The Spacesuit

An elderly priest from a small monastery near Rostov shared an unusual story with me. Had he heard it from anyone else, one might have chalked it all up to the author's wild imagination or mental instability. But the narrator, Father Tikhon, is known in church circles as a highly respected figure, not prone to outlandish fabrications, so I have no reason to distrust him.

This mysterious event took place in his life in the late 1980s. One day, Father Tikhon was walking back to his monastery from a nearby village along a road running through a field. It was getting dark, but the setting sun still provided enough light for Tikhon to notice a strange figure in the distance, crossing the field to intercept him. The figure moved slowly, with a strange, mechanical gait.

 Approaching the mysterious figure, the priest was taken aback—he was wearing what looked like an astronaut's spacesuit, with the helmet's visor raised. Despite his monastic life, Father Tikhon had heard plenty about spaceflight, so he initially mistook the stranger for a cosmonaut from a descent module that had landed somewhere nearby. Thinking the stranger might need help, Father Tikhon approached him and attempted to speak. But upon peering inside the helmet, he stopped mid-sentence and nearly stumbled—the suit was completely empty! How it had moved was completely incomprehensible. The priest was dumbfounded, gripped by sudden fear, and then ran away as fast as he could. Only after running a fair distance did he dare to look back—the mysterious spacesuit was leisurely heading toward the other side of the field...

At the monastery, the unfortunate Father Tikhon spent a long time reviving—he had suffered a nervous breakdown. For a long time, he hesitated to tell what had happened, fearing he would be considered insane. Only after some time did Tikhon finally reveal the truth to the abbot. The abbot accepted the priest's story calmly, attributing the incident to the devil's work, and then added that local residents had also repeatedly told him about the mysterious spacesuit during confession.

Finally, it's worth noting that space probes had never landed in this area.