7.2 Lights Outside Stavropol

Hours later, it grew dark outside and a couple of oil lamps lit the inside. Tyler lay on the floor and caught the smell of cooking. The Blue Berets cooked food in the ruins of the gavit in the blowing wind. Then he heard an aircraft, that he could tell obviously of propeller engines, roaring outside as it came to moor by the bank. The noise intensified in his ears as if it was coming right next to the door. It wasn’t a boat. In few minutes, the engines cut off and there was dead silence.

One of those Blue Berets came in with a plate of Ishkhan with some gata bread and a bottle of water. The food was good, Sevan trout cooked in wine and seasoned with basil, tarragon, chives and pepper. Wasting no time, Tyler finished his plate.

An hour later, they replaced his handcuffs from behind and blindfolded. He was taken to the GAZ-67 and driven downhill from the plateau to the bank. In the next move, they put him on a small dinghy in the water. It was dark and for some reason to assist him, they removed his blindfold. It was a clear night and he could see a gibbous moon rising over the mountains to his right. There was a boat waiting in the water.

As the dinghy reached the boat, he figured it was a Type-34 Madge – a Beriev Be-6 flying boat made in the 50s by the Russians. It was a huge plane, twenty feet high even partially submerged in water. It could carry a large payload but he realised it was the distance that mattered. It could fly over 2000 miles. For the first time that day or that night, Tyler felt an instinct of fear.

Under the huge engine fixed on an uptilted wing, Tyler was summoned to the plane and up another ladder to a seat behind the cockpit. In the light of a dim electric bulb, he couldn’t make their faces but they were Russian. Their uniforms had changed from what he remembered during his flying days. Those five crews wore blue flying suits or dark grey. Then there was one praporshchik in a green coat and a visor with an azure band. He leaned over watching carefully as Tyler Friesen was accommodated in the seat, hands cuffed in front, buckled and secured with a chain. His heart throbbing.

When the Blue Beret turned to blindfold him, the officer waved in a sissy voice to leave it. Tyler felt slightly relieved.

The Blue Berets were gone. It was hot inside. In a moment, the propellers spitted and fluttered to life one at a time. He observed the clouds in the sky through the sunroof over the cockpit. When the plane turned to take-off, the moon was on his left. Flight took off from water in the dark and made a 180° turn over Lake Sevan. He saw a bright humped moon on his right. They were heading north. 00:30 on his watch.

Into the first hour, she flew on a climb over the Caucasus Mountains. He felt the cool air and the noise of the engines pounding in his ears while the metal fuselage rattled in a vibration. He sat on the righthand side of the aircraft by a window and tried to grasp any stars in the sky. He could hear a synchronised tune echoing from the powerful engines and remembered Salazar for a moment. Did he say it sounds like melting alloy?

He dozed off.

Then the officer knocked him posing behind his seat with a Žiguli beer.

Into the second hour of the flight, she was flying at a low altitude. He caught a glow on the horizon and it continued to flash the sky like a bolt of a lightning stroke somewhere in the distance. The sky lit up in deep purple and outlined the white clouds on the horizon. Often, he felt some kind of warfare going on down there but it was much brighter. As he concentrated on the spot, he began to realise that it wasn’t flashing but glowing brighter and diminish into a recess. As the flight neared it occurred to him that there were two beams placed at great distance, one on the right and one on the left that he could not see. It produced an extremely powerful light that hurt his eye. He felt a shockwave following seconds after the beam lit up. Its blaze did not totally fade out of the sky. Then he anticipated the distance of the beams placed around five kilometres approximately. The light grew stronger and he felt a turbulence that made the fuselage scream over the noises. The aircraft was losing altitude while maintaining course between the twin beacons mounted on tall towers, probably twenty storeys high. He could feel an impact of a shockwave in a soundless boom plunging the aircraft in correspond with the explosive lights; it seemed like an invisible hand grasped your face when the light came on and a whisk of relief when the light went off. He couldn’t look at it, it was too bright and white.

Meanwhile in the cockpit, flight instruments and indicator needles behaved in an unstable manner. Jericho Trumpets going on while the crew remained calm. Flight cruised at 1000 feet above ground and Tyler observed an unbelievable and a phenomenal scenario.

As the aircraft entered the corridor between the two lights in a twilight setting, he saw a town below lit in great detail; the roads, the cars, the gates, the doors and windows, the walls, the trees with intricate branches and no leaves dispersed on a flat land. That was the town of Neftekumsk in the urbanised oil-extracting settlement of Stavropol Krai – 300 kilometres east from the capital city. It was a spectacular sight.

Tyler Friesen was not able to explain the reason behind those powerful lights and the purpose whether it was military or civil or if they tested at the time. Scientific obviously however, not likely experimental for a charge of an energy source. He didn’t even know the name of the town below. Tyler saw a segment of a more sophisticated version of a high-voltage electrical resonant transformer circuit designed by inventor Nikola Tesla in 1891. He only could tell those lights were intense.

In 1970, Istra High Voltage Research Centre built a giant ‘Lightning Machine’ operated by Moscow Power Engineering Institute, 40 km west of Moscow in Istrinsky District. This facility contained Tesla coil generators and some towering 20 storeys high. This facility was built for the military to test lightning insulation in aircrafts. The giant research apparatus claimed to have the capability to discharge the equivalent of all Russia’s nuclear, hydro, thermal, solar, wind, gas and coal generated output but for a fraction of a second.

Into the fifth hour, Tyler Friesen was blindfolded and the flight landed at a military facility somewhere in the Volga region. Destination remained unknown.