The Molyobka Triangle (M-Zone): Emil Bachurin's circle in the snow, Perm Krai 1983

Molyobka is a small village in Kishertsky District, Perm Krai, where the Molyobka River joins the Sylva. A Demidov ironworks operated there from 1787 to 1904. A few kilometres south lies the forest that would become the M-Zone, better known as the Molyobka Triangle.

October 29, 1983. Emil Bachurin, a geologist from Perm, was hunting near the village. Above the forest, something glowed. Accounts differ on what it was: a glowing sphere, a purple ball rising from the forest, or an object resembling a flying saucer. Some sources place the event in the autumn of 1984.

Bachurin marked the coordinates with a compass and walked to the spot. On fresh snow he found a yellow-brown thaw, a regular circle 62 to 63 metres across. The grass inside was crushed and seemed dried "as if by a giant iron." His watch had been running perfectly. Now it was about two hours behind.

Bachurin later said soil from the circle held yttrium and scandium at three orders of magnitude above normal. He also spoke of telepathic contact with an invisible alien entity.

Bachurin studied the area for 25 years. Yuri Belikov wrote of an anomalous zone in Molodaya Gvardiya in 1988. In 1989, Riga journalist Pavel Mukhortov coined "village M." in a series for Sovetskaya Molodyozh. On 12 October 1989, Komsomolskaya Pravda carried Belikov's "Stalkers." At the peak, about 500 seekers were in the zone at once.

Local hunters, through Bachurin, described a bright white half-disc that hovered for a moment, with a small flickering border. Expeditions saw glowing spheres ranging from red-orange to blue, arranged in regular geometric figures. They seemed to observe the researchers, then disappeared when people approached. Locals told of silver spheres that appeared, hovered and vanished. Some photographs showed orange transparent spheres that no one had seen with the naked eye, and in 2005 Nikolay Subbotin's group RUFORS photographed more.

The stories grew stranger: giant black humanoid figures, and phosphorescent silhouettes by the river seen by Mukhortov, whose film came out exposed or failed. A. Goryukhin of the Ufa Aviation Institute reported a mechanical clock falling 5 hours 41 minutes behind. Batteries drained. Three birches at the Central Clearing stood about 1 °C warmer than their surroundings.

No official Soviet or Russian investigation has been found. In 1992, Perm State University reported no magnetic variations and no unusual microorganisms. Slightly raised radiation was linked to hydrocarbons and oil extraction. The so-called pyramids were slag heaps from old copper smelting.

Doubt also came from the village itself, where villagers circulated press rebuttals in spring 1990. Members of Mukhortov's own expedition contradicted his accounts. Locals later claimed that tourism operators had deliberately burned patterns into fields. Others point to gas from geological faults, bioluminescence in the swamps, mirages, river fog, and military flights or launches from the Plesetsk cosmodrome. A ufologist expedition in March 2026 found nothing.

Bachurin died on 24 February 2009 in a house fire at Molyobka, but the zone outlived him. In 2008, about 450,000 tourists visited Perm Krai, and roughly half of them went to the zone. A UFO road sign went up in 2010 beside the Perm to Yekaterinburg highway. Eduard Schreiber's German film Zone M premiered at the Berlinale in 2000, and one podcast called the zone "Russia's Area 51." A tale of a 1908 expedition and scattered bodies has been called a fabrication modelled on the Dyatlov Pass incident.