HEIGHT 611 is the mountainside where locals watched a blazing red ball flying half-a-mile above ground suddenly plunge to Earth in the 1980s.
The strike – dubbed “Russia’s Roswell Incident” after the famous 1947 New Mexico UFO – was set upon by Soviet scientists, who made some remarkable discoveries.
Locals descended on the crater near Dalnegorsk in Russia’s far east, and harvested otherworldly metallic droplets with an unexplained chemical composition.
The only thing that could cut through the mystery material was a diamond saw blade.
Now, 39 years later, Brit investigator Philip Mantle has dubbed the incident “The Russian Roswell” – after the famous UFO crash in the New Mexico desert, USA, in 1947.
His book, written alongside Paul Stonehill, has revealed eerie new details about the crash on January 29, 1986.
Mantle, a former director of investigations for the British UFO Research ᴀssociation, told The Sun: “There are some of our colleagues that believe that Russia has alien technology from this event, but as yet they have not been able to understand it – just like their counterparts in Roswell in 1947.”
Various witnesses watched the crash landing and recorded what they saw.
Yevgeny Serebrov, a schoolboy at the time, saw the object zoom down to Earth and said it did not have a tail.
And V Korotko, editor of local newspaper Trudovoye Slovo was near the mountain during the UFO crash.
He wrote: “Out of the corner of my eye I saw something that fell on the mountain.
“There was an indistinct impact, not reverberating, but quite strong. The noise lasted less than a second. There was an explosion, and large reddish-white flames.
“It seemed something was engulfed in a powerful fire. The sphere was approximately one metre in diameter. The fire roared.”
A mechanic, V Kondakov, was at a local bus station and saw the UFO zip over the small mining town.
He said it was round, without any protrusions or holes, and looked like it was made from a metal resembling stainless steel.
Mikhail Gershtein, Russia’s top UFO researcher, said lots of witnesses compared the fire burning at the site to electrical welding.
On February 2, 1986, days after the impact, local schoolchildren searched the site and found a burned tree stump, a hole in the ground and branches that had been sheered off by the falling object.
They collected rocks and debris, alongside melted drops of a peculiar substance with a metallic tint, and took everything to the local museum.
Valeri Dvuzhilni, its director, began studying the material and drafted in V Berlizov – a local meteorite expert.
Frustrated by the lack of answers, he decided to lead a team of scientists up the mountain himself.
He later described to journalists how the UFO blew apart a huge chunk of rock where it landed – about two cubic metres – and that 10 square metres of snow had “evaporated” at the site.
Vegetation had been burnt away and the ground was scorched by the blaze.
Combing through the ground turned up 30 grams of the same unusual substance formed into dark, solidified droplets.
Valeri took his discoveries to a high-tech lab, which discovered an incredible alloy of lead and up to 17 other elements.
Analysis showed the material had a “metallic glᴀss” structure – something very rarely found in nature.
The specimens collected at the site were later dubbed “tiny nets” or “mesh”, “little balls”, “lead balls” and “glᴀss pieces”.
Closer examination revealed highly unusual properties.
One of the “tiny nets” contained torn and very thin threads, and each of the threads consisted of even thinner fibres, tied up in plaits.
Intertwined with the fibres were very thin gold wires.
When scientists tried to straighten one of the loops, to be able to see it better, the loop mysteriously disappeared altogether.
Alexey Kulikov, a Russian doctor of geological mineral sciences, said the drops resembled “glᴀssy carbon”, but couldn’t explain how it was created.
Further UFO sightings were reported that summer in the region by pilots and personnel at a local military airbase.
Author Philip, 66, of Pontefract, West Yorkshire, said: “There seems to a consensus of opinion that the Hill 611 crash may well have a conventional explanation, but exactly what remains to be seen.
“Other researchers tend to disagree of course. It does have its yep parallels in the West, the Roswell case being one of them.
“Irrespective of this, it is a fascinating case, which is sure to divulge more information and more theories in the years to come.”
