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June 8, 2021 - Skeptoid
18:06
Skeptoid #783: The Legend of Barsa-Kelmes

The story behind the story of the many paranormal events associated with this former island in the Aral Sea. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Barza Kelmus: The Aral Sea Island 00:07:53
Urban legends come from all around the world, and when they happen in non-English-speaking countries, the version we get is usually boiled down to just the most sensational aspects that the translator decided to share.
Today we're going to look at one from Central Asia, a former island in the now-dry Aral Sea, said to be the source of countless paranormal events.
Barza Kelmus.
That's coming up next on Skeptoid.
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The legend of Barza Kelmas Travel with me now to the plains of Central Asia, to these seemingly endless expanses of sand and brush and wind.
Formerly sunken beneath the now dry Aral Sea, these wastes are now the domain of wild burrow and antelope.
Here and there a low prominence rises above the desert floor, and one of these was once the uninhabited island named Barza Kelmus.
It was the largest island in the Aral Sea, measuring 23 by 7 kilometers, and being a barren spot in a now non-existent lake in one of the most barren parts of the world, it would never have been particularly noteworthy.
Were it not for one of the most astounding collections of paranormal and unexplained phenomena said to have taken place there.
Everything from pteranodons to missing time to vanishing populations has been associated with the island.
And today we're going to find out how much of it is true and what the source for the rest of it might be.
The Aral Sea itself is a lake on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
It's an Indariyak sink, meaning a low spot that water drains into and that has no outlet.
For about 20,000 years it was the fourth largest lake in the world, kept full by the rivers that flowed into it.
Since the 1800s, it had an active fishing industry, taking advantage of its rich populations of both native and imported fish species.
But in the 1960s, the Soviet Union decided that it needed agriculture more than it needed a lake, and the rivers were all diverted to nourish the new Soviet farmlands.
Ever since, the Aral Sea has been progressively drying up.
Today it consists of about four small lakes, totaling only a 20th of the former sea's size.
Hopelessly polluted and salty.
The many former islands like Barza Kelmus are now just part of the arid landscape.
Today you might speed right across them in your Land Rover and never know it.
Being in a part of the world so far removed from Western literature and culture, it's not surprising that many listeners may not have heard of Barza Kelmus.
But mentions of it are out there, few and far between though they may be.
One of the only sources that's commonly found in these mentions is a book by Nicholas Rorik called Heart of Asia.
In this book, they say, Rorik tells a few of the yarns.
In one, a group of several Kazakh families decided to move onto the island, but once they did so, no trace of them was ever again found.
Most of the island stories come out of Russia.
One of these is from Vladimir Bobwinyin, a radio operator for a geodetic survey on the Aral Sea.
Set ashore on Barza Kelmas with a party, he set up his radio equipment and checked in with the ship, though he was unable to reach anyone at the scheduled time for contact.
Finally, he did, but only after 15 minutes of trying, and once contact was established, the ship accused him of being a full day late with the contact, and the whole party charged with being alcoholics.
Other party members who had logged observations found the times of their entries disagreed by hours.
A stranger tale came down from Norpis Baijanov, who told what happened to his father in the 1830s or 1840s.
He was fishing on the lake with his crew when strong winds damaged their sail and forced them to land on an unfamiliar shore of Barza Kelmus.
Along the low bluffs, the elder Bajanov found a cave, and in it, a large egg that he took at first for a stone.
Upon being disturbed, the egg hatched, and a black creature crawled out of it.
It was the size of a calf, and had claws and wings as large as the boat's sail.
Its head was a terrifying beak longer than the creature's whole body and filled with teeth.
They called it a shaitan, a sort of devil in Islamic mythology.
Returning to the island on a later trip, he found an abandoned yurt, and inside the yurt, he was shocked to find the long-dead corpse of the shaitan.
He did collect a tooth from it, which his son had kept, and had it identified by a paleontology museum as being that of a Jurassic-era Pteranodon.
The island's association with time slips, or changes in the speed of time, is also showcased in a traditional tale called Koblinzi Bater and the Seven Brothers.
It concerns a great hero named Koblinzi, who fights to defend a young woman against seven brothers who wish her to marry against her will.
He battles them, but is compelled to retreat to Barza Kelmus, where he rests for three days and three nights.
So refreshed, he returns to the shore to resume his battle, whereupons he finds the seven brothers, now all old men, 33 years older than before.
So terrified are they by what seems to them to be Koblinzi's ability to defy old age, that they immediately surrender to him, and he takes their best horse in prize and rescues the girl, who had spent those same 33 years waiting on a mountaintop for him.
We could go on devoting whole shows to the rest of the lore about the island, such as that it's claimed to exist on one of Earth's metaphysical ley lines proposed by paranormalist Ivan T. Sanderson, plesiosaurs and their bones, or stories of fishermen having explored the barracks of a secret military base on the island, manned by soldiers wearing unmarked uniforms and carrying laser weapons.
These tales go on ad infinitum.
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Novoshilov's Final Words on Lukanyenka 00:07:20
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But I was most eager to find one strange tale in particular, the one said to be in Rorik's book, Heart of Asia, Memoirs of the Himalaya.
So I managed to get my hands on a copy, which was not easy.
It tells all sorts of poetic tales from various cultures throughout the Himalayas, and it's quite a lovely book.
But my version was a 1990 edition, and I noticed the author, Nicholas Rorik, died in 1947.
Looking more closely at what I had, I found it was an English translation of two books, Heart of Asia and Shambhala, both written much earlier under his original name, Nikolai Rarik, Heart of Asia in 1929, and Shambhala, written in a year I could not immediately determine.
But Heart of Asia is where the story is said to come from.
So I went through the entire book carefully, and guess what I found?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Nothing even remotely resembling the story of people visiting an island or missing time in any capacity.
Rorik's narrative of his travels never even came within thousands of kilometers of the Aral Sea or either Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan.
Apparently, someone either made something up or got something very wrong.
So the red flags start flying.
The next thing I did was to go back to the translation of Barza Kelmus, which is consistently reported to mean something like, Island of No Return, or Who Goes There Will Not Return, or You Will Not Return, in Kazakh.
Google Translate is a very helpful starting point to see whether a claimed translation is on the right track or not.
But of course, we always go to a native-speaking community for the final verdict.
So I took it to two Kazakh language groups on Facebook.
Barza Kelmas literally translates to something like, I don't want to go.
And my best distillation of the discussion around its common interpretation is that it's similar to English phrases we'd use like badlands or no man's land.
a place you probably don't want to go, which is a perfectly reasonable name for such a barren island so far from anywhere.
The whole idea of island of no return is just a dramatization invented by the storytellers.
And in this case, we know who the storytellers were, because they wrote up the whole case and published it.
It stemmed from Grigory Nevirov, president of KLF. a prominent club for science fiction fans at Moscow State University.
In 1990, he put out a call for local stories of the paranormal that anyone might know.
Stepping up to answer the call was Sergei Lukanyenka, then just a young student, but today a very famous Russian science fiction and fantasy author.
Lukanyenka remembered an article published in 1959 titled, The Mystery of the Island of Barza Kelmus by journalist G. Novoshilov.
In that article, Novoshilov told the story of the Pteranodon from the perspective of a narrator in conversation with the late fisherman's son.
Lukanyenka thought that idea sounded pretty good, but also that it could use some more beef.
And so he wrote up the basics of some of the other stories surrounding Barza Kelmus, sourced from his own imagination, and submitted it all to Nevirov.
Neviarov was hooked and asked Lukanyenka for more.
He supplied more, but also finally let Nevyrov in on the joke.
But that was okay, as they wrote science fiction, not science fact.
Together, they expanded the lore of Barza Kelmus, and Neviarov published it in 1991 under the title, Island You Will Not Return, in the magazine Tieknika Moladyoze, sort of a Soviet version of popular science.
It went crazy viral.
The article inspired fan bases and clubs of its own, and was a ravenous black hole sucking new fan fiction and new additions to the story from anyone who would contribute them.
In a 1993 letter to Lukanyenka, Nevyurov noted with pride that they had succeeded in, quote, the birth of a new myth.
Toward the end of 1992, Lukanyenka managed to arrange a meeting with Novoshilov himself, who was then 90 years old.
He published an account of their meeting in KLF in 1994.
They enjoyed a chuckle over the whole episode.
Novoshilov even showed him an old letter he'd received from the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan, in which they asked if he still had the Pteranodon tooth.
At that point, Novoshilov freely confessed that he made the entire thing up, saying, We decided to play a trick on the people.
If you don't put an end to Barza Kelmus now, then our grandchildren will organize expeditions to the unfortunate island.
So, I confess.
But it is Novoshilov's final words that Lukanyenka took down that perhaps best capture the history of the Barza Kelmus legend, teaching a lesson so relevant to so much of what we hear today.
Sometimes I ask myself a question, is there anything beyond the ordinary?
Psychics, flying saucers, aliens?
I'm afraid to answer, for the answer is so offensive, all the more for a science fiction writer.
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