The Chernobyl disaster occurred on 26 April 1986 at the V.I. Lenin nuclear power station in northern Ukraine (part of the Soviet Union at the time), 3 km from the town of Pryp"jat': together with Fukishima, it was the most serious nuclear accident in history, placed at the highest level of the INES scale classifying radiological events according to their degree of severity.
Radioactive clouds also reached Eastern Europe, Finland and Scandinavia, touching also Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Balkans, up to portions of the East Coast of North America.
According to a Greenpeace report extended to all cases of cancer related in some way to the disaster, in these 30 years the number of deaths would have reached six million.
Despite being classified as catastrophic, no one seems to have really investigated thoroughly the causes of the accident, also because most of the documents have been destroyed or are inaccessible because they are sealed.
The focus on the Chernobyl case was awakened in 2015 with the docu-film "Chernobyl-the Russian Woodpecker" by Chad Gracia, focused on a perspective of strong conspiracy matrix: the protagonist, an artist named Fedor Alexandrovich investigates the causes of the disaster in the belief that in the Soviet Union of 1986, now on its way out, nothing happened by chance.
In fact, Chernobyl was the only major environmental incident officially attributed to human error and Fedor’s hypothesis is that someone politically influential gave the precise order to blow up the reactor.
But why deliberately provoke such a disaster?
Who would have the political motive and power to do so?
The hypothesis arises that the explosion would have to do with a huge over-the-horizon radar (OTH) built near the power plant, called Duga ("arc" or "curve"), equipped with a giant antenna whose function, in the middle of the Cold War, had to be to intercept with a 25-minute advantage the launch of any missiles by the United States.
Nicknamed "Woodpecker" generated a short-wave radio signal with a characteristic 10 Hz pulse with which disturbed radio channels all over the world and not only: interferences were such as to disturb airliners and European telephone circuits.
The real function of Duga, however, was not clear: not being the radar signals able to effectively overcome the magnetic barrier of the northern lights, the utility of the antenna as "missile shield" falls.
So why would the USSR invest so much money in this project?
In the cauldron of anti-Soviet propaganda by the United States, since emerged the hypothesis that it was a tool for mental control or weather control or a Western Communication espionage system.
In Gracia's documentary, just to divert the attention of the Party and public opinion from the secret malfunction of DUGA, the then Minister of Communications would order the explosion of the reactor in a phone call of which the traces have been lost (but apparently there are testimonies).
Although the government maintained the incident was the result of a flawed reactor design, coupled with human error cause the workers weren't sufficiently trained to handle any sort of emergency situation, the truth about Chernobyl remains muddied with various other conflicting conspiracy theories.
One of them suggests the CIA sabotaged The Nuclear Plant's Control Systems: theorists believe in an attempt to prevent the USSR's future nuclear attacks , the CIA sabotaged equipment at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, causing the malfunction of the reactor.
Another theory is that the KGB is responsible for the Chernobyl explosion because it would ensure Western and Central European dependency on Russia for energy far down the road by instilling a European fear of nuclear power, and they would have to rely on Russia's vast supply of natural energy resources.
The last one hypotesis postulatesUFOs got involved during the disaster: a large number of people maintain it could have been a global catastrophe, but a few UFOs zoomed in and saved the day, they hovered over a newly-smoking reactor, stopped the smoke, and sped off.
Air traffic controllers in the area also reported seeing strange, unidentified flying crafts in the weeks preceding the meltdown.
"We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation."
-Svetlana Alexievich
Resources related to Chernobyl conspiracy theories: from the Russian Woodpecker to aliens
- Ranker
- AV CLUB
- HYPERALLERGIC
Cover Image by by Amort1939
Article image by Piotr Andryszczak
Article image2 by Alexander Blecher
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