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Another paleontological find preserved at the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow remains unexplained.



From Not of This Earth (1969) by Peter Kolosimo
Siberian Enigmas
Who was striking down bison hundreds of thousands of years before our cavemen staggered about, growling in search of a stone to turn into a weapon? After what we have discussed, it seems only right to ask ourselves this question seriously, as we observe the skull of a prehistoric bison displayed at the Museum of Paleontology in Moscow. 
The fossil was found west of the Lena River, in the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Yakutia, and one detail immediately drew the attention of scientists: a circular hole in the forehead, such as no spear point could have produced. To our eyes, that wound could only have been caused by the projectile of a firearm.
And it is a wound certainly as old as the bison itself: the process of recalcification visible along its edges rules out the possibility that someone inserted a bullet into the animal’s skull in more or less recent times, and confirms that the beast survived the grim adventure.
These are the opinions of the director of the Moscow museum, Professor Konstantin Flerov.
If asked who might have gone hunting bison with a rifle in prehistoric Siberia, Flerov shrugs and smiles. He thinks of his colleagues who, less cautious than he, do not hesitate to declare: “Only one hypothesis is possible: that linked to the descent, in remote epochs and on more than one occasion, of space explorers to Earth.” It is a hypothesis that, in these regions, exerts a deep fascination.
We are among the Yakuts (or Sakha), that singular people who arrived here long ago from Turkey, after having sojourned at the foot of the Altai. “Sleep,” the Yakuts sing to their dead, whose coffins they place among the branches of trees to facilitate their retrieval by celestial beings, “sleep until the spirits descend from the stars on their splendid chariots.”
Which spirits? Those spoken of by shamans, Mongolian and Siberian priest-magicians, who describe mysterious beings who come to summon the deceased aboard “flying shells,” casting off their “dark skin” when they wish to reveal their true appearance, similar to ours.
It requires no great stretch of imagination to see in these “shells” cosmic vehicles (is it not at least curious that we have coined the terms saucers, flying discs, flying plates?) and in the “removable skin” a space suit.
Let us move further west, and we encounter the baba, those strange funerary monuments that dot the kurgans, the very ancient cemeteries of Siberia, and constitute an insoluble puzzle for archaeologists. Let us observe one closely: it is carved from a stone block sculpted in its upper part in human form. An enigmatic Mongolian face smiles, eyes half-closed, at the objects held in its two hands: a dagger and a sphere. “The dagger that pierces the darkness, the sun of life,” we might say, once again drawing upon shamanic wisdom.
Let us dream of spaceships launched to pierce the cosmic darkness, toward a distant globe preserved in the memory of a vanished people as a symbol of life beyond the dark abysses. Descending southward, we arrive in the Tunguska taiga, where on June 30, 1908, that meteorite fell which, according to Kazantsev, was not a meteorite but an interplanetary nuclear-powered cruiser, having escaped the control of its pilots and exploded a few kilometers above the ground.
“Siberia,” states the Soviet scholar and writer, “and many other regions of our globe, are perhaps immense museums containing the testimonies of cosmic encounters.” And of clashes, we might add, recalling not only the Yakutian bison but also an unfortunate Neanderthal whose skull came to light near Broken Hill, in Rhodesia.
The skull of the ape-man even appears to show the entry hole of a projectile and, on the opposite side, the exit hole. That these might be the famous prehistoric cranial trepanations is impossible: in the Siberian case, no one would certainly have taken the trouble to operate on a bison (without anesthesia, moreover), and in the African case the double wound is enough to demolish the supposition. One might add that the so-called “Neanderthal men” never performed surgical operations of this kind: the only holes—rather large ones—that these cannibalistic anthropoids made in others’ skulls were intended for the extraction of the brain for food.
Some Soviet scientists have also been credited with another sensational conjecture: that certain bones belonging to the gigantic saurians of prehistory might have been shattered by explosive projectiles. The idea clearly arose from the fact that some finds are marked by fractures that seem to admit of no other explanation, both because of the way they appear and because of the position of the skeletons and the nature of the surrounding terrain.
Indeed, if one admits that the Earth has received visits from space since the most remote eras, one cannot expect that astronauts would have refrained from using their weapons against those mountains of flesh and blind fury.