People of Earth!

Forget your jobs. Forget that audit you're doing for Price Waterhouse. Forget that date you've got on Friday at Propaganda. Forget your per diem and stop worrying about who Derk Sauer will find to edit Men's Health magazine. None of it matters anymore.

The world is ending.

Just a few weeks ago, a group of 500 leading experts on UFOs met at the aptly-named Rurik Spiritual-Ethical Center in Chelyabinsk and came to the following conclusion: things are so bad these days, there is so much negative energy and such a despicable change in our entire ethical-spiritual organization, that something terrible must be happening.
The Boyakin photographs. Note mysterious "circles."

That thing would be unclear if it weren't for a clear set of messages that we've all been ignoring, and that is UFO visitations, which they say have been happening in legion all over Russia. They haven't said so explicitly, but what the aliens are apparently trying to tell us with their visits, according to this group, is that our planet is about to die. And nobody's been listening.

Until now. At the conclusion of the congress, the group composed an emotional appeal to the peoples and governments of the planet earth.

"After much heated discussion and scientific debate over a wide range of reports," they wrote, "we have come to the conclusion that the development of human civilization has entered a new, concluding phase."

Loans-for-shares, Naf-Naf, the Chechen war, Herschi Cola-it all points to one thing. "It is all leading," they wrote, "to a cosmo-planetary phenomenon, best known under the title 'Apocalypse.'"

Two days later, the more mainstream newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets carried a banner headline across their front page.
"There Is Life on Mars," it read. "But What About Here?"

Is the world ending with the help of space aliens? An increasing number of people seem to hope so. While the Chelyabinsk group reached their grim verdict, the Western world intensified its recent romance with the extraterrestrial unknown.
Boyakin, continued: Mother-ship clearly visible in upper left-hand corner

With "the X-files" and "Third Rock from the Sun" conquering American television, the major alien-apocalypse feature film "Men in Black" raked in $54 million in its first weekend, shattering last summer's record alien haul brought in by "Independence Day." Meanwhile in the Mars mission, a cuddly little land rover called "Sojourner" crawled along the Martian surface searching for evidence of water and/or life. A web site established at the time of the Martian landing has already collected 100 million hits worldwide.

Worse still, the U.S. government made the bad mistake of publicly denying its involvement in an alleged alien cover-up which supposedly happened some 50 years ago in the desert of New Mexico. The denial, which explained sightings of "alien bodies" through release of the news that the air force had used test "crash dummies" dropped from hot-air balloons some five years after the incident, satisfied no one. The denial only bolstered international belief that Uncle Sam was in league with the aliens, efficiently planning interplanetary mischief in secret laboratories underneath Virginia.

Aliens are hot all over the world now. A conspicuous UFO resurgence in the United States and Russia in particular suggests that in some measure, aliens are taking the place of both sides' cold war enemies. In the American UFO mythology, aliens, just like our stereotypical cold-war Soviet enemies, are usually emotionally-crippled beings with superior but cumbersome technology who are just scary enough to make whipping them really satisfying.

The Russian UFO mythology is a little different.
A "cigar-shaped object."

UFOs aren't usually enemies. Lately, they're usually messengers who come to earth to let Russians know that any world which allows America to run rampant all over it isn't worth preserving, and will soon die.

"The modern world is rotten to the core," said "UFOlogist" Aleksander Semenov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Unknown Ecology, Russia's largest UFO organization. "You see it everywhere in all the corruption and commercialism. The UFOs are a sign of what is to come. They can tell us the truth about our future."

The Moscow suburb of Balashikha is best known for being the home of the MVD tank unit which was sent in to the capital to enforce the curfew during the coup of 1993. It is also home to several CSKA sport teams and a half-dozen or so pioneer camps. These days, another particular sort of summer outdoor activity takes place there-UFO training.

Semenov and his "unknown ecology" friends-which quite curiously include an inordinately large number of Itar-TASS correspondents-hold seminars there each weekend to help elementary school children learn to "use ecology to come closer to UFOs."
Cigar-shaped object photographed over Novokuznetsk, May 1993

In reality this mainly involves walks in the woods coupled with talks about "unusual phenomena" that will help the next generation comprehend UFOs when they meet them.

"It is important for youngsters to know how to interpret the signs they are given," said Semenov. "If they understand the urgency of what's going on, they might, unlike my generation, try to do something about it."

Semenov dismisses the Chelyabinsk conference as the work of a bunch of publicity-hungry hacks, but agrees in principle that the end is nigh. His own Moscow conference, held a week after the Chelyabinsk one, came to a similar conclusion. (A key factor in that meeting's proceedings, incidentally, was the performance of an Italian UFOlogist who called himself "Buon Giorno," who impressed everyone by his ability to bleed on command out of his forehead.). After all, he said, the evidence was hard to dismiss.

What evidence? There are no shortage of UFO sightings in Russia to look back upon. In 1991, in Vladivostok, a military parachutist named Oleg Lakeyev died when his parachute failed to open during an air show. Photographs of the event later revealed large circles in the sky around various parachutists. Local reporter Vyacheslav Boyakin of the daily Vladivostok has been loudly accusing UFOs of causing Lakeyev's death ever since-a campaign that has helped him sell his photos dozens of times. Aliens must like parachutes, because after the Lakeyev incident, UFOs started showing up at air shows around the country. Ukrainian photographer Andrei Chernov captured a UFO on film at an Odessa aerodrome on May 5, 1992, causing a stir in the local press for weeks to come. In May 1994, another UFO was sighted at an air show in Saratov and was listed as a possible culprit in a runway mishap several weeks later.

Cigar-shaped objects in Yalta, September 1983. A levitating blob outside the village of Pomari-Uzhgorod in February 1983. The "abominable snowman"- remember, the Russian Sasquatch is widely considered to be a space creature-seen clawing trees near Petrozavodsk in June 1993. The list goes on. The popular magazines "NLO" and "Anomalia" have been chock full of UFO accounts since they were founded in the perestroika period (both in 1990, incidentally). After decades when the only non-Russians to be officially spotted flying over the Soviet Union were Gary Powers and Matthias Rust, Russians started recalling whole lifetimes worth of UFOs once it became safe to do so in print around 1988.

"It's not that we didn't see them before," said Moscow UFOlogist Valery Rzhevsky. "It's that we have more opportunity to tell the truth about it now."

Again, the political orientation of Russian UFOs speaks volumes about the people sighting them. In the United States, UFO enthusiasts routinely accuse the U.S. government of UFO coverups, as the conspiratorial Westmoreland-military-industrial complex remains the chief villain in the eyes of a whole generation of 60's rejects.
That cuddly Sojourner buggy

After all, the thinking goes, if any human entity would be accountable in a UFO scandal, it would have to be the same people who laid Vietnam on us.

Russians are different. For them, it's not their own government-which Rzhevsky says is "perceived as too incompetent to cover up alien visitations"- but, again, the U.S. government which is generally behind most UFO mischief. The latest issue of Anomalia accuses the U.S. government of kidnapping crashed space aliens in Brazil and taking them back to Washington for analysis. And Semenov himself entered the UFO world after he spotted a "cigar-shaped object [isn't it odd that they are cigar-shaped all over the world?]" while walking down Mikhailovskoye Shosse in Moscow. The object turned out to be the work of the Americans.

"It flew overhead slowly, near the Molodezhnaya. Hotel, and I was sure it was a large spacecraft," he said. "But I later learned that it was the after-effect of a U.S. laser experiment."

Semenov refuses to make any connection between Russian politics and alien visitations. He is noncommittal when asked if Anatoly Chubais is a space alien, saying that visitations point to "a general lowering of ethical standards," rather than betoken specific instances of corruption.

Semenov and his followers are ready for you if you ask them, with a straight face, "Are you kidding?" The answer is, they are not kidding. They believe that UFOs actually exist, just as some readers of newspapers like Skandali actually believe in giant man-eating plants.

"I believe in a higher power," said Lera Yevdokimova, one of the young girls at the Unknown Ecology retreat. "Space is too vast for it to be empty. Besides, science has proven that life outside earth exists."

Most of all-and even UFO enthusiasts agree on this-people believe in UFOs because earth culture leaves something to be desired. In Russia, Rzhevsky says, things are such a mess that many people are willing and ready to roll the dice with an invading army of Plutonians.

"Unless they eat us," he said, "they can't be too much worse than what we've got."

Overall, the Russian UFO mythology tends to be more humane than the American one. On the mass-culture level, Americans in movies and television consistently dream up aliens who provide a healthy outlet for collective aggression by allowing us to shoot them by the hundreds. Russians like those in the Chelyabinsk group, on the other hand, seek to make contact and to use alien visitations as an excuse to convince their neighbors to be better people. "We believe," the group wrote at the end of its "Apocalypse" letter, "that the press must first of all inform its followers of the main thing-the necessity of raising the cultural and spiritual level of all people on the earth. We ask that the ins and outs of culture be propagandized and that the greatest achievements of all peoples of the earth be demonstrated. The power to save humanity is in our hands."

Crazy? Probably. Wrong? Maybe not. It's unlikely that we here at the eXile can do much to raise the cultural and spiritual level of humanity, let alone save it. But we'd sure as hell like to see one of those cigar-shaped UFOs.