I'm calling from Petrozavodsk. I work at the port here, been doing it for twelve years now. Dockworker, early shift. And I'm telling you, I know what I saw that morning. September 20th, 1977. I was there. Look, I'm not the type to see things. I deal with cargo manifests and crane schedules, you know what I mean? My job is numbers and containers. But that morning, there was no mistaking what was in the sky above us. Me and four other guys from my crew, we all saw it. And not just us, either. The whole damn city saw it. I'd been fighting with my supervisor the week before about overtime pay. Stupid thing to remember, but that's what was on my mind when I got to work that morning. It was early, around four oh five in the morning. Still dark. Cold, too, the way it gets in September up here. We were getting ready for the morning shift, checking the equipment.
One of the guys, Dmitri, he spots it first. He's looking out toward Lake Onega, and he just stops. Stops moving completely. Then he says, real quiet, 'What is that?' And we all turn to look. There's this light. Coming from the direction of the lake. At first I thought maybe it was a flare, or a fire on one of the boats. But it was moving. Moving toward us. And as it got closer, it started getting brighter. Much brighter. Like someone was turning up a dimmer switch on the biggest spotlight you've ever seen. The light had this quality to it, you know what I mean? Not like a searchlight or anything man-made. It was pulsing. Sending out these shafts of light, like spokes on a wheel, but they were aimed down at the ground. At the city. At us. And the thing is moving slowly, silently. No sound at all. Nothing.
As it gets closer to Petrozavodsk, it changes. The light spreads out above the city. And I swear to you, it looked exactly like a giant jellyfish. That's the only way to describe it. A massive, glowing jellyfish floating in the sky. The main body of it was this bright core, and then it had these tentacles, these beams of light coming down from it. They were thin. Incredibly thin, like threads. But there were so many of them, hundreds maybe, all coming straight down. It looked like it was raining light. Like the thing was showering the city with this strange, white light. The ground was lit up like it was daytime. No, not daytime. Like a full moon, but brighter. Everything had this glow to it. We're all just standing there, frozen. One of the guys, Pavel, he says he thinks it's a nuclear attack. He's asking if we should run, if we should take cover. But where would we go? The thing was right above us. It was huge. The jellyfish part, the canopy of it, it must have been 30 degrees across. Maybe more. Larger than the Big Dipper constellation, if you were looking up at it.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]