Local anomalies. Russia

From the letter of S.V. Pankin to the Commission on the:

I'll start with a very surprising event in the owl time. 6-7 years ago, on the shore of the Gulf of Riga in the Kemeri area (about 40 km northwest of Riga), in the second half of summer, in the evening, at dusk, leaving the house standing literally 20 m from the water at an altitude of 2-3 m above sea level, I saw a very unusual and even strange picture. Instead of the expanse of the sea, a large lake appeared to my eyes, surrounded on all sides by a shore with many lights. There is a group of people in the center of the "lake". With the help of 6x binoculars, I easily distinguished the familiar cities and towns on the shore of the bay, up to the Pärnu of the Estonian SSR, which was about 140 km to the north from me.

In Pryanu, high-rise buildings "pillars", yellowish street lighting, columns of smoke, etc. were clearly visible. In other villages, water towers and other tall objects were very clearly visible. The shores of the Estonian islands were also clearly visible and it even seemed to me that I could see the opposite (distant) shores of these islands.

Beyond the Parna, the shore was also visible in depth. Even more unusual were the ships on the outer roadstead of Riga, about 40 km away from me. It was as if I was looking down at them from a high mountain. It was clearly possible to see the decks and what was located on them. There was clearly an increase in the size of the objects.

It was a case of amazing light refraction, and if it were not for the well-known cities and towns on the shores of the bay, this phenomenon could be considered a mirage, but without distorting the proportions of objects.

When I called the sailor-fisherman, the son of the owner of the house, he said that he had already seen such a phenomenon repeatedly.

The phenomenon was observed by me until late in the evening (night), but in the morning visibility was already almost normal, although the ships on the roadstead of Riga were still visible.

Simultaneously with light refraction, refraction was observed on broadcasting bands, which was established using a conventional TV with a rotating antenna and a VHF station of a broadcasting receiver. The signal of the nearest Estonian TV station on channel 11 from the island of Saarema (Oresare) was received as from a local television center, but periodically faded and had a multi-circuit, which indicated the presence of several ways of signal arrival. The intensity of the "contours" was great. I had a chance to observe similar phenomena again already in the 3-centimeter wave range in the 80s, when I became interested in the UFO problem and began to observe the visibility of the balloons of probes launched by meteorologists, and at the same time observe the reception of aircraft radar signals using a sensitive radio spectrum analyzer. At the same time, the radar signals move apart on the analyzer screen (as if the radar operates at several frequencies) due to the different arrival times of the signals along different paths.

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