A Russian Man Dug Into His Backyard - And Found Something Impossible

The story goes something like this. Just imagine this is you. You're visiting family that live out of town out in the hills and one of the things that you like to do when you go out there is to explore those hills. You know, climb around, find caves, just check the place out. So, you do that, walking around, having a good time. And then you find a crack just big enough to wiggle through. So, you do. And on the other side, you find this massive drop. Like, you can't even see the bottom of it. It's just a hole that ends in darkness like your mom. So now you're really curious and you come back a few days later with some climbing buddies and a lot of rope. And as you're descending down, you start looking at the walls of this hole, this shaft, and you start to realize they seem to be made of very like evenly sized stones. This was built by someone. When all is said and done, you realize that this hole, this shaft is hundreds of meters deep and dated to nearly 5,000 years ago. Whoever built this thing had to have advanced engineering skills. And you have no idea what this thing is for. This is the story of the carora shaft. It's become a bit of a niche internet mystery. A lot of crazy conspiracies around it and a lot of questions. Questions like who was this ancient advanced civilization? What did they build it for? How did they build it? And maybe the most pertinent question of all, does this thing actually exist? In 2011, a Russian speliologist, that's a fancy word for a cave expert, a guy named Arthur Zimikov, was exploring the rugged slopes of Carahora, a mountain range in the high north Caucasus region. This is wild country, full of glacier carved valleys, jagged outcroppings, and weatherbeaten cliffs. It's a place that would be really good at keeping secrets. In other words, if it had secrets to keep, that is. Zimov found out that it did. Yeah. He discovered a hole in the mountain side that led to this really deep shaft. It was it was something right out of Indiana Jones, right? A [clears throat] hidden passage with smooth straight walls and cold air swirling up from below. So, Zimikov got a crew of cavers together and they repelled down the shaft. They thought it might be some kind of tube or some other geological feature at first, but then as they continued down about 40 meters or so, they became convinced they were seeing something man-made. Zimikoff had discovered an underground superructure, an underground building made of blocks that sat so close together, not even a knife could slip between them. Like the scale of the place brought to mind the pyramids and specifically like some of the shafts inside the pyramids. It would have taken a highly advanced civilization to build this. And surely tracking down the civilization would keep scientists busy for decades, right? Except it didn't. Outside of a few Russian news shows and several conspiracy websites, Arthur Zimikov is basically a total unknown. His life is so poorly documented that at times while we were researching this, we were convinced that he was completely made up. But that's not true. He was a real person who was loved by the people who knew him. Like this is his friend Victor Cultly at his grave. We'll get to that later. Well, there's a lot of mystery around Zimacov. Like I said, we at some point even thought he might not be real at all because he wrote extensively about Korahora. He uh he explored it quite a bit. He wrote in his diary about this place. Uh but his diary is lost. Nobody can seem to find all of his writings about it. Like some people think that maybe he found something that he shouldn't have found and that it was kind of taken by people in power. We'll get to all this, I promise. But even though his writings are now missing, his friend Victor Kyrov um told people about what he found in there. Basically, what he said he found was an underground city with tunnels stretching up to 72 km long all the way to Mount Elris, which is Europe's highest mountain. Now, that sounds extreme, but they definitely did find something inside that mountain. The greater Cauasus Mountains are part of the Cauasus region that sits on the border of Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaison. And Carahora is a group of connected mountain peaks that's right about there, just northwest of the midpoint. Much of it is rough, craggy, and heavily forested, and mostly made up of volcanic and metamorphic stone, things like tough, uh, shist, limestone with some granite. These are rock types that tend to break along straight lines as they cool and shift. And they're also prone to chemical weathering that can erode the stone into large blocky shapes called core stones. Just something to keep in mind there. But getting back to the shaft and the explorations of it, we talked about Arthur Zimmacov and his friend Victor earlier and their explorations. There are a couple of other people in this story that are worth mentioning, and that's Vadim Chernabrov and Alexander Splashnov. Veem started a group called Cosmopusa, and they're a group of science professionals and hobbyists who uh, you know, like to visit mystery sites, chase UFOs, explore crop circles, that kind of thing. So, the woo alarm is on standby over here. Um, we're getting close to woo territory. But Cosmopola, they did do some really cool expeditions over the years. Like just some of the things that they did between 1980 and 2016 was where they visited the Tangaska impact site.

Uh they searched Mount Ararat for traces of Noah's Ark and they searched for the Bronzo Dragon in Lake Bro. You know, laugh all you want at their uh at their leanings, but I I'll tell you, I would have had a ball doing that. That sounds like a lot of fun. But anyway, no, you could say that this shaft was right up their alley. But anyway, Vim and his team explored the site sometime after its discovery back in 2011, but there are no traces of it on their website. They didn't leave any information or diary entries or blog entries on their website about it for some reason. We don't know why, which made researching this very difficult. Um, I will say that a big majority of stuff that we got for this video came from a video from the Universe Inside You YouTube channel, who are um into this kind of stuff. So, take it with however much salt you like. But the video is right that Vadim did definitely take part in um some Carora shaft investigations. Even though they didn't write about on their website, we know that he did that. We know because here's an interview that Vadem did with Russian news media where he talked about the shaft descent, the smooth walls, and the large underground hall that his team found at the bottom of it. And that brings us to Alexander Splashnoff. Alexander's a cave enthusiast, but he also does 3D renders of the caves of the explorers. Yeah, Alexander is mentioned all over that universe inside you video because his photos of the shaft are actually the most recent that have been taken. And he also has a connection to that Cosmopolit uh group. So, like his YouTube channel actually has videos of all their events. And he has a second channel uh just for his 3D art, which is pretty impressive stuff. And I'll just throw in there real quick um there were some sort of conspiracy theories that suggest that the car horror shaft doesn't exist at all and that all the images of it are just uh splashnobs 3D art. That is not true. But the fact that he does 3D art and does a really good job of it led a lot of people to think that the whole thing was faked. It was not, though. So Cosmopolit definitely investigated the shaft even though they didn't write about it. They didn't leave anything behind. There are some other people included in the car horror story who did leave a little something behind. Yeah. In October of 1942, the German army came through the Caucasus region as part of operation adalvvice. And you can see a date underneath the swastika that says 28x42. The X stands for 10, like the 10th month. So that's the 28th of October 1942. All of which lines up because on the very next day on October 29th they captured the city of Maic which is about an hour's drive from there. So the German military were there for military reasons. Obviously there were reasons for them to want to take the Caucasus mountains. But the reason also that they came to that specific spot may have been a bit more um occulty. Yeah, you might know that the Nazis were kind of famously into uh occult stuff. Um now this has been exaggerated by Hollywood. It wasn't all Raiders of the Lost Arc and whatnot, but it definitely was a thing. Hydrickch Himmler especially was super into this stuff. He even founded a bureau that set out to find ancient relics to kind of prove their occult ideas to the world. So like a big part of their belief system was that they were descended from a master race from a long-lost Aryan civilization, right? And part of that was the belief in a city called Shambala where the Aryans lived. It was basically like the Garden of Eden for Hitler's master race. So they were always on the lookout for proof of this ancient city which according to legend was buried underground somewhere. Their first guess was actually a place in Tibet and the Nazis actually did an expedition there and searched for it but they came up empty. But their next guess was in the Caucasus mountains because I mean where else are you going to find a master race of Caucasian super beings? So, it's not true, but for a while there, um, a lot of people thought that white people came from the Caucus' region, and that's where the word Caucasian came from, right? Um, now over time, this got disproven. Obviously, now we know that it's a lot more complicated than that. That's too much to go into here. But, um, even by 1940, this was completely discredited, but the Nazis kind of latched on to it. So yeah, when they came through the Caucus' mountains, uh they took their they took their shot and they looked for it. And that symbol that's carved into the top of Kohora Mountain uh is proof that they were there. Now whether they actually found the shaft, the chasm underneath Carohora, we may never know, but they were definitely there and they would have found this very interesting. And that Nazi angle has led to a whole lot of suspicion that maybe they could have even actually built that shaft to try to get down to an underground city that still hasn't been reached or maybe it is down there and the Nazis knew about it but then they, you know, destroyed all the records of it or whatever. Anyway, it's it just kind of added to the suspicion of the whole thing. Now, there's another interesting theory from Reddit. There's always interesting theories there. Uh but the theory is that it wasn't the Nazis who carved that swastika at all, but actually the Soviets who later came in and they uh they did that to plant a false flag basically. Like the idea is that the Soviets actually built this shaft for like a secret government experiment. Um maybe as late as even the 60s, but then they carved a fake swastika in there to make people think

that it was the Germans that did it. a Reddit user named Longpickle claims to have met um an ex-soldier who visited some huge Soviet engineering projects back in the day. And he suggested it might have like provided a chance to test out ventilation systems, um maybe install seismic research tools or safe store weapons. And this actually isn't that crazy. Um the Soviets actually built a lot of weird underground stuff in the Cold War. Take for example the Balaclava submarine base. This is an entire underground military base carved out of a Crimean mountain that was hidden from NATO satellites until the 1990s. There's also famously an underground city hidden under the city of Moscow. It's called Bunker 42, and it's a 65 m deep command post built under the Kangaka Hill. Uh I cover this in a video, but there's elevators, airlocks, um an independent power grid, all built below ground. An even closer comparison to Carora might be found in the bunkers built under TLI in Georgia. It's basically aworked series of bunkers. It's practically an underground city. Um, this is in the southern caucuses, by the way. So, yeah, I mean, digging something into Karahora would have been definitely, you know, part of the course for the Soviets, but there are no Soviet records of a massive digging project in this region, and there's no matching design plans. There's no proof of this whatsoever. But, you know, who knows what projects might have been attempted and then abandoned during the Cold War. All right, so you want to get more nuts? Let's get more nuts. Another theory about the caror shaft has to do with something called the solar induced dark age or CEDA. The idea is that thousands of years ago, a massive solar event forced humanity to retreat underground and that we're basically all just descended from underground dwellers. So, believers of this idea think that there's a network of like underground cities around the world and many believe that Cara is one of them. It's an interesting idea. I haven't really dived into this idea to see like where it came from and how they explain it or whatever, but I can just say that scientists have not found any actual evidence that the solarinduced dark age ever happened. At least nothing you'll see in the lamestream media. But if you really want to get crazy, this next theory, it gets an honest to god woo alarm. There are people who believe that the Kohhora shaft might have been part of a planetary weapon. This is mainly from Dr. Joseph P. Ferrell, a writer best known for his book, The Giza Death Star. He argues that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a kind of resonance machine to focus planetary energy, that it's essentially a super weapon, and somehow the Kohora shaft is connected to this super weapon. Or maybe it's just something similar. I guess the idea is that if wind were funneled into this huge shaft that it could function like a quote large pipe and a pipe organ. Like if it was played correctly, it could produce infrasound, which as we have talked in this channel before, it can be weaponized. So I guess the idea is it was built by an ancient civilization that was at war with another civilization or aliens. Got to get them in there somehow. And what it has to do with the Giza Death Star, I'm not entirely sure. Um maybe it's just an example of another super weapon. Anyway, it's weird and it's crazy. So, of course, it's super popular. Now, all of that does definitely uh lean into really crazy territory, but part of the reason why people have leaned into really crazy conspiracy things around the car shaft is because there have been some mysterious deaths around it. Like, two of the early discoverers of the shaft died within just a few, you know, years of each other at very early ages. I kind of hinted earlier that Arthur Zimikoff had died. There was that picture of his friend Victor at his grave. Well, he died because he got hit by a car while he was walking at midnight in 2015. He was reportedly a bit drunk. He had just been at a pub for a few hours, so it's easy to see it as just an unfortunate accident. But the waitress at the pub apparently described him as being unusually cheerful that night, like he was unable to sit still cuz he was so excited about something. And according to his friend Victor, Arthur had just called him uh a day or two before that uh claiming that he had an incredible discovery that he was about to reveal. To this day, nobody knows what that discovery might have been. So maybe this was no accident. — Oh man. Oh god. Oh man. — It was probably an accident. But some people do think that he found something and was silenced. Thankfully, nothing like that quite happened to Vadem, but he did pass away from cancer 2 years later in 2017. uh he was only 51 years old and there's absolutely no medical connection between his cancer and Kohora, but the fact that it happened so close to Arthur's death of course spun rumors uh particularly rumors of a curse. You know, kind of like King Tut's curse when some of the discoverers started dying in uh mysterious ways. Some people think that this might have been maybe a sacred place with a curse on it. Now, I don't give these ideas any credibility. I think it's just an unfortunate tragedy and my heart goes out to their families. Um, but I get the feeling that Arthur and Vadem would have been into that idea, the idea of a

curse if they were still alive. They seem to be into that kind of stuff. Real quick, I want to shout out some new members who have joined the channel lately. Uh, we've gotten a little bit behind, so we're getting caught up. We're blessing people with the power of Zoe. Here we are. There's uh Jared, Jesse Bowling, Dean, Arlene, Kylie, Unaitter, Jerry Smith, Daniel the Seven, Joy, Rickmite, what Mickey Brand, Rockme, Kieran, Ashley, Ho, the Bros, David, Dude, Print, and Anthony the Greek. Thank you guys so much for becoming members. If you would like to join them, get early access to videos, get a little thing by your name down in the comments, makes you a little bit special, and just be part of an awesome community. Just click the join button down below. Kyra Hora to me anyway just kind of feels like one of those situations where there were just enough weird things about it to gain traction and then once a critical mass of conspiracy types got a hold of it, it just explodes into a full-fledged internet mystery with layers upon layers of crazier and crazier theories until I have to make a video about it. I find it interesting as somebody who loves stories and mysteries and whatnot. And sometimes I gotta be honest, sometimes I love how imaginative some of these conspiracy theories get, you know, like humans come up with some wild stuff. Like it's kind of amazing. But of course, if you're going to aams razor this thing, it's probably just a natural formation. I know it's not an answers with Joe video if I don't, you know, ruin all the fun. So, remember earlier when I said that the mountain was made of volcanic and metamorphic stuff that tends to break along straight lines as they cool? That that's literally what this is. It's it was a volcanic rock that cracked along a giant fault line and then shifted leaving this long, wide, and very thin cavern. This doesn't make it any less cool. It's still very cool, but like you can look at something like Devil's Tower for an example of this kind of thing. So, Devil's Tower was an old lava core that's now in Wyoming. Um, and this lava when it cooled it formed these weirdly regular trapezoidal patterns. This is a process known as columner jointing. Like here's a straight quote from nps. gov. As the molten rock cools from a liquid to a solid form, it begins to contract. This contraction stresses the cooling rock which begins to crack. Cracks radiate out from stress points forming hexagonal six-sided shapes. Like that's the same kind of thing that we're looking at here, but on a much much, you know, bigger scale. And the rocks at Carahora are different types of rocks than at Devil's Tower, but you get the picture. Uh chemical weathering also plays a part. Like water could have gotten in to the mountain and eroded down and carved out those large corridors underneath the shaft and then that can kind of shift the pressure on the rock above which can cause it to crack into slabs. Slabs that then can break through fracture points in very regular patterns, patterns that look man-made. There's actually a good example of this right here in my backyard, my proverbial backyard. Just east of Dallas is the city of Rock Wall. They're a suburb of Dallas. They got their own lake, a 6A school. They're kind of a big deal. And I've lived here for a long time. I've known about Rock Wall. I never thought about the name Rock Wall and where it came from. Well, just a few years ago, actually, I found out that the name Rock Wall came from an actual rock wall. Yeah. Farmers in the area in the early days, they kept finding large rocks in their fields. And these large rocks were kind of arranged in straight lines. And when they dug down, they found out that it was just gigantic rock wall like buried in the soil. And it kind of became this big mystery that the town was famous for. Like who built these gigantic rock walls, some of which went on for like 7 miles. Like this was some kind of ancient mega project. Now the obvious culprit were the Kado people who were here for thousands of years obviously and um and they were known to be mound builders. So they did have, you know, structural stuff that they did, but there was nothing about it in their written or oral history. And it certainly wasn't a practice that they did anymore. You know, they built mounds. They didn't build walls. So maybe it was an even more ancient civilization. Or we can just go straight to the aliens. Just go to aliens. Anyway, yeah, it turns out it's it's a natural formation. It's just a natural rock formation. It's the product of iron rich sandstone cracking and fusing as groundwater and tectonic pressure worked on it for millions of years. Simply put, um, like erosion basically just sliced the rock horizontally through different layers and then the shifting weight caused the slabs to crack at sort of regular intervals and in a way that made it look like there were stones that were, you know, intentionally placed there. And Cara is the same idea just on a much bigger scale. It's not an ancient super weapon or a lost city of pale people or proof that humans used to live underground or a cursed temple or an alien antenna. It's just a really cool cave. And really, isn't that enough? Now, there's a lot of mysterious and unique places in the world, but there's only one oldest place in the world, and I set out to find that in my recent documentary, Oldest and Newest Places on Earth. It's an area called the Aosta Nice Complex in Far North Canada, and it's been dated to 4. 02 02 billion years old, which makes it the oldest confirmed rock formation on the planet. I got to join a team of geologists from the

Smithsonian Institution as they search for potentially even older rocks in the area. And they walked us through the history of the early Earth through the rocks there at the Aosta Nice. — Geology is great because, you know, we speak about planetary science all the time. Every time you look at an rock, you're seeing a different planet, a planet that used to exist and no longer does. — Then we flew to the big island of Hawaii to talk to USGS geologists who were studying Kilawea. While there, I helped to break down rock less than a day old. And I walked across an 18-month old lava field on the tallest volcano on Earth. What came out of it was part adventure, part educational video, and part existential journey, and a documentary I'm deeply proud of. And you can watch it right now only on Nebula. Nebula is a streaming service that I'm part of, as well as hundreds of other thoughtful creators, but you can find all of our YouTube content early and adree and find exclusive content that you can't find anywhere else. It's also where we've been creating some awesome original productions that let us stretch our creative muscles and do bigger and better work that has much bigger scope than a YouTube video. And if you want to check it out and go see my feature documentary, you can get 50% off your annual subscription when you click the link down in the description or scan the QR code right here on screen. That brings the price down to only 250 a month. It's kind of a crazy price for what you get. And if you really like it, we do have lifetime subscriptions where you pay once and you get Nebula for the rest of your life. Find that on another platform. Hint, you won't. Anyway, go check out my movie. It's over there on Nebula. I'll see you there. Anyway, that's it for today. Thank you guys so much for watching. If this is your first time here, um, I might recommend you check out this video where I talk about the Bermuda Triangle. Uh, it was one of my favorite videos that I did back in the day about a very mysterious place in the world, much like the car shaft, and which has natural explanations that, you know, throw a nice cold blanket on everything. But you can check that video out and if you enjoy it, um I might invite you to subscribe because I come back in videos just like this every Monday. Also, if you like mysteries, I've got an entire book of mysteries. It's called Get the Book of Mysteries. This just came out this last year. You can find it on Amazon. I'll put a link down below. Maybe I'll put a QR code up here on screen. This is basically um taking a lot of the topics we've covered on the channel over the last 10 years, some of the most u popular mystery topics, turn them into book form, and it's a nice little fun book that you can just kind of read in a short period of time. It's a lot of fun. Go check it out. But that's it for today. You guys go out there, have an eye openening rest of the week. Do stay safe and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care.