Doctors and experts on Alioshenka

Igor Uskov, an urologist with a local hospital, was on duty on that day. A telephone rang in his office about midday. He burst out laughing when policeman on the other end of the line told him the reason why his services were required.

“The dead body of an alien? Stop kidding me, will you?”

“Doctor, you’d better take a look at it yourself …”

Dr. Uskov was the first medical professional to examine the body. He reckoned that it might as well be a human fetus aged some 20 weeks. Dr. Uskov asked his colleague Irina Ermolayeva, a gynecologist, for a second opinion. Dr. Ermolayeva agreed that the body looked very much like an underdeveloped fetus expelled from the womb prematurely i.e. a miscarriage.

The doctors’ verdict was music for Bendlin’s eyes. Everything was falling into place. The strange thing was not an alien any more; it was a human fetus, yet another case of illegal abortion. The investigator had dealt with several cases of illegal abortion before. He expected to close the case right after getting an autopsist’s opinion. Bendlin hoped that the autopsist would tell him that the fetus was either stillborn or too underdeveloped to live, and therefore the case would be not be a matter for further investigation.

Stanislav Samoshkin, a chief of morbid anatomy department at the Kyshtym hospital, didn’t smile and make cheesy jokes about aliens when the policemen brought the creature to his office. He performed a thorough autopsy on the body of the dwarf. And then he announced that the creature was neither a human being nor an animal. According to him, it was some new life form.

I met Dr. Samoshkin several years after the Kyshtym dwarf caused a worldwide sensation. According to him, he never doubted the conclusion he reached on that day.

“The creature was not by any means a human being. The human skull consists of six bones. The skull of that creature was made up of 4 bones. There were other differences in the skeleton structure. Those anomalies didn’t look like any congenital malformations known to date,” Dr. Samoshkin said.