Thursday, October 23, 2003





A month or so ago I received an email by a person calling himself Pavel, who claimed to have found a strange object (shown above) buried in the woods near his home in Perm, Russia. According to Pavel, the object had been ejected from a UFO. During my subsequent correspondence with him, Pavel rejected my suggestion to take the mystery object to a properly equipped lab for analysis and, inexplicably, decided to send the artifact to me via international post. Pavel described the object's anomalous physical characteristics: the Braille-like figure (shown in the upper right-hand corner) had supposedly changed by itself and the cylinder's metallic surface would grow hot after being touched with no evident mechanical cause. These and other properties apparently worried him that the object's original owners would return for it, possibly endangering his family.

I shortly received an email from Pavel claiming that overseas shipping was more expensive than he had expected and requesting me to send money to assist in the artifact's delivery. I declined and email from "Pavel" immediately ceased. I had realized that the possibility of my being hoaxed was very real, and Pavel's request for funds seemed to cinch the matter. But I had become interested in the cylinder's basic resemblance to similar objects associated with the infamous UMMO hoax (see Jacques Vallee's "Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception"). Even the "Z"-shaped glyph on the object's underside bore a vague resemblance to UMMO's trademark stylized "H." Was Pavel operating as an agent for a Russian offshoot of the ostensibly defunct UMMO cult?

After appealing to the UFO community via the UFO UpDates email list, I discovered that at least two other parties had been approached by "Pavel." I now tend to doubt any explicit UMMO/cult connection; the more likely explanation is the desire for quick cash from gullible UFO researchers.

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