The Tunguska Event is one that virtually every UFO fan knows of. On the morning of June 30, 1908, a massive explosion devastated over 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest near the Tunguska River. The blast, equivalent to about 10-15 megatons of TNT, flattened an estimated 80 million trees and produced shockwaves felt hundreds of kilometers away. Despite numerous expeditions to research the cause, the Tunguska explosion has remained a subject of debate and fascination. While the prevailing theory suggests a comet or asteroid as the culprit, alternative hypotheses have flourished, including the intriguing possibility that the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft caused the event.

Likely, we'll never have more definitive information about this event than we do now, but that doesn't mean the area around Tunguska hasn't experienced anything else that is potentially otherworldly and, unlike Tunguska, has eyewitnesses.

As we’ve shared in past episodes, the Soviets actively suppressed the study of UFOs while mocking the American public’s interest in the topic. Despite this, Soviet citizens continued to see UFOs, some very unusual ones, many of which were cigar-shaped crafts.

One of the most fascinating occurred in 1965 when a Soviet nuclear submarine arrived about 90 minutes early for a rendezvous with a Soviet surface ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Giving his crew a break, the Soviet submarine captain allowed them to enjoy fresh air on the deck while they waited. The nighttime sky was clear, and no other vessels were in the area. Suddenly, a cigar-shaped object flew into view of the crew. It moved without sound. The captain thought it was an American aircraft and sounded an alarm to prepare to dive, but when the object didn't appear on the radar, he decided to stay on the surface. The object was about 200 to 250 meters long and had three lights that allowed the crew to see its shape and movement. It was clear that it wasn't an American aircraft. Suddenly, when it was about a kilometer away, the UFO dove into the water. The sub's sonar picked up an unusual hissing sound for a short time immediately after the UFO entered the water. It was never seen again after that. The captain reported the event to his commanding officer. This event reminds me of many of the UFOs and UAPs that have recently been reported to travel both through the air and underwater with equal ease.

It's virtually impossible to explain the source of this UFO sighting as being an airship, there are other cigar-shaped craft that likely were.

For example, a series of sightings occurred in 1915 at the mouth of the Volga River. The events, reported decades later in the magazine Soviet Soldier, told of a massive, airship-like craft flying over towns as far apart as 150 kilometers. The craft flew with a loud sound and bright spotlight. Six human-like figures were seen in a gondola slung under the object. Similar objects were seen as far as 800 kilometers north of this area. In one case, witnesses said the craft had landed. Rather than being extraterrestrial, these objects were likely airships.  By this time, Zeppelin was testing one of the largest zeppelins he had ever built, the LZ72, a part of Germany's fleet of airships for reconnaissance and bombing. While the primary focus of Zeppelin raids during World War I was on Western Europe, there were instances of Zeppelins operating over Russia. In addition to Von Zeppelin, Russian engineers were operating airships around this time. In particular, Igor Sikorsky built several airships, and during World War I, the Russian military operated several airships for reconnaissance purposes. So, as much as we'd like these sightings in 1915 to be attributable to aliens, these sightings is likely best connected with people seeing actual airships.

But before I share an amazing story of a cigar-shaped UFO seen near Tunguska that was decidedly not an airship, I want to go back to 1896, when a cigar-shaped UFO lit up the sky in San Francisco. What makes this event particularly odd is that it predates even Zeppelin's first airship, which wouldn't fly for another four years. So, the events of that November need some other explanation.

This is My Dark Path Plus – a special episode for subscribers only. I'm so grateful for each of you! As a special offer, I'll send subscribers a free audio copy of my first novel, Seeing by Moonlight, this fall. Thank you for your subscription! Let's get started with My Dark Path Plus, episode 9. Legends of Cigar Shaped Craft.

Excitement and consternation erupted in late November 1896 in San Francisco when hundreds, if not thousands, observed a mysterious airship haunting its night skies.

Coverage of the events became a front-page story in the local newspapers. On November 19, the San Francisco Call and Post dedicated half of the front page to the topic and included interviews with many who had seen the craft. You can see the image from the newspaper on My Dark Path.com. The consensus was that the craft was oblong and egg-shaped with fan-like wheels on both sides that "served to propel the vessel directly against the wind, and in doing so caused the vessel to sway from side to side with a wavering motion, similar to that of a boat being forced against the rapid current of a stream.” 

The paper goes on with the description, saying, "midway of the vessel and suspended directly beneath it was a brilliant searchlight about twice the size of an arc light, evidently placed that the occupants could ascertain when the vessel approach too near the Earth and was in danger of collision with lofty objects. Above the egg-shaped body toward a tall, indistinguishable mass, whose shape it was impossible to ascertain, owing to the fact that the brilliancy of the searchlight blurred the onlookers' eyes."    In other words, the object had some mass above the oblong shape, which was impossible to see at night.

As I record this, I just returned from a research trip to the Zeppelin archives in Friedrichshafen, Germany. This description certainly describes the design of the rigid airships that would appear in the next decade—except for the mass that sat above the oblong or egg shape. More about that later.

Why witnesses would describe the object in this way is, well, odd. Zeppelin's first airship, the LZ1, would not make its first flight until July 2, 1900. Of course, if you've listened to or watched some of my airship episodes, you know Von Zeppelin was hardly the only innovator in airships. Several airships had been tested in the prior decades. Henri Giffard had flown a powered airship in 1852 – but his design had a single steam engine in a basket that hung low under the non-rigid airship. Soloman Andrews flew the Aereon in New Jersey in 1863, but it was unpowered. The French army flew a powered airship called La France in 1884, but its design was much like Giffard’s – more like a hot air balloon with a gondola slung underneath it. 

So, the object's shape was hardly consistent with any craft the citizens of San Francisco had ever seen in person or print. The design of the LZ1 would not be published until after its first flight.

Even odder was that many witnesses heard and saw people speaking English in the craft. For example, David Carl, listed as a horse trainer by the newspaper, first saw the craft when it was close to the ground. Then he heard a voice saying, "We are too low down here; send her up higher."  He then heard another distinct voice discussing the appropriate height for their craft before the craft started to rise.

Other witnesses didn't hear the voices or see much more than the intensely bright searchlight that night. Frank Ross, the assistant superintendent of the electric streetcar system, told the newspaper: "All I saw was a brilliant electric searchlight, apparently twice the size and power of an ordinary arc light which was being propelled through the air by some mysterious force. I watched the light until it passed out of sight thirty minutes later. It was traveling unevenly toward the southwest, dropping now nearer to the Earth and now suddenly rising into the air again as if the force that was whirling it through space was sensible of the danger of collision with objects upon the Earth. I, of course, have no idea as to its destination or purpose. I can only say that I am fully convinced by what I have heard that it was something of the ordinary.”

So what were thousands of people seeing? Could there have been a local inventor flying an airship that wouldn't be matched by Zeppelin for another decade? What else would explain the English-speaking voices?

San Francisco was a bustling and rapidly growing city in 1896. Rudyard Kipling, the prolific British writer of works like The Jungle Book and Gunga Din, had visited the city a few years earlier and described it as a "mad, all-hailing, all-sailing, always prosperous town."  

The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 linked the city directly to the East Coast, enhancing its role as a major port city and facilitating trade between the US and the Pacific. It was a practical city, not prone to weird flights of fancy by large numbers of its citizens.

Electricians who saw the floating light declared that it was electrically generated and would require at least one horsepower. At the time, the equipment required to generate this amount of power was half a ton or 1,000 pounds alone. 

An unnamed woman said the light was not a meteor as “it was a different shade of light and moved too slowly and unevenly.”

Some were alarmed by the blackness of the object above the oblong shape. MT Shelley said that when the craft careened somewhat to partially obscure the light, he saw both the cigar-shaped object and a dark wall above it.

Rumors abounded. What was the source of the craft? Some claimed it was an invention of the technical wizard of the time, Thomas Alva Edison. Another newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, referred to a telegram that had been received declaring that an inventor would fly a new airship from New York to San Francisco in just two days.

Then, the November 23, 1896 edition of The San Francisco Call and Post published a story about the origin of the mysterious airship, citing local patent attorney George D. Collins. He said the airship was the brainchild of a reclusive and innovative millionaire inventor from Oroville, California. Oroville was a small town about 200 miles northeast of San Francisco. Collins was skeptical about the inventor’s claims for his airship, but he learned that the “propelling power is produced by compressed air, which works the arms and produces the lights.”  Still, the inventor's paranoia about the theft of his intellectual property compelled Collins to say no more as he was under an oath of secrecy.

But soon, the hysteria about the sightings passed. Just as government officials explained away every sighting in the '50s and '60s as hot air balloons or atmospheric phenomena, the airship sightings in 1896 had a range of explanations, from kids playing pranks by lighting oil-soaked fabric to balloons to mass hallucinations. Even Edison dismissed the affair as a hoax, demonstrating his typical skepticism towards unproven inventions that were often attributed to him due to his prolific reputation as an inventor. He said, "You can take it from me that the only airship flying is a big humbug.”  And later, Collins denied that he had ever discussed a mysterious airship inventor in Oroville and that a reporter had made up his quotes. Newspapers turned from breathlessly reporting every eyewitness account to openly mocking them. Witnesses were drunk or liars. One even ran a series of stories about a giant sea monster in the San Francisco Bay just to make light of the gullibility of the local population.

The events, now almost 130 years old, can never be fully explained. 

However, the final stories of airship-shaped UFOs are even odder and unlikely to be rationalized by group hallucinations, drunk barhoppers, or Howard Hughes-type millionaire inventors.

And for this extraordinary story, we turn to Soviet Siberia in 1953. I originally learned of this case from Paul Stonehill's book, the soviet UFO Files. In it, he introduces the witness at the center of the story, Veniamin Dodin. The book's recounting left me skeptical of this character, who Stonehill described as a scientist, lecturer, and writer who also produced over 26 books. That all seems good, especially if you're trying to establish someone's credibility as a strong witness. So I started digging for third-party corroboration of this man and his story. First, I had to get an anglicized version of his name – Veniamin is Benjamin in English.

With that, I started to reveal more about this fascinating man…and his dark path, which extends far beyond this story. Everything I've learned comes from other sources, which I'll share more about in a moment.

Dodin grew up in an orphanage in Moscow and was very frustrated with his living conditions. At age 16, amid the arrogance of his youth, he somehow found a way to contact the dictator, Joseph Stalin, likely by letter. But by whatever means it was that he contacted Stalin, he complained about the conditions of the orphanage, which forever changed his life. He was immediately arrested and sentenced to a decade in the Gulag for “anti-soviet agitation.” 

This history comes to us not from UFO research but via Robert S. Miller, who wrote an exhaustive and heartbreaking book, America's Abandoned Sons. This massive book details the murder of thousands of US prisoners of war by the Soviets from World War II through the end of the Cold War. It turns out that when Dodin was sent to a Gulag in Siberia, he encountered multiple American servicemen who had been declared missing but were in forced labor in Soviet Gulags across the country. When Dodin first arrived at this Gulag, he recorded the names of every American he met. Almost immediately, Dodin was caught, and for his trouble, he was given more time for his sentence. He was finally released from the camp in 1961 but was required to live in the city limits of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia for the rest of his life. Dodin ended up working for 30 years in the city, eventually becoming a high-ranking official in the Laboratory for Construction in the Arctic. But despite his senior position, he, like hundreds of thousands of others, could never leave the area, even if they completed their sentences. Once the USSR collapsed, he immigrated to Israel in 1993. 

Dodin’s records of the names and characteristics of these POWs came to light when Norman Kass, who worked for the Defence Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office or DPMO, learned of him in 1993. Upon his arrival in Tel Aviv, Dodin immediately contacted the American embassy to relay information regarding his encounters with Americans, which occurred not only during his time in the Gulag but also throughout his subsequent travels across Siberia while employed with the Laboratory of the Arctic. Recognizing the value of Dodin's insights, the embassy compiled his numerous intelligence reports and audio recordings, which were promptly classified.

I will return to the story of these forgotten POWs in a future episode, as it's both fascinating and heartbreaking. For this episode, I'm fairly confident that Benjamin Dodin was an actual person in the story I'm about to tell you. We can also feel comfortable that he was a man of intellect and hard work, evidenced by his professional success.

Early in his imprisonment, in June 1953, Dodin returned to his hut near the Ishimba River in the evening. This Gulag was built in a boreal forest, consisting mainly of pines and spruces. It's typical of the areas just below the Arctic tundra, known for relatively mild summers and long, harsh winters. So, although it was night, at this time of year, the sun didn’t completely set, and days lasted up to 20 hours.

It was a clear, quiet evening, and a light wind chased away all the clouds. Suddenly, he was hit with a high-pitched noise, but at a frequency that made it feel like it was inside his head. Almost immediately, he saw the source of the sound. A long gleaming cylinder hovered in the sky. He thought its distance to be about two miles away. The massive cylinder was rotating, and near one end, the otherwise smooth hull was ringed grooves . The cylinder’s end was turned far enough toward Dodin that he observed it was completely open, like the top of an open can.

The sight was so surprising that he initially assumed it was an airship – the only object he knew of that had a similar shape and could float seemingly effortlessly in the sky. But quickly, the absence of a gondola and engines confused him. The object, rotating slowly, floated toward him. As he watched the object, he then thought that he had stumbled upon a test of a new aircraft or weapon as the Soviet military conducted top-secret weapons development in the area.

But as he watched, the object’s behavior again astounded him. A disc or drum shaped objectemerged from the open end of the cylinder that faced him, fully separated from the mother ship, and quickly flew into the sky. I'd add my description – essentially, if the cylinder were a roll of nickels, he saw a single nickel separate from the roll.

As this occurred, the piercing sound in his ears seemed to lower in tone but became even more uncomfortable. Then, like the first flat disc, several more emerged, each following the same pattern. After the fourth disc's separation, the open end of the cylinder closed, and the object flew out of sight.

As it did so, the terrible sound also abated. And Dodin was left alone in the forest as the semi-darkness turned to day.

He reflected on his observations. The movement of the mother cylinder and the discs was beyond anything he had ever seen or thought was possible with man-made aircraft. 

Reportedly, Dodin secured a camera for the next day, hoping to see the object again. It returned the following evening. Like the first evening, the "flat drums" continued to pour out of the cylinder before disappearing into the sky. On the second night, Dodin estimated that each disc was about 80 feet in diameter. The mothership was about 650 feet in length. Each mothership held eight perfectly smooth polished "flat drums."

Dodin enhanced his observations using a Zeiss theodolite to observe the objects. A theodolite is an instrument used in surveying. It consists of a telescope mounted on a base that allows it to rotate horizontally and vertically.   It was hardly a perfect tool, but he had nothing else, and it provided some magnification. Using it, he thought he could see each disc faintly glowed while the mothership did not.

During the second event, Dodin tried walking to the location underneath the cylinder. But as he approached the site, he became sick with sharp joint pains, and the sharp sound in his head returned, forcing him to turn back. Returning home, he fell asleep for a long time.

The next month, soldiers arrived at his hut and seized his camera and the photos he had taken. As an aside, I struggle with this part of the story. It seems unlikely that a dissident sentenced to the Gulag would have a camera at hand. The military had seen the same objects in the sky and their presence had disrupted their radar. Also, the area under the mothership was severely radioactive. Perhaps this prevented Dodin from reaching the area underneath the craft.

Before leaving Dodin, the military officer asked him to continue his observations.

Another month passed, with Dodin periodically observing the cylinders and discs in the evening. Later, he estimated that he observed the UFOs for over 40 hours. 

Then, after another month, on August 7, 1953, Dodin experienced another event when his radio made a sharp static noise and failed. And he was hit, again, with that same sharp sound, this time so strong that he fainted. When he awoke and exited his hut, the sky was colored in different green shades that lasted for over a month. In his report to the Russian Ufology Research Center, Dodin learned later that the military command of the area had sent two fighter jets to bring down a mothership. Their attack failed. Their missiles somehow turned away, exploding in the forest. The two jets and four crew members disappeared and were never found. All radar in a 120-mile radius was shut down.

The story is fascinating ,even if all the dates and elements don't quite tie off. Whatever Dodin observed was not an airship or anything from the Soviet military. So either his experience is a lie, or he observed something otherworldly.

I'm trying to find Stonehill's research center and see if the original reports he took are still available. Until then, we're left with Benjamin Dodin's verifiable history and the story of this event.

I’ll close with this hypothesis and want your thoughts on this. First, if our world has been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence, is it more likely that our visitors would be biologic or autonomous, self-replicating robotic observers? And if the latter, would these autonomous observers adapt their observation technologies over time, optimizing them for Earth's resources? Could the cylinder and the discs simply be the product of an alien AI, producing craft that could be deployed worldwide, funneling information back to controlling AI to be transmitted back to its organic creators? What are your thoughts?

And, if we’re visited, what explains the different types of UFOs observed and aren’t resolved by other means?  Here’s my second question for you: If one intelligence in the galaxy can do this, why would there not be 2? Or a dozen, each with similar but different approaches to the same problem – observing what is happening on this planet. And this isn't so difficult to believe. Think about the latest unmanned missions to the moon by the US, Japan, India, and China. Each visiting Earth's satellite in their distinct way.

But. we are looking through a glass, darkly. We are trying to understand what may not be understandable. Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks again for joining me in this episode of My Dark Path Plus. Thank you for your subscription and time! Remember, you can find all the images from this episode on My Dark Path.com and Patreon.

Until next time, my friends, good night. 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/secret-casualties-of-the-cold-war-180967122/

https://www.baltimoresun.com/2006/05/18/russia-provides-scant-help-as-us-searches-for-mias/

https://www.sanfranciscostory.com/1896-ufo/

Impact Events: What if the Tunguska Event Happened Today? https://interestingengineering.com/video/how-would-tunguska-event-scale-up-against-the-modern-world

L'airship de 1896-1897 - Page 3. https://ufo-scepticisme.forumactif.com/t2459p50-l-airship-de-1896-1897

America's Abandoned Sons

1896 UFO. https://www.sanfranciscostory.com/1896-ufo/