In 1990, when the system changed in Russia, I was eighteen years old. It was a hard time for many people. A large part of the population lost their work, yet others lost their belief in the future. The idea of a union and of community was going down with the Soviet Union, and it was being replaced by individuality and a sense that everything was crazy.

My sister is four years older than me, but at the time, we were very close. We were both interested in science-fiction movies, alien stories, and everything unusual and crazy. Everything that was certain about the future no longer existed, and we looked to figure out the meaning of life in these kinds of stories. 

One time, we read an article about a strange place in the Permsky region, near the village of Molebka. According to this article, strange things happened in this place. There were UFO contacts and paranormal activities. The author of this article had published some photos with strange objects in the sky, and he claimed that these objects were UFOs. The author also argued that things like this often happened in this area, as in Area 51 in the United States. 

My sister and I were fired up with the idea of going to this place, and we made a plan about how we would do it. Our parents checked this plan, approved it, and gave us some money to go to Molebka by train. 

It was the end of summer. This place had wide green fields with a mixed-tree forest and a quiet river flowing through it. We got off at the railway station in Molebka and headed to the end of the village so that we could cross over the Sylva River. When we got to the river bank, we found an amazing view: The river smoothly flowed around the village, sunbeams were playing in the fast-moving water, and the riverbanks were covered in grass. There was no bridge crossing the river, but from the article, we knew there was a ford where we could cross. We found vehicle tracks going from the riverbank into the water, and we approached. The ford was deeper than we had accounted for, and we paused in order to figure out how to cross. 

Suddenly, we heard the sound of a working tractor, and after a short time, we saw the tractor approaching the crossing. The tractor driver stopped near us and kindly offered to help us to the other side. We were so happy about that and soon reached the major point of our journey. 

There were no mosquitoes in this place, the weather was nice, the air was full of birdsong, and there were a lot of strange people who wanted to believe in aliens coming toward us. I was a young man and very excited but not enough to lose my critical thinking. I did not see any flying saucers or aliens, but I saw a beautiful sky with a billion stars. I sat by the fire in the forest for a few nights and listened to a lot of philosophical and cosmological theories from the very nice and friendly people I met during this time, who sincerely believed in what they were saying. 

I saw flowers that became fluorescent at night; I saw one lonely tree that had a lot of circular notches on the bark of each branch. But it didn’t matter much compared to the faith that a miracle was about to happen. We all wanted to believe that we were not alone in the universe, and we had common hopes, common dreams, and common expectations that we shared with each other. Every person who was there was able to talk about their experience with strange things in this place or in their personal life. There were a lot of people who came to see alien ships, strange objects in the sky, or paranormal activities. All of them wanted to believe that something real was going to happen in this place. The feeling of expectation was everywhere, and it felt like it was being transmitted to each person through the air. 

I have noticed that if a lot of people have strong expectations about something happening, and they want to believe that so much, it doesn’t matter if it happens or not in reality. This expectation is the real miracle.

When we came back home and dipped back into our simple, ordinary life, after a few months, I started to miss the expectations I’d had in that strange place. It turned out that the people I met gave me hope and filled my life with a kind of meaning. I felt that we were not alone in the whole empty space of the universe, and that there was something out there smarter than us, kinder than us, and more humane than us that would take care of us and help us solve our problems. 

At the same time, I clearly understood that it doesn’t matter if aliens come to us or not. We are responsible for our individual lives, and it depends on us how life will be. In that wild pursuit of individuality in the 1990s, we had lost the sense of community, but we could find it. It didn’t matter if it was a shared belief in aliens or whatever else. We had to find a way to find each other again.