The Kyshtym dwarf (Alyoshenka)

Kyshtym sits in Chelyabinsk Oblast, in the Russian Urals. The town already carried a heavy name. In 1957 the Mayak nuclear accident spread fallout across the region. On its southern outskirts lies a small settlement called Kaolinovy. Tamara Vasilyevna Prosvirina lived there. She was a pensioner, reported as 74, with a history of mental illness. In about May 1996, she said, a "telepathic order" called her out.

Accounts of where she found it disagree. The woods near a well, while she fetched water. The cemetery, which she visited at night. A pile of sand during a thunderstorm. What she brought home is clearer. It stood about 20 to 25 cm tall. The description that survives: "Brown body, no hair, big protruding eyes." A large head. Greyish-green skin, in one account. Two front teeth in the upper jaw. "His mouth was red and round, he was looking at us," her friends said. It "looked like a real alien."

She called it her son. Alyoshenka. She fed it sugar water from a spoon, caramel and milk. It lay there "moving its tiny lips, making squeaky sounds." Her friends remembered one more thing. "He looked sad." At least two people confirmed it showed signs of life and even ate.

Then Prosvirina was taken to a psychiatric hospital. Alone in the house, Alyoshenka died. A lodger, Vladimir Nurtdinov, took the body and dried it in the sun.

August 1996. Nurtdinov was arrested in a theft case. He asked Capt. Evgeny Mokichev whether he "believed in aliens," and gave up the mummy. Maj. Vladimir Bendlin took it on. He videotaped the body, interviewed witnesses on camera and kept the mummy in his home refrigerator. The case was never registered. "The chief said: bring me a dead cat and register it. I had 25 cases in progress," Bendlin recalled. Mokichev put it more bluntly. "We were reprimanded, our boss got a dressing-down for taking this on."

Doctors looked at it without any official status. They split. Pathologist Stanislav Samoshkin said it was not human. Forensic expert Lyubov Romanova said the anomalies were "just too many." Gynaecologist Irina Yermolaeva and urologist Igor Uskov saw a human fetus of 20 to 25 weeks with congenital malformations. They raised the Mayak accident as a possible cause.

In autumn 1996 Bendlin handed the body to ufologists led by Galina Semenkova. It was never seen again. The group later told a story, as Bendlin retold it: "Shortly after leaving Kyshtym, our engines stalled. An oval-shaped levitating object hovered above, extracting the artifact via gravitational beam."

In 2002 Vadim Chernobrov of Kosmopoisk obtained the cloth that had wrapped the body. The Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences found "the DNA of an ordinary person, only with many developmental pathologies." English Wikipedia dates the testing to April 2004. The body itself was never officially tested.

KP journalists Andrey Gorbunov and Ekaterina Saltyakova spent three years on the case. Semenkova finally told them it was a human embryo, not a humanoid, and that her group had disposed of the mummy. In 2025 she said it again. "Alyoshenka is no humanoid. It's a human embryo."

Prosvirina did not live to hear it. She died on 5 August 1999, hit by a truck at night. In 2015 Kosmopoisk raised a monument to Alyoshenka on the shore of Lake Anbash. Andrey Loshak made a documentary for NTV. Plays, a novel, songs and a festival, Alyoshenka FEST, followed. The comparisons with the Atacama skeleton from Chile keep coming. The small body is gone. The story stays.