Skeletons of Giants and Mysterious Swimmers in Lake Issik Kul: Supernatural Discoveries in the USSR!

Issik Kul is a remote deepwater lake located in the northern Tian Shan Mountains in the Transiliysk Ala Tau area of Kyrgyzstan (Central Asia). Its name means “hot water” and the lake is surrounded by snow-capped peaks but never freezes.

According to a well-informed Ukrainian writer, V. Krapiva, in the late 1930s a Russian paranormal investigator, Grabovsky, conducted an interview with a reluctant witness. The man and his friends had explored a cave near Lake Issik Kul, where they discovered three human skeletons, each over three metres tall.

The skeletons were adorned with objects that looked like bats (flying mammals) made of silver. The men were very frightened and kept silent about their discovery for many years.

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The silver ornaments were melted down, but a small piece was saved. Soviet scientists who studied the piece said they could not determine its age. Interestingly, a Kyrgyz legend mentions a sunken city in the lake. The ruler of the city, King Ossounes, was a creature with “long donkey ears.” Paranormal phenomena are known to occur in the lake.

The first mention of similar gigantic beings dates back to the early 20th century. Several children from Georgia (at that time part of the Russian Empire) discovered a cave inside a mountain, filled with humanoid skeletons. Each skeleton was about three metres long. To reach the cave, the boys had to dive into a lake. George Papashvili and his wife recall the incident in a book published in New York in 1925, St. Martin’s Press (Anything can happen). In 1953, José Ferrer portrayed the Georgian immigrant George Papashvili, whose book is a classic story of an immigrant adjusting to life in the United States.
Many years later, a much more sinister incident took place in the Soviet Union. The Russian paranormal magazine ANOMALIYA (Issue 4, 1992) contained an article written by Mark Shteynberg, a Soviet veteran of the war in Afghanistan.

He is the author of several books and an expert on the Russian military, now living in the United States. In the summer of 1982, Mark Shteynberg, together with Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Zverev, actively led the regular training of reconnaissance divers (“frogmen”) of the Turkestan and Central Asian military regions. The training exercises took place on Lake Issik Kul.

According to media reports, this is where powerful but not very accurate Soviet torpedoes and submarine missiles were tested in Soviet times. Today, in Kyrgyzstan, there is reportedly still a Russian long-distance naval communications centre on Lake Issik-Kul.

But in 1982 (a memorable year in the history of Soviet ufology) Major General V. Demyanko, commander of the Military Diving Service of the Engineer Forces of the USSR Ministry of Defense, unexpectedly and hastily arrived to inform local officials of an extraordinary event that had occurred during similar training exercises in the Trans-Baikal and Western Siberian military regions.

During their military training dives, Soviet frogmen had encountered mysterious underwater “swimmers,” very humanoid beings of enormous size (almost three meters tall). The “swimmers” wore tight-fitting silver suits, despite the freezing water temperatures. At fifty meters deep, these “swimmers” wore neither scuba gear (“aqualungs”) nor any other equipment; only spherical helmets that concealed their heads.

Shteynberg said that local military commanders in Siberia decided to capture one of the creatures. For this purpose, a special group of seven divers, led by an officer, had been sent. While the divers tried to cover the creature with a net, the entire team was propelled out of the deep water to the surface by a powerful force.

Since the frogmen’s self-contained equipment does not allow them to surface from such depths without strictly observing the decompression stop procedure, all members of the ill-fated expedition were stricken with aeroembolism, or Caisson’s disease. The only curative treatment available was immediate confinement under decompression conditions in a pressure chamber. There were several pressure chambers in the military quarters, but only one was working. It could not hold more than two people.

These local commanders had forced four frogmen into the chamber. As a result, three of them (including the group commander) perished and the rest were left crippled. The Major General was sent and flew to the Issik Kul to warn the local military against similar attempts to capture any “swimmers.”

Although Lake Issik Kul is shallower than Lake Baikal, the former’s depth was sufficient to contain similar mysterious creatures. The Soviet high command was aware that “swimmers” lurked in the depths; an order was issued against their capture. Perhaps they knew much more about the underwater inhabitants of Issik Kul than the independent researcher Grabovsky.

Shortly thereafter, the Headquarters of the General Staff of the Turkmen military district received an order from the Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces. The order consisted of a detailed analysis of the events at Lake Baikal and the subsequent reprimands. It was supplemented by a news bulletin from the headquarters of the Engineering Forces of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR.

The bulletin listed numerous deep-water lakes where sightings of anomalous phenomena had been recorded: appearances of underwater creatures analogous to the Baikal type, descent and ascent of gigantic disks and spheres, powerful luminescence emanating from the depths, etc.

Mikhail Demidenko, a well-known Russian writer, read Shteynberg’s story in 1992 and recalled that during a mission of the Writers’ Union in 1986 to Irkutsk (Siberia), he spent some time on Lake Baikal. There he learned from local fishermen that a few years earlier they had observed Soviet frogmen being propelled from the lake to a height of ten to fifteen meters above the water. The locals never found out why the military behaved in this way.

Demidenko thought that this was the same episode, and he contacted his sources in the highest echelons of the Russian army in vain. But eventually the writer spoke to a colonel in the Main Logistics Directorate who tried to help; Demidenko later learned from him that such an order would be kept in special archives requiring high-ranking authorization.

He died in 2003, a true humanitarian who hated totalitarianism of any kind; a tolerant man who survived the Nazi occupation and cherished memories of Nazi atrocities against Soviet Jews; as a young man, Demidenko (after graduating from a military school) became a Chinese translator and interpreter.

He was seconded by the Soviet Army General Staff to the Red Chinese Air Force Headquarters; he also served in North Korea during the war. Demidenko later travelled across China to western Tibet; and by the time he became a well-known author and screenwriter, he had visited several countries in South-East Asia and Europe. He collected material to write fascinating books, including his latest: Po sledam SS v Tibet (Following the Trail of the SS to Tibet), 1999.

Tibet In 1954,

Demidenko was accompanying senior military officers from Beijing and the Soviet Union as they inspected Red Chinese troops in Xinjiang province (Uygur Autonomous Region) and western Tibet, where the group spent a night in a Lamaist monastery. There, Demidenko met an old Mongolian monk who spoke Russian.

Among many other fascinating topics, the monk told him about caves in the Tibetan mountains where three-meter-tall giants lie in an anesthetic-induced sleep; one day they may wake up. Later, Demidenko heard stories that the Red Chinese gutted one of these sacred caves, took out “sleeping amphibian giants” and publicly hanged them.

As Demidenko’s well-documented book shows (he had extensive connections in Asia, East Germany, the Russian military…), the occult-worshipping Nazis were quite aware of the giants and the legends of the underground cities of Tibet. That’s why Hitler sent his SS expeditions to Tibet, as he was sure that these giant demigods would confirm his theories… but there is more information about the giants in his book; and a wealth of historical information about Hitler’s expeditions, archives and mysterious events.

The Borisoglebsk Giant

A sharp increase in UFO activity in 1978 had forced the USSR Academy of Sciences to agree on a program of research into anomalous atmospheric phenomena. The code name for this program was SETKA-AN (Academy of Sciences Net, or AS-NET). The first act of SETKA-AN resulted in the official sanctioning of “anomalous atmospheric phenomena” as a descriptive term in place of the banned “UFO.”

Censorship restrictions on the UFO subject were lifted in 1989. The Ministry of Defense embarked on a similar program, under the name SETKA-MO (Ministerstva Oboroni Set’). Eduard A. Yermilov, a distinguished Russian scientist at the prestigious Research Institute of Radiophysical Sciences, had participated in the SETKA (“Galaktika-AN”) program and investigated the 1982 case that most likely involved a similar humanoid “giant”…

Borisoglebsk, located in the Voronezh region, is one of the most active areas of UFO sightings, according to A. Plaksin, an expert of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and a former prominent participant in the SETKA program. In the 1980s, a special military commission was established to study UFOs in the area (objects sighted and reported by military observers ranged in size from a tennis ball to two hundred meters long, and maneuvered at speeds of 0 to 600 km/h at altitudes of 0 to 20 km).

Yermilov (according to a famous Russian paranormal researcher Mikhail Gershtein, who owns many SETKA documents) reported that on May 26, 1982, during the loss of communications with a MIG-21 aircraft and its subsequent disappearance, a UFO was sighted at an altitude of 1500 meters. A search and recovery operation was organized.

On May 27, the search team (consisting of Junior Sergeant A. A. Panyukov and Private A. Yu. Kunin), while in the forest in the Povorino area, entered a clearing where they observed a humanoid entity. It was no less than 3.5 meters tall and was dressed in silvery clothes with greenish highlights. After the entity fled the scene of the incident, eyewitnesses observed an explosion behind the trees and the flight of a luminescent object that left a faintly luminescent trail; the object disappeared behind the trees.

The “silver ones”

Komsomol’skaya Pravda, a popular Russian newspaper, published an article by A. Pavlov in its December 1, 2000 issue. It described the close relationship that had developed between local Russian military personnel and UFO researchers (among the latter was Dr. Dvuzhilni, famous for the investigation of the Dalnegorsk crash case). Among the documents provided by the commander of the Far Eastern Air Defense District to local ufologists was one that mentioned a very interesting case from 1990.

A military brigade from the settlement of Timofeyevka was sent in response to an alarm raised by a sentry who fired a warning shot. They saw two beings, dressed in silver overalls; they were about two and a half metres tall; they came from a nearby oak grove.
Immediately after the warning shot, the “silver ones” ran back. The ground was wet from a recent rain, and Russian counterintelligence agents who arrived at the scene discovered large, shapeless “footprints.” More “swimmers”

B. Borovikov hunted Black Sea sharks for many years. Then something happened that put an end to his hobby. While diving in the Anapa area, he went down to a depth of eight meters. He saw gigantic beings rising from below. They were milky white in color, but with humanoid faces and something like fish tails. The creature that was ahead of its companions noticed Borovikov and stopped.

He had giant bulging eyes, like vague goggles. The other two joined him. The first waved its hand (it was undoubtedly a webbed hand) towards the diver. They all approached Borokivov and stopped a short distance away. Then they turned around and swam away. Borovikov’s experience was published in XX vek: khronika neobjasnimogo or “20th century: chronicle of the inexplicable” (Moscow, 1996).

D. Povaliyayev was gliding by hand over Kavgolov (Leningrad area) in the early 1990s. There are lakes, and on one of them the parachutist observed three gigantic “fish”. He descended and could make out “swimmers” in silver suits. He mentioned the episode in his book Letuchi Gollandets or “Flying Dutchman” (1995). There have been many UFO sightings in the area.