Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency release, dated 2012-06-01, contains an English translation of a 1948 Soviet article by S. P. Tolstov and M. A. Orlov on archaeological aerial surveys in Khwarazm, Uzbekistan, during 1945 and 1946. It describes flight altitudes, lighting and camera methods for photographing ruins. The authors report flights of more than 9,000 kilometers that doubled the number of known monuments, located medieval cities and irrigation networks, and produced an archaeological map. It contains no UFO material.
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Middle Ages was not vindicated and no monuments were discovered there. Earthold had based his belief on the legend of the turning of the Amu-Larya into the Caspian Sea after the Mongol invasion, which apparently was based on the flow of waters in the western branch of the Amu-Larya, and the Daryalyk which falls into Sary-Karych Lake. A large dead oasis, attributed to the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries of our era, with numerous monuments, was discovered there. Furthermore, the ruins of the ancient medieval cities of Vazir, Torzek and Adak, mentioned in the Chronicles, were discovered in the basin of the Daryalyk. At Khwarazm it was possible through aerial research to make a historical map of the ancient irrigational network of the Cherben-Yab Canal. Detailed surveys of many monuments of ancient and medieval Khwarazm were made and a large dead oasis was discovered next to the city of Toprak-Kala. Thus, it was possible to make an archaeological map (scale 1:1,500,000) of ancient Phwarazm as well as the entire northwestern part of Middle Asia from the Syr-Larya to the middle Uzboy. Other expeditions are using the methods pioneered by the Khwerazmian Aviation Unit in researches at Karmir-Blur, Trans-Caucasia. The development of aerial exploration will be an important step in Soviet archaeology.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 6 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.