I will also note that hands with their tubular phalanxes, joints, ligaments,
 blood vessels, and nails are intensive CSE emanators capable of giving a powerful
 push to the straw or coal indicator of my little instrument from a couple of meters'
 distance. Practically anyone could do it. This is why I am convinced that there are 
no people with supersensory abilities, or rather that all the people have them...
 And the number of those who from a distance can move light-weight objects on a table,
 hold them suspended in the air or "magnetically" attached to the hand is far greater
 than is usually thought.
Try it yourself! I look forward to your letters.

There once was an ancient folk game: one man sits on a chair, and over his head,
 four of his friends "build" a grid of horizontally stretched palms with slightly
 spread fingers-first right hands, then left, with 2 cm gaps between them. In 10-15
seconds, all four synchronously put their pressed-together index and middle fingers
 under the armpits and under the knees of the sitting man, and then they energetically 
toss him up in the air. The time between "collapsing" the grid and tossing the man must
 not exceed two seconds; the synchronicity is also very important. If everything is done
 right, a 100-kilo man flies up almost to the ceiling, while the ones who tossed him
 claim he was light as a feather. 

A strict reader may ask me how it is possible. Doesn't it all contradict laws of nature?
 And if so, am I not propagating mysticism? Nothing of the sort! There is no mysticism,
 the thing is simply that we, humans, still know little of the Universe which, as we
 see, not always "accepts" our, all too human rules, assumptions, and orders... 
Once it dawned on me: the results of my experiments with insect nests bear too much
 similarity to the reports of people who happened to be in the vicinity of.….UFOs.
 Think and compare: temporary malfunctioning of electronic devices, disrupted clocks-
i. e., time, an invisible, resilient "obstacle", a temporary drop in the weight of
 objects, the sensation of a drop in human weight, phosphenes-moving, colored flashes
 in the eyes, a "galvanic" taste in the mouth...

I am sure you have read about all this in UFO journals. I am now telling you it can all
 be experienced in our Museum. Come visit! Was I standing on the threshold of yet another
 mystery? Quite so. And again I was helped by chance, or rather by my old insect friends.
 And again there were sleepless nights, failures, doubts, breakdowns, even accidents...
 And I had no one to turn to for advice-they would have just laughed, or worse...

But I can say this, my reader: he is happy who has a more or less adequate use of
 his eyes, head, and hands-skillful hands are particularly important!-and trust me,
 the joy of creative work, even of work that ends in failure, is far higher and brighter
 than earning any diplomas, medals, or patents. 

     *********************************************************************                                                                              
Flying an Anti-gravitational Platform  --- (excerpts from a diary)

Judge it for yourself from my diary excerpts-obviously simplified and adapted for this
 book.  Pictures and drawings will help you to evaluate my story... A hot summer day.
 Far-away expanses drown in a bluish-lilac haze; the sky's gigantic cupola with fluffy 
clouds stretches above the fields and coppices. I am flying about 300 meters above ground,
 with a distant lake-a light, elongated spot in the haze-as my reference point.

Blue, intricate tree contours slowly recede; between them, there are fields.
Those, bluish-green ones are fields of oats; the whitish rectangles with a strange,
 rhythmic twinkling are those of buckwheat. Straight ahead of me is a field of alfalfa-
its green color is familiar, it resembles the oil paint "cobalt medium-green". 
Green oceans of wheat on the right are of a denser shade and resemble the "chrome oxide" 
paint. An enormous, multi-colored palette floats  further and further backwards. 

Footpaths meander between fields and coppices. They join gravel roads which it turn
 stretch further out, toward the highway, still invisible from here for the haze,
 but I know that if I flew on the right side of the lake, I would see it-a smooth,
 gray strip without a beginning or an end, on which cars-small boxes-are slowly crawling.

Isometric, flat shadows of cumulus clouds are picturesquely spread around the
 sunny forest-steppe. They are deep-blue where they cover coppices, and are various
 shades of light blue over fields. Now I am in the shadow of one such cloud:
 I accelerate-it's quite easy for me to do that-and leave the shadow.

I lean forward slightly and feel a warm, taut wind coming far down below, from
 the sun-warmed ground and plants. It comes not from the side, as on the ground,
 but strangely from the surface up. I physically feel a thick, dense current with
 a strong odor of blooming buckwheat. Of course this jet can easily lift up even a
 large bird-an eagle, a stork, or a crane-if it freezes its spread wings. But I have
 no wings and am suspended in the air not by the upward jet.

In my flight I am supported by a flat, rectangular little platform, slightly bigger
 than the seat of a chair, with a pole and two handles to which I hold on and with
 whose help I navigate the device. Is this science fiction? I wouldn't say so.…..

In a word, the interrupted manuscript of this book was abandoned for two years because
 generous, ancient Nature, again through my insect friends had given me another
Something-and it did so, as usual, elegantly and inconspicuously, yet swiftly and
 convincingly. And for two years the Discovery did not let me go, even though it seemed
to me I was mastering it at a break-neck speed.

(Note: Grebennikov would have been approximately 62-63 years of age in 1990-1992)

But it always happens this way: when your work is new and interesting, time flies
 twice as fast. A light spot of a steppe lake is already much closer. Beyond it,
 the highway is visible with already distinctly discernable boxes of cars. The highway
 is about 8km away from the railway that runs parallel to it, and if I look closer,
 I can see the poles of the power line and the light-colored embankment of the railway.
 It is time to turn some 20 degrees to the left. 

I am not seen from the ground, and not just because of the distance: even in a
 very low flight I cast almost no shadow. Yet, as I found out later, people sometimes
 see something where I am in the sky-either a light sphere, a disk, or something like
 a slanted cloud with sharp edges that moves, according to them, not exactly the way
 a cloud would.

One person observed a "flat, non-transparent square, about one hectare in size"-could it have been the optically enlarged little platform of my device?
Most people see nothing at all, and I am for the moment pleased
with it-I can't be too careful!   Besides, I still haven't determined
what my visibility or invisibility depends on.

Therefore, I confess, I consciously avoid people in my flight and for that purpose bypass
cities and towns, and even cross roads and footpaths at high speed, after making sure there is no one on them. 
In these excursions-no doubt, fictional for the reader, but for me already almost casual-I trust only my insect friends depicted on these pages.

The first practical use of my discovery was-and still is-entomological: to examine my secret places, to take a picture of them from above, to find new, still unexamined Insect Lands in need of protection and rescue. Alas, Nature established its own, strict limitations on my work: just as on a passenger plane, I could see but couldn't photograph.

My camera shutter wouldn't close, and both rolls of films I had taken with me-one in the camera, the other in my pocket-got light-struck. I didn't succeed in sketching the landscape either; as both my hands were almost always busy, I could only free one hand for a couple of seconds. Thus I could only draw from memory. I managed to do that only immediately after landing-though I am an artist, my visual memory is not that great. 

In my flight I did not feel the same way we do when we fly in our sleep. 
It was with flying in my sleep that I started this book a while ago. And flying is not so much pleasure as it is work, sometimes very hard and dangerous. One has to stand, not hover, the hands are always busy, and a few centimeters away there is a border separating "this" space from "that", on the outside. 

The border is invisible but very treacherous. My contraption is still rather clumsy and resembles perhaps... hospital scales. But this is only the beginning!

By the way, besides the camera, I sometimes had trouble with my watch and possibly, with the calendar too: descending on a familiar glade, I would occasionally find it slightly "out of season", with a two-week deviation, and I had nothing to check it against. 

Thus it is possible to fly not just in space but also-or so it seems-in time as well. I cannot make the latter claim with a 100% guarantee, except perhaps that in flight, particularly at its beginning, a watch runs too slow and then too fast, but at the end of the excursion starts running accurately again.

This is why I stay away from people during my journeys: if time is involved alongside gravitation, I might perhaps accidentally disrupt cause-and-effect relations and someone might get hurt.

This is where my fears were coming from: insects captured "there" disappear from test tubes, boxes, and other receptacles.  They disappear mostly without a trace. Once a test tube in my pocket was crushed to tiny bits, another time there was an oval hole in the glass, with brown, as though "chitin" edges-you can see it in the picture. 

Many times I felt a kind of burning or an electric shock inside my pocket-perhaps at the moment of my prisoner's "disappearance".

Only once did I find a captured insect in the test tube, but it wasn't the adult ichneumon with white rings on its feelers, but its... chrysalis, i.e. its earlier stage. It was alive-it moved its belly when touched. Much to my dismay, it died a week later. 

It is best to fly on clear summer days. Flying is much more difficult when it rains, and almost impossible in winter-not because of the cold. I could have adapted my device accordingly, but since I am an entomologist, I simply do not need winter flights. 

How and why did I come to this discovery? In the summer of 1988, as I was examining under a microscope the chitin shells of insects, their pinnate (feathery) feelers, and the thinnest structure of butterflies' wings, I got interested in an amazingly rhythmical microstructure of one large insect detail. 

It was an extremely well-ordered composition, as though pressed on a complex machine according to special blueprints and calculations. As I saw it, the intricate sponginess was clearly not necessary either for the durability of the detail, or for its decoration. I had never observed anything like this unusual micro-ornament either in nature, in technology, or in art.

Because its structure is three-dimensional, so far I have been unable to capture it in a drawing, or a photograph. Why does an insect need it? Besides, other than in flight, this structure at the bottom of the wing case is always hidden from the eye-no one would ever see it properly. Was it perhaps the wave beacon with "my" multiple cavernous structures effect? That truly lucky summer there were very many insects of this species, and I would capture them at night: neither before, nor after was I able to observe these insects.

I put the small, concave chitin plate on the microscope shelf in order again to examine under strong magnification its strangely star-shaped cells. I again admired this masterpiece of nature, and almost purposelessly placed it on top of another, identical plate that had the same unusual cells on one of its sides.
But no!-the detail broke loose from my tweezers; for a few seconds it hung suspended above the other plate on the microscope shelf, turned a few degrees clockwise, slid to the right, turned counterclockwise, swung, and only then abruptly fell on the desk. 

You can imagine what I felt at that moment... When I came to my senses, I tied a few panels with a wire-it wasn't an easy thing to do, and I only succeeded when I positioned them vertically. What I got was a multi-layered chitin block. I put it on the desk.

Even a relatively large object-such as a paper tack-could not fall on it-something pushed it up and aside. When I attached the tack on top of the "block", I witnessed such incredible, impossible things  (for example, the tack for a few moments was lost from sight) that I realized it was no beacon, but something else entirely. 

And again I got so excited that all the objects around me became foggy and shaky. It was with a huge effort that I managed to pull myself together in a couple of hours and continue working. 

So, this is how it started. Of course, much still remains to be understood, verified, and tested. I will certainly tell my readers about the finer details of my machine, about its propulsion principles, about distances, heights, speeds, equipment, and all the rest-but in my next book. 

...I conducted my first, very unsuccessful and highly dangerous flight on the night of March 17, 1990. I didn't have the patience to wait till the warm season and neglected to go to a deserted area. I already knew that night was the most dangerous time for this kind of work.

I had bad luck from the very beginning: the panel blocks of the right part of the bearing platform periodically got stuck. I should have fixed the problem immediately, but neglected to do so. I took off right in the middle of the Agricultural Academy campus, erroneously assuming that at 1 AM everyone was asleep, and nobody would see me. 

The lift-off went well, but in a few seconds, when the lit windows of buildings sank beneath me, I felt dizzy. I should have landed right then but remained airborne, which was wrong because a powerful force snatched away my control over the movement and weight, and it pulled me in the direction of the city.

Drawn by this unexpected, uncontrollable power, I crossed the second circle of nine-story buildings in the city's residential area (they are laid out in two huge circles with five-story buildings, including ours, inside them), then I crossed a snow-covered, narrow field, and the Academy City highway...
The dark immensity of Novosibirsk was closing in upon me, and it was closing in fast. I was already near a bunch of tall factory chimneys many of which fumed thick smoke-night shift was on. I had to do something quickly. 

I got on top of the situation only with a great effort. Finally I managed to conduct an emergency adjustment of the panel blocks. My horizontal movement slowed down, but then I again felt sick.

Only at fourth try did I succeed in stopping the horizontal movement, at which point my platform was hanging over Zatulinka, the city's industrial district. The sinister chimneys silently continued to fume right underneath me.

I rested for a few minutes-if one could call hanging over a lighted factory fence rest-and after I made sure the "evil power" has passed, I glided back-yet not in the direction of our Agricultural Academy campus but to the right from it, toward the airport. I did this to foul the trail, in case someone had seen me. 
Only about halfway to the airport, over some dark, night fields where there was clearly no one around, I abruptly turned home... Next day I naturally couldn't get out of bed.

News on TV and in newspapers was more than alarming. Headlines, such as 
"UFO over Zatulinka" and "Aliens again?" meant that my flight had been detected.
 But how! Some perceived the "phenomenon" as glowing spheres or disks-many actually
 saw not one sphere but two! Others claimed they had seen a "real saucer" with windows
 and rays.

I am not discounting the possibility that some Zatulino residents saw not my
 near-emergency evolutions, but something else entirely that had nothing to do with
 those. Besides, March of 1990 was particularly rich in UFO sightings in Siberia,
 near Nalchik, and especially in Belgium where, according to Pravda, on March 31
 the engineer Marcel Alferlane took a two-minute film of the flight of a huge
 triangular craft which, according to Belgian scientists, were none other than
 "material objects with a capacity no civilization can currently create." 

Is it really so? As for me, I would suggest that the gravitational filter platforms
 (or as I call them, panel blocks) of these machines were in fact small, triangular,
 and made here on Earth-but with more sophistication than my half-wooden contraption.

I too wanted to make the platform triangular-it is much safer and more efficient
 that way-but I chose a rectangular design because it is easier to fold, and when folded,
 it resembles a suitcase, a painter's case, or a briefcase that can be thus disguised
 so as not to arouse suspicion. I, naturally, disguised it as a painter's case.

I had nothing to do with the sightings in Nalchik or Belgium. Besides, as it may appear, I am very impractical in the use of my discovery-I only fly to my entomological preserves.
These are far more important to me than any technological finds.

At the moment, I have eleven such preserves: eight in Omsk region, one in Voronezh region, and one near Novosibirsk. There used to be six of them in Novosibirsk region, all of them created, or rather salvaged by me and my family, but they don't like them here. Neither the Agricultural Academy (still more obsessed with "chemistry" than with anything else), nor the Environmental Protection Committee were willing to help me salvage these little preserves from evil, ignorant people. 

Thus I am continuing my journey westward under the magnificent, fluffy clouds at noon. The blue shadows of the clouds, the intricately shaped coppices, and the multicolored rectangles of fields float backwards below me.

The speed of my flight is quite high, but there is no wind in my ears-the platform's force field has "carved out" from space an upward-diverging, invisible column that cuts the platform off the earth's gravitational pull. But it left me and the air inside the column intact. I think that all this, as it were, parts space in flight, and then closes it behind me. 

This must be the reason for the invisibility, or the distorted visibility, of the device and its "rider"-as was the case with my flight over Novosibirsk's Zatulinka suburb.

But the protection from gravity is regulated, even though it is incomplete: if you move your head forward, you already feel the turbulence of the wind that clearly smells either of sweet clover, of buckwheat, or of the colored weeds of Siberian meadows.

I leave Isilkul with its huge grain elevator on my right and gradually begin to descend over the highway, making sure that I am invisible to drivers, passengers, and people working in the field.

My platform and I cast no shadow (although the shadow occasionally appears): I see three kids on the edge of a forest, go down, drop my speed, and fly right near them. They show no reaction, which means that everything is fine-neither I, nor my shadow are visible. Or heard: the propulsion principle of my device is such that the platform makes no sound whatsoever, because there is practically no air friction. 

My journey was long-at least forty minutes from Novosibirsk. My hands are tired as I can't take them off the controls, so are my legs and body-I have to stand up straight, tied to the vertical pole with a belt. And even though I can travel faster, I am still afraid to do so-my hand-made machine is still too small and fragile.

I again go up and ahead, and soon I see the familiar landmarks-a road intersection, a passenger terminal on the right side of the highway. Another five kilometers, and finally I see orange columns of the Preserve fence. The Preserve is this year-come to think of it-twenty years old! How many times I saved this child of mine from trouble and bureaucrats, from chemicals-loaded aircraft, from fires, and many other evil deeds. And the Land of Insects is alive and well!

Descending and braking, which is done by cross-shifting filter blinds under the platform
 board, I already see the thicket of carrot weed, make out the light heads of their
 flowers resembling azure balls-they are of course covered with insects, and an
 incredible joy comes over me, taking away my fatigue, for it was I who saved
 this piece of Earth, even if a small one, less than seven hectares.
Already for twenty years no one has driven here, no one has cut the grass,
 tended cattle, and the soil has risen in places to fourteen centimeters high.
 Not only several locally extinct species of insects have returned, but also such 
weeds as feather grass of rare varieties, purple Scorzonera whose large flowers in
 the morning smell of chocolate, and many other plants. I feel the thick smell of cuckoo
 flower-only this Middle Glade smells like that, it is right behind the fence of the preserve, and fills me with yet again with the joyful anticipation of another encounter with the World of Insects. 

Here they are, I can see them very well even from ten meters above the ground on the wide umbrellas and azure balls of angelica and carrot plants: dark orange butterflies sit on them in groups; heavy hornets bow the white and yellow inflorescences of lady's bedstraws; ginger and blue dragonflies with trembling wide wings and a fine network of veins hover next to my head. I slow down even more, and see a sudden flash below: my shadow, hitherto invisible, has finally appeared and now slowly glides along weeds and bushes.

But I am already safe-there is not a soul around, and the highway three hundred meters north of the preserve is now empty. I can land. The stems of the tallest weeds rustle against the bottom of my "podium"-the platform with the panel blocks.

But before putting it down on a little bump, I, in a fit of joy, again spread the blinds 
with my control handle, and vertically go up. The landscape below quickly shrinks,
 shrivels as it were: the shrubs of the preserve, its edges and fences, all the
 surrounding coppices and fields. The horizon begins to curve on all sides in a huge
 groove, opening up the railroad that runs two kilometers on the left, then a village
 on the right-it twinkles with its light slate roofs. 

Further on the right is Roslavka, the central estate of Lesnoy State Farm-
it already looks like a small city. Left from the railroad are cow farms of Lesnoy's
 Komsomolsk branch; they are surrounded by a yellow ring of straw and dry, foot-worn
 manure. In the far west, where the smooth curve of the railroad disappears
 (this is actually confusing: the railway is straight as an arrow), there are small
 houses and the neat white cube of the Yunino railroad terminal, six km away.
 Beyond Yunino, there are limitless expanses of Kazakhstan drowning in the hot,
 bluish haze. 

And finally here it is, below me-Isilkulia, the land of my youth; it's very different
 from how it appears on maps and plans with their inscriptions and signs. It is vast,
 limitless, alive, interspersed with dark, intricate islands of coppices, cloudy shadows,
 light, clear spots of lakes.