I've researched anomalous zones all across Russia, but there's one case that still haunts me. It involves a journalist named Peter Markov who visited the M-Triangle back in October 1989. I need to tell you what happened to him because nobody believes it, but I've seen the evidence. The M-Triangle, they call it the Perm Anomalous Zone. It's about 44 square miles of dense forest in the Ural mountains, maybe 600 miles east of Moscow. The locals near the village of Molyobka had been talking about strange lights for decades, but the government kept it quiet. The KGB was investigating the area since the early 1950s, and that's not something they do for fun. A geologist named Eric Baranov first brought attention to it in 1983. He was out hunting in winter when he saw this purple ball rising out of the forest. When he got to where it landed, there was this perfectly round mark in the snow, 62 meters across. No tracks leading to it, nothing. Just this enormous circle melted clean through the snow down to the ground.
Peter Markov was a journalist for Soviet Youth newspaper, based in Riga. Just an average guy, really. Not particularly interested in physics or space, just a reporter looking for stories. But he'd heard the rumors about Molyobka, and in the autumn of 1989, he decided to go see for himself. He went with about 40 other people, a whole expedition of researchers and curious folks. They set up camp in what they called the Central Glade, right in the middle of the zone. The first thing Peter noticed was the sky. He described it as dome-shaped, like all the stars were concentrated directly overhead. Four or five kilometers out, the sky looked completely normal, but straight up it was like looking through a lens. Then he started seeing the spheres. White ones, orange ones, sometimes small like basketballs, sometimes bigger. They'd appear out of nowhere, float through the forest or hover above the trees. hate it when my camera battery dies at the worst time - Viktor' On his first night alone, he counted seeing them maybe 14 or 15 times. Other people in the camp saw them too, so it wasn't just him.
The really strange part came on the third night. Peter and a friend took some newcomers out to show them a spot where the feeling of something otherworldly was especially strong. They split up to walk this forest path one by one, about ten minutes apart. It was a clear night with a full moon, bright enough to see the trail perfectly. Peter went second. He walked down into this small ravine, and something made him look up. That's when he saw it. A figure, standing right there on the path ahead of him. He described it as translucent, almost see-through, shaped like a person but not quite solid. It just stood there, watching him. He froze. Couldn't move, couldn't speak. The thing didn't move either, just stood there for what felt like forever but was probably only 30 seconds. Then it simply faded away, like it dissolved into the air. When Peter finally got his legs working again and caught up with his friend, the friend asked him why he'd stopped walking for so long. But Peter never told him what he'd seen, not right away.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]