the entire team was rapidly propelled out of the deep waters to the surface by a powerful force, which some speculate was an advanced sonar wave weapon used by the creatures to defend themselves. Unfortunately, this rapid ascent from a 50-meter depth created a life-threatening situation for the divers.
The human body is very sensitive to pressure. The more serious and dangerous form of this is called decompression sickness, or the bends. As an oversimplified explanation, rapid ascent from depths like the Soviet divers’ rette messes with the gases inside the body and can cause bubbles to form. This can be extremely painful and even fatal. But it can be avoided by ascending gradually and making decompression stops to slowly reduce the excess pressure. Since the divers were forced to the surface so quickly, they didn’t have the chance to ascend safely. As a result, all seven of the frogmen suffered from this dangerous condition when they surfaced.
The only treatment that might keep them alive was immediate confinement in a pressure chamber. They had two pressure chambers in the area, but only one of them worked, and only two people could occupy that chamber at a time, so the local commanding officer had to choose who lived and died. He forced four frogmen into the pressure chamber at once. The three unfortunate divers who didn’t make it into the chamber died. The four who made it into the chamber lived, but their injuries were so severe that they became invalids. The tale of the Lake Baikal Swimmers has several different versions, most of which are generally consistent, but with slightly different details.
The story you just heard was compiled from about eight different sources in an effort to present my best judgment of the story’s accurate representation. But is it true? Well, the starting point for determining this story’s veracity is to try to find where it originally came from, and that process is going to require going down the rabbit hole. So the first place I ever saw this story was in a July 24, 2009 Wired article, and it didn’t say much about the incident. In fact, this singular paragraph is it. But the Wired article did credit Phil Ewing in a Navy time scoop deck blog with writing about this story as part of the Russian Navy’s 2009 declassification of records relating to Cold War UFO sightings.
I was able to track down Phil Ewing’s July 22, 2009 article using the Wayback Machine, and it was clear that this wasn’t the original source either. Ewing gave a hat tip, aka attribution or credit, to a Paranormal News Daily article published on the day before, on July 21st. The Paranormal News Daily linked to an article in a publication called Russia Today. Unfortunately, Russia Today wasn’t the original source either, but it’s based on an article from another publication on July 16, 2009. The name of that other publication translates to the Free Press. It’s an online publication that was founded in December 2008, about seven months before this article came out in July 2009.
The Free Press looks like an independent publication type of situation, and for some context, it appears to be an exclusively online publication. For what it’s worth, it didn’t make Wiki’s list of Russian newspapers. But as near as I can tell, this Free Press article appears to be the source for the modern circulation of this story, though it might not actually be the story’s origin. We’ll discuss that in a few minutes. Unfortunately, the Free Press is written entirely in Russian. As I’m sure you can probably guess, I’m one of those obnoxious, self-obsessed Americans who doesn’t know a liquor Russian, knit, and I’m okay with that.
So it looks like we’re at the mercy of Google Translate for this one, though I was able to find another translation made by an individual. The two translations didn’t match word for word, but they were substantively consistent with each other, so I think we have a good idea of what this article says. Let’s get into it. It begins by saying… So Vladimir Chernivan was definitely real, and might be the most Soviet-looking individual to ever exist. He served in the Soviet Navy for basically the entire Cold War, and was the last Commander-in-Chief of the Navy before the Soviet Union was dismantled.
He apparently really liked the sea. And if you’re liking this video so far, make sure to hit the like button. It’s the simplest and easiest way to support a small channel like this one. Anyways, the Free Press article claims that the materials gathered by the Special Investigation Group were recently declassified. And there are several different USO accounts reported by multiple Navy officers in the article, and the late-by-call swimmer’s encounter is discussed as well. If you want to check out the other stories, I’ll put the link to the article in the description. Another individual mentioned in the Free Press article was Captain First Rank Vladimir Zajja, who we’ll call Vladimir.
He gave some interesting stats, including that 50% of UFO sightings involved the ocean, and another 15% involved lakes. All of that said, we’ve got some issues with the late-by-call swimmer’s report in this Free Press article. The Free Press gave specific named Navy officers for several of the encounters described in the article, but not for the late-by-call swimmer’s story. And it wasn’t clear to me from reading the article who the story came from. That said, numerous online sources said the late-by-call swimmer’s report was disclosed by Vladimir, who we just discussed in the Free Press article. And if that’s true, we should probably get to know him a little better.
According to the Free Press, Vladimir was the former deputy head of the underwater research section of the Oceanographic Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences. What the Free Press forgot to mention was that Vladimir was also an avid UFO enthusiast and spent a large portion of his life studying them. So much so that he was actually on the editorial board of a magazine about UFOs and paranormal phenomenon, and he wrote books on the subject. He’s also a controversial figure in the UFO community. One source noted that he had been chastised for often making blatantly false claims about aliens.
Several sources said Vladimir claimed that when Neil Armstrong was on the moon, he relayed the message to Mission Control that two large, mysterious objects were watching them after having landed near the moon module. But this message was never heard by the public because NASA censored it. He thinks we landed on the moon. We’ll save that project for a different day. But at least one writer called Vladimir’s claim patently bogus, and he was apparently pretty active in the media around the time this Free Press article came out. In May 2008, he was quoted in an NBC article about a 1984 Minsk UFO sighting by a passenger jet.
Vladimir was referred to by the author as a quote, leading Russian UFO expert. And apparently, Vladimir had also independently written about the late Baikal Swimmers. As near as I can tell, his books are in Russian, and I don’t have an efficient way to translate them. But Brian Dunning, over at the Skeptoid podcast, wrote a great article discussing this that you can find online. I’ve only looked at Dunning’s work a few times, but it appears to be well researched and well-reasoned from what I can tell. In his UFO books, Ajaja reported that through his contacts in the UFO community, he heard about a story told by two Soviet diving trainers, Mark Steinberg and Gennady Zverev.
One day, their training exercise at Isikul Lake in Kyrgyzstan was visited by a senior officer, Major General Demyonenko. In a lecture to warn the men about the dangers of decompression, he told the story as having happened to another of his units that had been training at Lake Baikal at some unspecified date and place. Based on all this, I think we can say we have a reliability problem when it comes to the story’s source. We all know that the further away from the source a story gets, the less reliable it tends to be. In this situation, let’s assume that the Major General had personal knowledge of the Lake Baikal Swimmer incident.
Even so, he told the story to the two diving trainers who apparently had an unknown contact in the UFO community who allegedly told Vladimir. Maybe Vladimir was also able to confirm the story with another source, but I don’t have any information to indicate that. So if all this is true, that means we’re getting the story multiple layers away from anyone with personal knowledge. In the legal world, they’d call this multiple layers of hearsay, or hearsay within hearsay. That’s another way of saying, it’s possible that this story is true, but it’s probably too attenuated to really be reliable.
Also, if this Lake Baikal incident actually happened, I would imagine that it would be classified immediately. So it’s difficult to imagine that a Major General would use it as a teachable moment for other divers about the dangers of decompression, especially since the divers suffer their unfortunate fate due to simply just following orders. To all the Russian soldiers out there, the lesson here is don’t follow the orders of your superiors. Write that one down. But what about the Navy Special Investigation Group’s USO materials that were declassified? I searched high and low for these declassified materials and found absolutely nothing.
I also looked through the CIA records and couldn’t find anything, though I guess the US government could still have that classified. Let me know if I missed something, but Brian Dunning couldn’t track down any disclosed documents either. He said, I think that’s probably true, though I did find another tale that could, in theory, support the Lake Baikal swimmer story. It said that… For what it’s worth, I don’t have much reason to put a lot of stock in the veracity of this source. Do what you will with that. But it doesn’t help that Russian Navy officials have actually denied that the collection of UFO-related encounters exists.
Now, I may have been born yesterday, but I’ve lived the whole day. And I can’t imagine that the Russian government is being honest about that, but it does probably mean that they didn’t actually disclose anything in this instance. As more support for that, another source said that officials at the base the divers read have all denied the Lake Baikal swimmer’s account, calling it absolute nonsense, and said that there has never been a single death of a diver at that base. I also doubt that, but again, it sure doesn’t sound like they are disclosing anything in 2009, does it? But there’s one more piece of evidence worth looking at.
On May 25, 2009, NASA released some unusual pictures of the surface of Lake Baikal that were taken by the International Space Station. Take a look. Pretty weird, right? A visible circle under the ice surface. Guess what people speculated this was? Experts say it was just methane emissions causing warm water to rise, which apparently creates circles like this. But the timing of these May 2009 photos is interesting for our story, because less than two months later, the Free Press article came out discussing USOs and the Lake Baikal swimmer’s incident. Could these NASA photos and the speculation around them have been the spark or impetus to publish a story about potentially alien creatures in the lake? Now don’t get me wrong, there are many USO stories.
Some very credible. And it does seem like oceans or the world’s deepest lake would be a great hiding spot for these craft. But there’s a lot of issues with this particular story, and no real independent evidence to support it. With no official documents to review, multiple layers of hearsay, a potentially unreliable witness, and a complete Russian denial, I’m inclined to call this one improbable. That said, with all the confirmed disinformation that governments have put out over the years, it’s almost impossible to rule anything out. They lie a lot. And like with anything that a government denies, I don’t think that we can say for absolute certain that the Lake Baikal swimmer’s incident didn’t happen.
But either way, it’s a pretty cool story. Unless you’re one of the divers. But while this story may not be able to be confirmed as true, it’s difficult to ignore the numerous, unexplainable stories involving UAPs that have come out of the Soviet Union and Russia. And if you want to hear another one of these videos, check out this video here. Thank you for joining me on this project, and we’ll see you on the next one. Until then, watch out for the lizard people. [tr:trw].
