RUSSIAN UFOLOGISTS BECOME TARGETS OF HARRASSMENT

July 21, 1996
Source: ISCNI
By Paul Stonehill (RuRc@aol.com) Russian UFOlogy Research Center

Russian media have reported gruesome details of unprecedented attacks on Russian UFO researchers. The terror is being unleashed by religious fanatics from several sects. In 1993-94, hoodlums who believe UFOs are "messengers of God" attacked the Russian UFO Center and its employees on several occasions. The Russian information agency "Novosti" has reported that UFOlogists have been threatened by telephone, by huge numbers of defamatory leaflets, and by offensive graffiti tagged on their homes and office buildings. Also reported by "Novosti" were attempts on UFOlogists' lives, including setting fire to their apartment doors.

Television reporters who cover UFO-related news are also fair game. A. V. Myagchenkov, a well-known TV personality and producer of the popular Russian TV program "Extro-NLO," has received many telephone threats. American producers who visited the bright young Myagchenkov found he was not silenced, but L. S. Makarova, who produced the ever-popular TV program "The Unidentified Universe" was brutally silenced. She was struck in the face with brass knuckles in Moscow, in broad daylight. She was so traumatized she took her program off the air. The fanatics won that round.

Threats have greatly affected the work of such prominent researchers of anomalous phenomena as cosmonaut Pavel Romanovich Popovich, academician V. P. Kaznacheyev, and engineer A. S. Kuzovkin. Law enforcement in Moscow, after appeals by the leaders of the city's UFO study groups, curtailed the terrorists to some extent, and sent some of the perpetrators to prison. Terrorists remained active in the provincial cities of Penza, Yekaterinburg, and Tver. In October 1995, scientist and UFOlogist A. Zolotov was murdered in Tver.

The latest report comes from Nalchik. Viktor Petrovich Kostrikin, a UFOlogist well-known in Russia and abroad, was savagely beaten and his apartment on Bogdan Khmelnitsky Avenue was ransacked. The 70-year old researcher was at home on December 9, 1995 when two young men broke into his home at four o' clock in the afternoon. They beat him up methodically, and when there was nothing left to maim, the hoodlums tore apart his personal belongings.

The Russian UFOlogy Research Center has been trying to find the whereabouts of a well-known researcher from Vladivostok, Alexander Rempel. He was a fearless explorer, author, and publisher. Rempel and his colleagues have studied "the Devil's Cemetery," the site of the Tunguska meteorite's fall in Siberia. His findings have been published in prominent Russian science magazines like "Tekhnika Molodezhi" of Moscow. Rempel had excellent contacts among the Russian military in the Far East, and helped explore phenomena such as the Height 611 "crash." He was one of the first to study the sinister cults that have recently mushroomed in Russia. Perhaps he found out too much; there has been no news of him since the end of 1994. His newspaper "Dzhentry" is no longer being published.

[Paul Stonehill runs the Russian UFOlogy Research Center, 5700 Etiwanda Avenue, Suite 215, Tarzana, CA 91356.]

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