In the city of Zhirnovsk, Volgograd region (Russia), for many years there lived a man who died two centuries before his own birth. Yevgeny Iosifovich Gaiduchka is considered here perhaps the most outstanding personality of the 20th century.
“I’m from the future!”
Svetlana Bulgakova learned about the amazing fate of her father three years after his death, in 1994. Vadim Chernobrov, a well-known Volgograd researcher and author of books about the time machine, told her his incredible story.
“I met him in 1985,” wrote Vadim Chernobrov in his book. – This man came up to me and after a short introduction said: “I flew here in a time machine! – and introduced himself: – Evgeny Iosifovich.
How do you think I should have responded to that?! Before I said goodbye, I asked why he was telling me all this, and the answer was obvious nonsense: he allegedly read about the time machine … at my place! It was impossible, because at that time my book about Time did not exist even in drafts …
According to him, I was the only person in the Soviet Union who was able to believe him. How did he find me in vast Moscow? Mystery…
But here’s what he told me. Being very young, he decided to steal a time machine and ride it to some exotic antiquity. Having taken a girlfriend for company (for the sake of whose beautiful eyes all this was started), he rushed through worlds and centuries. But he didn’t fly far. In the 1930s, a stolen vehicle crashed.
Very quickly, the teenagers, stunned with horror, realized that the crippled car could lift only one of them, and whether it had enough energy to fly into the 23rd century is unknown. However, they didn’t have much choice, so Zhenya pushed the crying girl into the unit and, having ordered her to return with help, sent her into the future.
But he never got help. Very soon, the young wanderer was adopted by kind people, and the boy began to master a new life, which, in his own words, at first he simply hated it. It was only after riding a bicycle for the first time in his life that he realized that here, too, there could be little joys…
Communicated with Herbert Wells
Of course, there is no direct evidence for this. However, in the biography of Yevgeny Gaiduchka, there are indeed many inexplicable facts.
“For example, it’s still not clear to me where a simple Soviet youth could meet Marshak, why Kirov met with him several times and Olesha, Bulgakov, Bernes liked to talk…” continues Svetlana Bulgakova. – And once (that’s the irony of fate!) He even talked with the author of “The Time Machine”, the legendary H. G. Wells. And it was like that.
While in Leningrad, the author of The Time Machine expressed a strange desire to get to know Soviet children and asked to be taken to the exact school and class where Zhenya Gaiduchok studied. It is said that Wells approached the boy and quietly exchanged a few words with him. Before that, no one even suspected that Zhenya knew English …
Svetlana Evgenievna often recalls strange tales that her father told her in early childhood.
— I heard a lot of amazing stories about spaceports, interplanetary flights, amazing “furry” creatures, about life on Earth in the future. One of the tales was remembered especially well – it was the story of Oorfene Deuce and his wooden soldiers, which I heard at the age of five, it was 1951. As you know, Alexander Volkov wrote the continuation of The Wizard of the Emerald City in 1963 …
“A few years after his death, amazing events began to happen,” says Svetlana Evgenievna, “One of his fellow soldiers was found, who remembered several episodes in which his father acted as a natural clairvoyant. For example, a couple of days before the start of the war, he told his friends who were going to leave that “on Sunday they will not be up to it.” And a few days later, when one of them literally got Gaiduchka with questions about the date of the victory (the soldier considered him to be some kind of fortune teller), he also named this cherished number. After that, he instantly lost his reputation as a prophet: everyone was too sure of our lightning victory.
In his time, he demonstrated similar foresight to Chernobrov, “predicting” Yeltsin’s presidency, the collapse of the USSR, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, Georgia, Chechnya, Yugoslavia …
“Tape of Time”
After the war, Yevgeny Gaiduchok ended up first in Stalingrad, then in Zhirnovsk, where he created and headed the local history museum, whose unique exhibits were visited even from abroad. By the way, in the 1970s and 1980s, in one of the halls of the museum, a long “Tape of Time” hung – a multi-meter paper scroll depicting the main events of world history – from the stone to … the 21st century inclusive!
According to Yevgeny Iosifovich’s daughter, newspapers of the 1970s are still kept in the museum. Even then, journalists from such serious publications as Pravda, Kommunist, and Krasnaya Zvezda did not hesitate to call Yevgeny Gaiduchka a visionary. For example, he wrote an article describing Zhirnovsk of the 21st century in 1980. At that time, even desperate dreamers did not take his poems about mobile communications and the Internet seriously …
By the way, according to close friends, Gayduchka sometimes “found” and he launched into stories about how the Earth looks from space, how the perception of an astronaut plowing the expanses of the Universe changes, how aliens adapt to our conditions and about many other “how” . “Dreamer,” some said. “Crazy,” said others. “Well, he turned it down!” admired by others.
Or maybe he was just remembering?
Yevgeny Iosifovich died in 1991 at the age of 76, having passed away two centuries before his birth …
“He knew that it would be so,” says Chernobrov. “According to his own words, hope for a search party from the future faded very quickly. Having slept a part of history, he thus signed a terrible sentence for himself – no one has the right to take away from the past a person on whom at least something depends in this past.
People “out of this world”
Messages about “guests from the future” regularly appear in newspaper chronicles in many countries. The mysterious traveler Said Nahano in Nepal said that he was from the year 3044. Louis Roger in Tokyo claimed that he “arrived 300 years ahead” to prevent the death of his native Japan. Such people “not from this world” were seen at different times in Sweden, France, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, in the Crimea and Altai…
And even historical chronicles are full of similar legends. In Russia, during the time of the Quietest Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, a “very strange man, in a wonderful caftan of demonic cut,” appeared at the court, who, moreover, was aware of the past and future of the royal dynasty. He was executed for sin. The archives also contain another strange document: an interrogation protocol for a certain Sergei Krapivin, dated 1897. A strangely dressed man at the end of the 19th century claimed that he was from the 21st century, lives in Angarsk and works as a computer operator. He was placed in a lunatic asylum.
If these are not impostors, but really guests from the future, why don’t they come to visit us, in the 2000s?
