In the mid-1990s, near the city of Kyshtym, a mysterious creature appeared, the origin of which has yet to be explained by any of its numerous versions. This story contains several blank spaces. The events have already become overrun with rumurs. Some eyewitnesses to the strange phenomenon refuse to give interviews, while others’ stories are blatant fabrications. It all started with a strange document about an unseen but real baby named “Alyoshenka.”

The strange story of Alyoshenka

One night during a violent thunderstorm in the summer of 1996, Tamara Prosvirina, 74, a resident of the village of Kalinovo in the Kyshtym district of the Chelyabinsk region (1,764 km east of Moscow), discovered “Alyoshenka” in a pile of sand.

Prosvirina was seen that day strolling down the street talking to something while carrying something covered in a blanket in the small Ural region city of Kyshtym. The elderly retired woman brought her find home and started to think of “Alyoshenka” as her son, keeping him wrapped up.

“She said to us, ‘It’s my baby, Alyoshenka [short for Alexey!'” ‘But it was never shown,” the locals recalled. “Prosvirina had a son named Alexey, but he was an adult at the time, and he was serving time for theft in 1996.” So we concluded that the woman had gone insane, talking to a toy and mistaking it for her son.”

Prosvirina did have mental issues, and she was eventually admitted to a clinic to be treated for schizophrenia. The creature in the blanket, on the other hand, was not a toy but a living creature she had discovered in the woods near a well.

Alyoshenka: Real alien?

Alyoshenka was described by those who saw it as a 20-25-centimeter-tall humanoid. Tamara Naumova, Prosvirina’s friend who saw Alyoshenka in her apartment and later told Komsomolskaya Pravda, “Brown body, no hair, big protruding eyes, moving its tiny lips, making squeaky sounds…”

“His mouth was red and round, and he was staring at us,” another witness, Prosvirnina’s daughter-in-law, said. The woman, according to her, was feeding the strange ‘baby’ cottage cheese and condensed milk. “He looked sad, and when I looked at him, I felt pain,” the daughter-in-law recalled.

Locals’ perspectives differ. Vyacheslav Nagovsky, for example, stated that the dwarf was “hairy” and had “blue eyes,” while Nina Glazyrina, another friend of Prosvirina, stated, “He was standing near the bed, with big eyes,” and also mentioned hair. Others claim the humanoid had no hair.

The only thing these people agreed on was that Alyoshenka “looked like a real alien.” However, the testimonies of people like Nagovsky and Glazyrina are dubious: both were drunkards (as were most of Prosvirina’s friends) and died of alcoholism.

Radioactive place

Journalist Andrey Loshak, who made the film “The Kyshtym Dwarf,” quoted locals as saying, “Perhaps Alyoshenka was a [extraterrestrial] humanoid, but in this case he made a mistake landing in Kyshtym.” Sounds about right: the city of 37,000 people isn’t exactly paradise. Even without considering local alcoholics.

Kyshtym faced the first nuclear disaster in Soviet history in 1957. The 160-ton concrete lid was thrown into the air after a plutonium explosion at Mayak, a nearby secret nuclear power station. It is the third-worst nuclear disaster in history, after Fukushima in 2011 and Chernobyl in 1986. The environment and atmosphere were severely polluted.

“Sometimes fishermen catch fish that don’t have eyes or fins,” Loshak explained. As a result, one popular explanation was that Alyoshenka was a human mutant deformed by radiation.

Alyoshenka dies

The unavoidable occurred one day. Prosvirina’s neighbours called the hospital, and she was taken away by doctors. She objected and insisted on remaining with Alyoshenka because he would die without her. “How could I believe the words of a woman suffering from acute schizophrenia?” ” shrugged the local paramedic.

The Kyshtym dwarf died because he had no one to feed him. When Prosvirina’s friend Naumova is asked why she didn’t visit Alyoshenka or call anyone, she responds, “Well, goddamit, aren’t you freaking geniuses?” I wasn’t in the village at the time! ” When she returned, the small creature had died. Prosvirina, who was most likely insane, was the only one who cried for him.

With Prosvirina gone, a friend discovered the body and created a mummy: “washed it with spirit and dried it,” a local newspaper reported. The man was later arrested for stealing cable and turned over the body to police.

Investigation

“Vladimir Bendlin was the first sober person who tried to make sense of this story,” Loshak says. Bendlin, a local police officer, took Alyoshenka’s body from the thief. His boss, on the other hand, was uninterested in the case and told him to “stop this nonsense.”

Bendlin, dubbed “Fox Mulder from the Urals” by Komsomolskaya Pravda, began his own investigation, with Alyoshenka kept in his fridge. “Don’t even ask what my wife said about it,” he grumbled.

Bendlin never confirmed or denied his extraterrestrial origins. A local pathologist stated that he was not human, while a gynecologists’ stated that he was simply a child with terrible deformities.

Then Bendlin made a mistake: he turned over the dwarf’s body to ufologists, who took it and never returned it. After that, Alyoshenka’s traces vanished, with journalists searching for more than 20 years.

Outcome

Alyoshenka’s body has yet to be discovered, and it is unlikely that it will be. His “mother,” the pensioner Prosvirina, died in 1999 after being hit by a truck late at night. Locals said she had been dancing on a highway. The majority of those who had met him had also died. Scientists, journalists, and even psychics continue to debate who (or what) he was, with various theories ranging from an alien to an ancient dwarf.

Despite this, serious experts are sceptical. Alyoshenka, a humanoid mummy discovered in Atacama, Chile, has a similar appearance but was proven in 2018 to be a human whose phenotype was caused by rare gene mutations, some of which were previously unknown. The Kyshtym dwarf was most likely not an alien as well.

In Kyshtym, however, everyone remembers him and his tragic fate. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, “the name Alexey is now extremely unpopular in the city.” “Who wants their child to be mocked at school as a ‘Kyshtym dwarf?'” ”