Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClain smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In last week's episode, it Came from Above, we looked at the strange story involving a mysterious object said to have crashed near the town of Downa Gorsk in far eastern Russia in January nineteen
eighty six. The object is believed by some to be nothing less than an alien artifact, potential evidence of technology that is not of this world. Whether true or not, I find the idea of alien artifacts immense fun, and it would have been impossible to discuss the idea without
mentioning the strange celestial body known as Omuamua. This classified vaguely as an interstellar object due to its unusual properties, is perhaps the closest we've come to seeing an object whose potential alien provenance remains an open discussion within the mainstream scientific community. Most, it should be said, are unconvinced by the idea, and in all likelihood there will be
a fascinating but decidedly non intelligent design explanation for its existence. However, much like the roadside picnic analogy I made in the last episode. In a twenty nineteen interview with The New Yorker magazine, Abraham Loebe, who's written extensively about Amoamoor's potential alien origins, made the point that even if we saw evidence of an advanced technological civilization, there's no guarantee that
we'd recognize it as such. As he said, if you were to show a smartphone to a prehistoric human, they would have absolutely no context or frames of reference to even begin to understand it as anything other than an unusual rock. In a November twenty eighteen article in Scientific American, Abraham Lobe summarized six unusual facts about O'mohamoah that make
for compelling reading. One was that, due to the objects relatively slow speed of motion, rather than thinking of it as something that moved through the Solar System, it might be better to think of it as the other way round,
that the Solar System was moving past it. In this sense, as Lobe suggests, we might imagine O'mooamuah like a boy on the surface of the ocean, moving slowly through space, and the Solar system, as a large ship moving toward it might o'mooamuah have in fact been some kind of data gathering beacon positioned in space as part of a
wider network of similarly placed beacons. Another interesting point is that since astronomers weren't able to get a picture of the object, despite many artists impressions of it suggesting it looks not too dissimilar to a cigar shaped asteroid, there's no definitive answer and what it actually looks like. Lobe suggests it could just as easily be flat and round,
like a pancake. The most unusual fact for Lobe was how the object, as he says, deviated from an orbit that is shaped purely by the gravitational force of the Sun, which is to say, with no evidence of ice evaporating from it as you might expect from a comet. Something extremely unusual must be propelling it. One theory proposed by Lobe is that the object is some kind of solas sale using the heat of the Sun to keep it
in motion. In order for this to be the case, it would have to be comprised of a material only millimeters thick, something he believes only a technological civilization would be able to manufacture. Despite some ambitious plans to build a spacecraft to chase after Omuamua, it is likely this object will forever remain a mystery, with it expected to return to interstellar space at some point in the next
twenty or so years. Some, however, like the scientists in Russia who examined the object that crashed near down a Gorsk, might argue there's no need to travel into space to find evidence of alien artifacts. In nineteen seventy five, in West Ukraine, a quarry worker was digging out a section of clay about eight meters below the surface when he
noticed an unusually spherical object embedded in it. Rubbing the clay away with his hands exposed what appeared to be a black ball of glass, like a giant marble, unlike anything he'd seen before. After pulling it free, he struck it against a metal bucket, and sure enough, a small fragment of what appeared to be glass chipped off. The man took the mysterious sphere home as a gift for his son, who in turn took it to school, where his teacher offered to get it looked into more closely.
Eventually lending it to a local museum, where it was kept for a further three years. In nineteen seventy eight that teacher's son, Boris Nowmenko, who was by then working for the Earth Physics Institute of the Soviet Union's Academy of Sciences, took an interest in it. Not only was the object unusual in its shape, but since it was found in a seam of clay thought to be close to ten million years old, there was a good chance
the object was also millions of years old. In October nineteen seventy nine, now Menko lent the ball to a doctor Valentine Fomenko, a senior research fellow of the Sawyer's Scientific and Industrial Association, in an effort to determine its true age and physical make up. However, since now Menko didn't want to damage the object, doctor Fomenko was restricted to using only non destructive methods in his investigation. Despite the limited conditions, Formenko was nonetheless able to make some
intriguing findings. Firstly, the ball was not actually a perfect sphere, but rather slightly ovoid by the finest of margins, with the longer axis measuring three millimeters more than its midsection. With the use of a halogen light held up to its surface, Formenko was also able to see it was made from a black glass like substance that was so
dark the light was unable to penetrate it. Then, after X raying the object, Famenko made the startling discovery that there was in fact something else inside it and in a core shaped like half an egg that appeared to absorb X rays four times less intensely than the material surrounding it. And that wasn't all. If there's ever been a year to make the mums in your life feel
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overall density, which left Famenko and his team dumbfounded. According to their calculations, the inner core appeared to have a
negative mass. If this were true, the material that comprised it would be in complete violation of what most scientists consider to be one of the fundamental laws that govern all known matter in our universe, as recognized in all classical theories concerning gravity, including Einstein's theory of general relativity, all energy and by extension, matter exists in a positive state, in the sense that it is something that increases cumulatively as more and more energy or matter is added to it.
Something with negative mass would do the opposite. Very crudely, that would be like putting a kilogram of material on a weighing scale, then adding another material that, despite looking solid, actually reduced the combined overall weight of the objects placed
on the scale. Since weight is actually a measure of the force of gravity on an object, as opposed to mass, which is simply how much matter is in an object, this could theoretically be achieved by a substance that had anti gravitational properties, despite no conclusive evidence that such a thing exists in our universe. The concept of negative mass has been applied to numerous hypothetical technologies, such as time travel devices and machines that might one day be able
to artificially construct a traversible wormhole. After a number of further tests, including one that revealed the dimensions of the object to be based on a base twenty four number system, as opposed to Base ten as we tend to use. Famenko was left in little doubt that the strange black sphere had been manufactured by an alien intelligence, possibly containing
a material with anti gravitational properties or even antimatter. A week after receiving the object, however, just as Flemenko and his team were starting to make headway, Boris now Menko demanded the urgent return of the object, and the investigations were brought to a swift end. It would be another two years before doctor Farmenko heard of it again, as reported by Vladimir Rubsov in the March twenty fifteen edition
of The Fourteen Times. In February nineteen eighty one, two years after doctor Farmenko's experiments, an article appeared in the popular Russian newspaper Izvestia titled A Mysterious Ball in the Lebyanka Sellers. The article, written by doctor Yuri Kolodny, alleged that shortly after Fermenko published his findings, his results made their way to the Military Industrial Commission of the Soviet
Union's Council of Ministers. The Council in turn alert to the Committee for State Security also known as the KGB, and instructed them to find the object and confiscate it immediately, and if Fermenco's results were found to be correct, to neutralize it in an echo of the hexham head story
that I covered in Season one. Since being returned to Boris Nowmenko, the ball had apparently been passed between a number of individuals and was eventually found in the possession of a man named mister d'ev dev, a parapsychologist, was convinced the ball possessed some kind of unknown energy that he'd been trying to harness. After being confronted by the KGB, he agreed to lend it to them on the condition
that they returned it to him afterwards. The ball was then given to a team of scientists, including doctor Colodney, who wrote the nineteen eighty one article about it. Colodney claimed that on opening the sphere, they found it to be comprised of green glass with a brown colored core that was also little more than glass, although it was unusual for having virtually no sodium in it and a
high concentration of strontium. The team also found a number of fine cracks on the sphere's surface, suggesting there was no way it could have contained antimatter, since it was not even airtight. Sadly, they found also that doctor Fermenko's negative mass calculations had been made in error due to a mistake in calculating the ball's center of gravity. Having had the object formally carbon dated, Colodney revealed it was not millions of years old at all, but something much
closer to a few hundred years old. After consulting with a Ukrainian historian that specialized in the history of glass, doctor Colodney and the rest of the team concluded that the mysterious black sphere was nothing more than a gallow, a large glass ball often constructed from waist glass that in the past would be heated up and used as an iron for pressing clothes. The mystery then appeared to
have been solved. After making a copy of the artifact, Colodney wrote that what was left of the original sphere was then returned to mister Diev to use however he pleased, and that was almost that. After the article was published, it soon came to the attention of doctor Famenko, who
carried out the original analysis of the object. His confusion at what he read prompted him to write a letter to the newspaper's editor, as he went on to explain the sphere he'd examined had been undeniably black, not green as doctor Colodney stated, nor were there any cracks on it at all. Furthermore, he knew mister d'ev had enclosed the ball in a block of epoxy resin, from which it would have been virtually impossible to extract it without
damaging it. It was also odd he thought that Colodney said it had been carbon dated, since if it was nothing but glass, there'd be no carbon in it with which to date it. There could only be one explanation, he argued, the ball that KGB had taken from mister d'ev had not been the original sphere, but rather a genuine glass gallow that he used to palm them off. Doctor Famenko left his contact details on the letter, hoping that doctor Colodney would write back to him to explain
his findings further, but Colodney never replied. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via patroon. To receive access to add three episodes us go to patron dot com Forward slash Unexplained pod to sign up, or if you'd like to make a one time donation, you can go to Unexplained podcast dot com Forward Slash Support. All donations, no matter
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