Decemystery (2023) 31: That Time a Russian Managed to Noclip Out of Reality

 

Salutations, dear reader. Welcome back to my blog for the final time this year. This month has been filled with the wildest, strangest, and most unbelievable stories I’ve ever written about in the five years that it’s been around. Or, well, four years if you wish to pretend 2022 didn’t happen, given I only wrote a single movie review that year. Thank you, COVID brain fog, for robbing me of a year of my life.

But I digress. When I put the two Decemysterys together, the capstone entry for 2022.3 remained the same; the Professor Oak story was always what I had in mind. However, the one for today was not what I originally had in mind. I won’t spoil what it is since I’m hoping to use it as next year’s capstone entry, but I will say that I began work on it earlier in the year. I believe in June. I can’t remember precisely because of just how much I wrote in such a short amount of time.

However, I ultimately decided to hold off on finishing it because it would have been disgustingly long. It’s a case that’s extraordinarily personal to me, and I believed that if I’d rushed it, I would have felt so disappointed in myself for not giving it the proper love and care that I believe it deserves. So, that left me in limbo for a bit; I wasn’t sure what I’d use to end this absolute beast of a month off.

The biggest challenge in finding what I believe to be a truly worthwhile case was that this month was a never-ending one-upping of strangeness. Almost every story was just pure, unadulterated: “What in the world!?” through and through. So, in order to find what I felt was a proper capstone entry, I went looking for something that was not only weird but also encompassed everything that made this month special.

That story came to my attention a few months ago, in October, when I was looking at sustained_disgust’s Obscure Unsolved Mysteries Iceberg. We started out this month over there, and we shall end it off there. So come along, dear reader, as we end off 2023—and Decemystery—with That Time a Russian Managed to Noclip Out of Reality!

Decemystery (2021) 8: The Bashkortostan Creature

Russia’s a hotbed for sightings of mysterious creatures. Dire wolves, mammoths, and aliens are but a few of the enigmas that have been seen over there. Though above all else, the nation is known for a ton of sightings of hairy hominids. Many of them come from Siberia, though Russia as a whole is no stranger to seeing the infamous Yeti. Sure, the Yeti itself may be from Himalayan folklore officially, but the name is used to describe more or less any snowy mountain-dwelling Bigfoot.

Anyways, for today’s story, we’re headed over to Russia to investigate something known as the Bashkortostan Creature. This is something you might be familiar with if you’re a bit fan of mystery-centric YouTube channels or happen to watch the Travel Channel show “Paranormal Caught On Camera”. It’s a rather famous video from the mid-2010s that managed to make the news. So come along, dear reader! It’s time to put on our winter clothes and investigate a Yeti!

Mystery: The Pokémon Incubus

Minor content warning: brief mentions of rape.

Okay, so, get this: I’ve discovered this thing called “not working constantly”. It’s a really novel concept where I don’t sit around on my bed, staring at a blank Google document, trying to force myself to write for hours on end before inevitably having a mental breakdown. I know, really incredible; I am truly ahead of my time and am far more enlightened than the Dalai Lama.

In all seriousness: I’ve actually finally decided that maybe not writing when I don’t feel like I can (whether it be due to feeling under the weather or just not really desiring it) is, in fact, a good idea. This has opened up a whole slew of new possibilities for me, like playing video games and enjoying some time to myself so I can recuperate from writing.

So in short, I’m making progress in living a healthier life!

Anyways, when it comes to video games, I’ve been playing a ton of Pokémon ROM Hacks, so I’ve been going through Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and even Unova (well, that is until the game froze and I couldn’t progress). It’s been a ton of fun, and quite frustrating. Though mostly fun.

At the same time, however, it’s also been kind of a bummer. While I’ve been having a lot of fun, I’ve found myself really unable to write. This is mostly because none of the stories I had in mind really struck the right chord with me. Sure, I wanted to write about them, but nothing I wrote really struck me as “worthwhile”. When I set out to cover something. I always want it to be entertaining and not flat, boring, and unengaging. So for a brief while, I found myself feeling really bummed out.

Well, that is, until I remember a certain story.

Just yesterday, I remembered something that I saw on the good old Paranormal World Wiki. It was a story involving Pokémon and I thought it fit with my recent bingeing of the series. So, let’s take a look at the Pokémon Incubus.

Mystery: The Arzamassian Monster

Today’s story is going to be a super short one because I’ve been extremely busy today. Apologies for all of those that are disappointed, but I promise that there are stories this month that will be much longer and much more fascinating. So anyways, today’s tale is one that will take us back to the year of 1719. It’s known as the Arzamassian Monster and it will send us to the land of Russia. Let’s dive bomb into this enigmatic story!

Mystery: The Tunguska Event

Aerial view of the Tunguska blast site nowadays.

Death from the skies!

This is what seems to make tabloid headlines every few months. NASA or some other space agency (though it’s almost always NASA) supposedly says that there’s a “killer asteroid” headed our way in X years. When it hits, we’re all dead! Just like the dinosaurs before us, we will be wiped out by a giant space rock and there’s nothing we can do about it.

These claims are, of course, clickbait. No one from NASA has said that there is a dinosaur killing sized chunk of space rock that will crash into our happy little planet and make us all enter the Forever Box. Alas, we can’t let facts get in the way of some good clicks for sensationalistic journalism.

Still, that doesn’t mean that our rocky friends from space haven’t hit us before. Every year, a plethora of meteors strike Earth, but they’re either too small to do any damage or burn up as they enter our atmosphere. In other instances, they do land, but are unnoticeable or make for a good viral video because they light up the sky.

In some rare instances, they actually do some damage and kill a lot of life. One good example of this is 99942 Apophis, a 1,080 foot wide asteroid that caused a pretty big scare when it was said it may hit Earth in 2036. An asteroid the size of Apophis typically strikes Earth once every 80,000 years. It wouldn’t cause an extinction level event mind you, but folks on YouTube and tabloids would have you believe otherwise since they made it out to be a doomsday rock from the high heavens.

A comparison of the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower to 99942 Apophis.

Nowadays, they say that Apophis has a 1 in 150,000 chance of hitting Earth on April 12, 2068. These chances are subject to change and given that’s not for another 48 years (rounded) as of the time of this writing, one can bet that it’s likely we’ll either be able to send Apophis to Mars, Venus, or just straight out of the Solar System. Or, even more likely, Apophis will whoosh by our planet and go on its merry way.

Though what if it didn’t? What if it—or another still sizable asteroid—were to hit us? What would the damage be like?

As I said before, there have been asteroids that have hit Earth. There have also been meteors and comets. The thing is: it’s very rare, but when it happens, people definitely know. The devastation can be tremendous and the loss of life can be unbelievable…

Unless it lands somewhere remote, where the loss of life is minimal and nobody really notices it. This is  the case of today’s story, which has become known as the Tunguska Event. While many have come to accept the theory that what caused this incredible event was a comet, some remain unconvinced. As such, we’re going to take a look and see if we can discover the truth behind it all. So let’s dive in!

Decemystery 10: The Patomskiy Crater

Press C to Create Crater.

Russia is home to some very unusual mysteries. The Tunguska Event of of 1908 and the Dyatlov Pass Incident are probably two of the most famous; and both are stories I'll hopefully write about next year at some point. That said though, we’re here to talk about a significantly less malevolent mystery. One simply known as the Patomskiy Crater.