The Disturbing Case of Flight 6114

Good evening, you're watching The Unexplained. I'm Victor Baikov. Tonight something I've wanted to put on air for a little over two years and I'll tell you at the top that we very nearly didn't. On the 14th of October 1995, an Antonov 24 left Novie Urongoi for Perm carrying 33 people, 29 passengers and four crew. The commander was Boris Novikov, 19 years on the type. That route is about 1,200 kilometers and for a good 300 of them there is nothing underneath the aircraft at all, the northern urals, forest and rock and the first snow of the year. No road, no village, no technical defect logged before departure, no distress transmission of any kind at any point. And this is the part people don't understand about 1995, so I want to put it plainly. There was no radar underneath that aircraft. On a route like that, the crew reported their position by voice at a fixed point and then again at the next one. 6114 made its report south of Nadem. The next was due 47 minutes later and it never came. So what the search had was a line on a map about 300 kilometers long and an aeroplane somewhere within 50 either side of it, 30,000 square kilometers, October, no roads in any of it. It carried an emergency beacon as they all did. Nothing was ever received from it. The file was closed in 1997 and there is almost nothing in it. In the spring of 2004, a source I'm not going to name gave me a box of nine video cassettes. It's the ninth I've spent two years with and everything you're about to hear is on it in his own voice. So here it is. The Filatov tapes. My name's Yuri Filatov. I'm 25, second year at the Institute in Perm and in a few hours I'm flying north for work. I've got this camera for college. They gave us an assignment to make a 20 minute film about a place of our choice so I thought I'd killed two birds with one stone. I'm getting paid to work up there and I can get my project done at the same time. I'm working for Nover and Gas, one of the bigger gas producers up north. I work at one of their sites a few hundred kilometers past Novy Urongoi. It's literally in the middle of nowhere. I started the rotations in March, two weeks there and two weeks back in Perm. I'm due to finish in October. So I bought the camera myself. I got it from a man at the depot in February. Cost me a month's money which is why mum still isn't happy about it. I didn't tell her what I'd paid until I'd already brought it home. It was still black outside at twenty to six. It doesn't get light in Perm in March until eight. My mother was already up. She's always already up. She had the gas on under the kettle and the washing hung over the radiator to dry and when I came into the kitchen with the camera she looked at it once and then turned back to the stove and folded her arms. Mum, say hello, you're in the film. She said, it cost too much. I told her it was equipment that you don't tell a taxi driver his car cost too much. She said $90 euro and she went on filling the flask. She always fills it too full. Xenia came in about ten two. She's sixteen. Hair flat on one side from the pillow, one boot in her hand, clearly and looking for the other one. I said Xenia say something for posterity. She looked straight down the lens the way you look at somebody standing too close on a bus and euro, turn it off. I said, that's it. Seven months and that's the one thing you want on the record. She said, turn it off. And I was on the bus by six and I was at Goy Airport at two in the afternoon. The board said the Perm service was delayed. It didn't say why. I found a seat against the wall, put my bag between my feet and thought an hour. Two at the outside. At three it still said delayed. By four I'd read every sign in that building. There was a woman across from me asleep sitting bolt upright with her boy laid out across her lap and she didn't move for a solid hour. I kept checking on her which is a stupid thing to do to a stranger. Two men had a suitcase up on its end between them playing cards and one of them had a sheepskin coat on the whole time, indoors in a building that must have been twenty five degrees. There was a man asleep along three chairs with his boots off and his socks were the exact green my father used to wear. I don't know why I've put that on here. It isn't anything. In the end I asked one of them how long these usually go on for. He looked at me like I was simple. "This is a good one," he said. Four hours is a good one. And he went back to his cards. The woman in the seat behind mine was Olga, Beresniki. Her boy was Kolia and he'd been sick twice already and she told me both of those things inside four minutes. I turned the camera on her and she put her hand up and said, "Turn it round." And I did. There was a man on his own down by the window with his bag on his knees. Older, heavy-set, gray. Not reading, not talking to anybody, not looking at the board. Just sat there like he'd been put down and told to wait. I filmed past him. I wasn't supposed to be on that flight. I'd been booked on the Thursday for three weeks. Then I reached the counter and the woman looked at her sheet and said, "Once come off." And she picked up a pen and wrote my name on the bottom by hand and gave me six C in pen. I said, "Thank you." We got up about six. It was black outside. The cabin lights were down, nearly everybody asleep. One reading light on two rows in front of me, throwing a little cone up onto the ceiling and Kolia making a small noise behind me every so often. Nothing to film, so I sat with the camera in my lap. An hour in, maybe. The two girls at the front kept going over to the left hand side of the cabin, not with the trolley, not doing the belts. Just walking up, standing at the windows on that side, looking out for a bit and coming back. Once is nothing, twice you don't notice. I counted four times in about ten minutes. And there'd been nothing on the speaker, not one word the whole flight, not even the usual. Then one of them went forward through the flight deck door and I sat with the camera up over the seat back. And she was in there long enough that my arm went and I had to bring it down and put it back up. When she came out, she didn't come down the aisle. She stopped next to the other one and put her hand flat on the seat back beside her, close in, and said three or four words. I couldn't hear it, nobody could have heard it, not over those engines. And the other one put her hand up over her mouth and held it there. I decided it was ice, set it out loud into the camera. It's ice on the wing, that's all that is. They don't want thirty people all asking about it at once. Which is exactly what I'd have done. And I believed it when I said it. They didn't look at each other like people looking at ice, though. Then I turned to the camera around to my own window. I meant to film the black and say something clever about how you can't see one single thing out there. Which you can't. No towns, no roads, no lights of any kind for three hundred kilometers. And there was something out there. It was below the level of the wing and off to the left. And it was a lighter grade than the sky. That's the only reason I saw it at all. It was slightly less black than the black. It was long, it didn't taper at the ends. Both ends were rounded and they were the same as each other. And there were no lights on it anywhere. Nothing flashing, nothing on the ends, no red, no green, nothing. And it wasn't moving. It sat exactly where it was next to that wingtip, and we were doing 400 and something kilometers an hour and it stayed there. I thought it was on the glass, said so twice. Then I put my hand flat against the window to kill the reflection of the cabin, because you could see my own face in it. I tried to work out how big it was. If it was close it would have gone past us. It didn't go past us, so it was far off. And that's where I stopped, because there was nothing out there to hold it up against. No cloud in front of it, no horizon behind it. It could have been the size of a bus or the size of a village, and there was no way on earth to tell which. I had it in frame about 14 seconds. Then I said, "Must be an alien or something," and I laughed, and the laugh came out wrong, and I said, "Sorry, that wasn't funny," because it wasn't. Then I didn't say anything at all for about a minute and a half, which anyone who knows me will tell you doesn't happen. It's the camera, and that was the end of it. That is where the first cassette ends. I want to pause here because it is easy to forget what you are watching. This is not a film. That was a 25-year-old student sitting in a pressurized cabin, trying to convince himself that a shape outside his window was a fault on the glass. 90 seconds later, flight 6-1-1-4 crashed into the mountain side at over 400 kilometers an hour. There is, unfortunately, no footage of the crash itself. When the picture resumes on the second cassette, 11 hours have passed. We are no longer in the air. The aircraft lies shattered across a remote hillside, lost somewhere deep in the urals, within 30,000 square kilometers of absolute wilderness. The camera is running on a damaged battery, and the tracking is permanently compromised from the impact. But it is what Yuri records next that kept this file locked in a military installation for nine years. We return to the tape. It is the following morning. The 90 seconds, the first thing was the engines. Then it changed, not louder, not a bang. The note went like somebody had lent on it. Then the belt sign came on. No announcement, nothing on the speaker. Then the floor went. That's the only word for it. The floor went out from under the whole aeroplane, and a bag came out of the rack for rows up and hit the aisle. And then I don't have it. I've tried and tried to get it back, and there's nothing there. I have the shouting, and then I have waking up. Whatever's between them is gone, and the tape hasn't got it either, because I'd turned the camera off. I know we hit at a shallow angle and slid, because you can see the mark we made on the slope behind us. I know the noses crushed into rock, and the tails split open. I don't remember any of it happening. I woke up in my seat with my belt still on. Still done up exactly as I'd fastened it. I hadn't moved. It was light. That's what was wrong. My watch said quarter past eight, and it was light out, so that was morning, and we'd gone down at about nine the night before. Eleven hours. I did that some three or four times. Eleven hours in that seat with the door open somewhere behind me, and the snow coming in in October. And I woke up cold, but I woke up. My head was cut above the left eye up in the hairline, and it had dried and gone hard, so it wasn't new. Everything else worked. I unclip to the belt and stood up and had to hold the seat in front, because my legs weren't ready, and then I was standing in the aisle, and I was fine. 33 people on that hairline, and I stood up in the aisle with a cut on my head. The cabin was tipped forward, and over to the left, so you were walking downhill and leaning. Daylight came in through a long split in the roof behind me, gray and flat with snow turning in it, and up the front it was dark. I said hello. I said it about four times, getting louder, and then I stopped. It was how it sounded in there. There was nobody in any of the seats, not one. Then I turned round and went the other way, past my own seat, all the way down to the galley, and there was nobody in any of it, either side, the whole length. 28 other people got on that plane with me. It's not a full aircraft, that route, so there were rows nobody was sitting in it all, and every belt was undone, not just theirs. Every seat on that plane, all the way down, both sides, including the empty ones, the ones the girls had gone round and done up themselves before we left, both halves lying open on the cushion where somebody had let it go, not cut, not torn, not hanging off the side the way it would if you'd pulled a person out in a hurry, just open. I stood at the back and looked up the length of it and I thought they've been got out. I remember being pleased, they've come in the night and taken everybody out and missed me in the dark and they'll be back this morning and I'd better be ready. You undo the belt and you lift the person out and you go to the next one. That's what it looks like. Then I looked up, every bag still in the racks, both sides, the whole way down, nothing taken. A coat still hanging on the hook by the door, a book faced down and opened on the seat at 3B where whoever it was had put it down to sleep and I built the next bit fast because you don't take luggage out of a crash, you take the people and you come back for the bags. That works. It's the correct order to do things in. I opened the door. It took a while, it's a door built for a set of steps and there weren't any steps and when it finally came round it swung out onto about a meter and a half of nothing and then snow. I climbed down onto the step and shouted until I stopped and then I looked at where we were properly for the first time. We're high up, on open ground above the trees, long white slope going up behind us, long white slope going down in front, rock coming through it in places. The whole thing running down may be a kilometer to a line of trees a long way below. Beyond that it's more of the same in every direction. No road, no smoke, no cut in the trees. You can see about 30 kilometers from that door and there isn't one thing out there that a person made and the snow underneath me was flat right up to the door, flat all the way out both directions, not a mark in it anywhere. I walked out about 20 meters and turned round and looked back and there were two lines of prints on that entire mountain and they were both mine. If you take 30 people out of a door in the dark, you'd have a mess 50 meters across. Then I looked at the wing. There was fresh snow sitting on it, a good hand's depth, clean, right along the top surface and the same on the step I'd just come down. It fell some time after we did and it filled in everything that was there. It snowed on top of whatever was there and I'd never know either way. Then I went back in because I couldn't feel my ears and because I just remembered that when I reached that door it was shut, shut and on the latch from the inside and I'd turned it myself. Then I did the rest of it properly. There are four emergency exits over the wing, two on each side. I climbed up on the seats and put my hands on all four. Handles flush, seals on, not one of them had been touched so the only way off that plane is the door and the door was shut and latched from the inside. Then I worked up and down looking at the seats and there's blood in three places on two A on the arm of nine C quite a lot of it and a smear down the galley wall at about waist height like somebody put a hand out. All of it dried so people were hurt. Somebody was hurt badly going by nine C. There's blood in three places on this plane and there is nobody in it. I found him about an hour and a half later when I walked down to the back to see if there was anything in the galley I could eat. He was on the floor behind the last row down between the seats in the bulkhead where you wouldn't see him from the aisle unless you were looking. I thought he was dead. I stood there a good few seconds working out what I was going to do about a dead man. Then he breathed. I knelt down and took hold of him. He was cold like a thing rather than a person. His hair was matted on the left side, and there was a dark stain gone stiff down the collar of his coat. Sir, can you hear me? Can you open your eyes for me? His eyes were already open. They'd been open the whole time I'd been kneeling there talking at him. He wasn't blinking and he wasn't looking at me, and when I moved my hand across his face, he didn't follow it. I lifted him onto two seat cushions and pulled three coats off the racks and put them over him, and he didn't help and he didn't resist. And the whole time his eyes were open and he was looking at something over my shoulder. There was a bag next to him with Arkady Ivanovich, a shirt, a jar of something, and a slip of paper with a phone number on it. His stub was in the side pocket. Like say, he'd been sat two meters away from me for an hour, and before that I filmed past him in the airport like he was a chair. That's everything I know about him. That first night I built a fire in a meal tray out of the galley trolley. Seat foam burns like you wouldn't believe and it stinks, and the wall paneling comes off with a bit of work and the smoke goes up through the split and the roof more or less. There's no wood on this mountain. The trees are a kilometer down and I wasn't going down there. He didn't speak, not one word, not a sound, the whole day and the whole night. He lay on the two cushions with his eyes open and I sat by the fire and talked at him about nothing. The alternative was sitting in a dead airplane in the dark, not talking. I told him they'd come in the morning. There are 33 of us on a list, I believed that completely. Day two. Nothing has come over, not one aircraft, not a helicopter, not something crossing high up on its way somewhere else. He started talking on the second morning. I was up at first light, it comes up about eight up here or it does with the cloud sitting on us the way it has been and it's no use to anybody by half four. So you get eight and a half hours, you can actually work in and the rest of it is sitting next to a fire made out of a chair. I was counting those hours by then. I'd started counting a lot of things. He was warmer, he'd take in water and he'd eaten two biscuits out of the galley which was more than I'd managed to get into him the day before and I thought that's it, he's coming back. Then he asked me whether they'd moved to the car. I said there's no car, Arkady. Do you remember what's happened to us? And he said they'd told him they'd move it before six and then a bit later he asked me where Zoya had got to and he called me Sasha. I told him twice that my name is Yura. It didn't take either time. I was doing the fire in the water so all he had to do was sit by the open door and watch the sky. That's it. Sit and look up because two of us couldn't do the fire and somebody had to be watching when something finally came over. He got up and went outside and sat down in the snow. Out by the door, forty meters out, passed the wing, downhill, facing away from me toward the trees at the bottom and he sat down in it and stayed there. I walked out and fetched him and I brought him back in and I shouted at him. I shouted at a man in his fifties with a head injury who doesn't know what year it is. Then I did the coats over him again and I did it too hard and he put his hand flat on the floor and looked at me. Properly looked at me first time since I'd found him and he said, "Sorry. That's the only word he ever said to me that was meant for me." I did the water after that. Later that day I sat down and made a plan and put it on the tape properly. We're three days walk from Novi Urangoy at absolute best and I don't know which direction it is. But we don't walk. We stay with the aeroplane because the aeroplane is a big, great thing on a white mountain and it's the only thing anybody is going to see from the air. I had about eleven liters of water in bottles out of the galley plus all the snow in the world. Food was bad, a day and a half of eating properly, three days of eating badly. I climbed up into the cockpit on the morning of day three. The reason it took me that long is that the door to the flight deck was jammed shut. The nose of the aeroplane is crushed in against rock, which warped the bulkhead and locked the door solid in its frame. On day one I was concussed. On day two I was trying to keep our kadi alive and waiting for the search planes. You don't burn all your energy trying to bash down a locked door when you think a helicopter is ten minutes away. But by day three the sky was still empty. So I took a metal strut from the galley cart, went up to the front of the cabin, and spent two hours beating the latch on the cockpit door until it finally gave. The flight deck is tilted forward, so once you're through the door you're climbing down into it rather than walking. The windscreen is packed solid with snow and rock from the impact, so there's no light in there at all. I had to take a torch, I thought I was going to find the crew dead in there. But both of their seats are empty, and both belts undone and lying open on the cushions exactly the same as every other seat on that aeroplane. I set the camera on the combing where it could see the panel and left it running in case I picked anything up. There was power. I turned something and lights came up on the panel in front of me three or four of them, green, so the battery wasn't dead. Whether it would last an hour or a week I had no idea. I know nothing about any of this. The radio's a box in the middle with numbers on it and a switch, and there's a thing on the yoke you press, that's the one they press in films, so that's the one I pressed. I said hello. This is Yuri Filatov, I was a passenger on Flight 6114, Novie Urongoi to Perm. We've come down and there are two of us alive, nothing, just the noise it makes. That flat, rushing noise, on and on, I tried it again. Hello, this is Flight 6114, is anybody hearing this? Nothing, I turned to the numbers and I did it again on a different one, and again. Up and said my own name into a box for 40 minutes, and my hand went numb from holding the switch. And then a man said, "Say again, I'm not getting all of that." I had my whole weight on that switch. I said, "Hello, hello, this is Yuri Filatov. I'm on 6114, I'm alive, there's two of us, we're on a mountain, and I don't know where, and he came back, but not to me. He wasn't talking to me. You could hear it." He turned his head away from whatever he was speaking into, and he was talking to somebody else in the room with him, and what he said was, he says he's on 6114, "Sir, sir, he's saying he's on 6114, he's, there's someone still alive on 6114." And then a second man, further off, older, absolutely flat, get off the line, and the first one said, "Sir, he's, and the second one said, get off the line." Hang it up, and then nothing. I sat in that seat for an hour, I did every number on that box, and came back to the one it had been on when I started, and worked that one for a long time, I gave my name, and the flight number, and that there were two of us, and at one point I said, "Please, which I'm not proud of, nothing ever came back." Not since. He said there's someone still alive on 6114. He knew the number. He didn't ask me to repeat it, he didn't ask me who I was, he already had it. So, they knew we'd gone down. Somebody in a room somewhere in Russia knew that aeroplane was on the ground with people on it, and the other one told him to get off the line. "I've tried to find a version of that, which is alright, and I can't do it. If they thought it was a hoax, you'd check. You'd ask me something only a passenger would know. If it was the wrong frequency," he answered me, he said, "Say again. If there's a procedure, and I'm doing it wrong, then tell me the procedure. Say stand by. Say anything. He didn't say we can't help you. He didn't say stand by. He didn't say what's your position. I've left the radio on. I've had it on ever since with the volume as high as it goes, and I can hear it from where I sleep, and if the battery goes, then it goes. I want to stop the tape there, because that is the part everybody asks me about. When I first heard it, I played those 8 seconds, 11 times in a row, and then I went and got somebody else to listen to them. So here it is again, and this time, listen to what's underneath it. He says he's on 6-1-1-4, he's, there's someone still alive on 6-1-1-4. Get off the line. Now here's what our people tell me, and I'll say up front that they aren't certain either. That may not be one conversation, it may be two stations late over each other. Over that country, there are no towers and no radar, so the crew aren't on a local set, they're on high frequency, and high frequency doesn't travel in a straight line. It goes up, it comes off the ionosphere, and it comes down somewhere else entirely. Two rooms, 2,000 kilometers apart, can end up in the same 8 seconds of tape. They tell me that in 1995, on that band, it happened all the time. If that's what this is, then the man saying a flight number, and the man saying get off the line, were never in the same room, and quite possibly, never in the same country. And there's the other possibility. Somebody sat down with two tape machines at some point in the last 11 years, and put that on there, and if they did, they did it well. That's what I've wanted to believe for two years. I've not got a better answer than that, and I won't pretend it settles it. One thing I will say before I let it go, because I know where a room full of people goes with this. That wasn't somebody calling off a search, there was no search to call off. Nobody ever had a position for that aeroplane, and I've told you why. A line on a map, 300 kilometers long, and a beacon that never transmitted. Those two things sit next to each other on this tape, and I don't believe they're connected. If you go away tonight thinking somebody knew where that boy was and left him there, you'll be thinking something I can't support and never have been able to. What I can tell you is that a man in a room somewhere set a flight number out loud, and another man told him to hang it up, and I don't know why. I'd hold on to the frequencies if I were you. The wing I did that same afternoon when I came up out of the front. I emptied every bag on that aeroplane, which took what was left of the daylight and felt like something I'd be arrested for, and I took out everything orange or red I could find. A life vest, a child's coat, a red head scarf, two carrier bags. I laid all of it out along the top of the wing and waited it down with bits of torn paneling. From the ground it looks like a jumble sale. From the air it's the only color anywhere on this mountain, sat on white, and you'd see it from a long way up. And I kept the fire going all day as well, for the smoke, which I should have been doing from the beginning. Everything came over. He had a better day. He drank a lot, and there was a stretch in the afternoon where he was nearly right. He asked me my name, and I told him, and he used it, twice. He said, "Thank you, Yura." And then it went again. That evening I sat down by the fire, and I set out loud to the camera, that I was only shutting my eyes for a minute. Steped out onto the step, and there were his prints. One line of them from the bottom of the door, going out past the wing and then turning and going down. Down the slope, away from me, in the direction of the trees, and nothing coming back. You can see from miles up here, it's the one mercy of the place. I stood on that step, and I could follow that line of prints with my eyes all the way down the open ground, 400 meters of it, until it got to where the trees start, and I lost it in the grey. He'd walked down there in a coat and a pair of town shoes, thin ones, black leather things with a bit of a heel on them. I followed him. They were easy to follow. He hadn't been going fast, and he hadn't been going straight, and there were places where he'd stopped and stood for a while, two feet together, a bit of a mess around them, and then off again. I shouted his name about every 50 meters, and nothing came back except my own voice off the rock. It's downhill the whole way, so I was making good time. I didn't think about that, snowed at the knee in places. The trees got bigger and darker. I stopped about a hundred meters short of them, because by then I could see him. He was in among the first of the trees, standing, 200 meters further on from me, maybe. In a gap between the trunks with a big one in front and to the left of him, and he was upright, and he was still, and he had his back to me, facing the other way, into the trees, on the hill. I shouted. I shouted until my throat went, and I put both hands up and shouted his name, "Arcadi, Arcadi, it's Yura," and he didn't move. Not his head, not his shoulders, nothing. He didn't turn round, and he didn't put a hand up, and he didn't sit down. He just stood there, facing away from me with the trees behind him, and I couldn't tell anything about him. At that distance in that light, I couldn't see whether he still had his coat on, I couldn't see his hands. I couldn't tell you if his eyes were open. The only thing I could tell you about him was that he was standing up. So he's alright, I thought. If he's standing up, he's alright. I stood there and shouted at a man's back for about two minutes. Then I stopped. I told the camera I was turning back because I'd come 600 meters down a mountain in the snow with no rope and no compass, and going down is nothing but coming back up is another thing entirely. And if I lost the aeroplane that finished both of us, all of that is true. It isn't why I turned round. I turned round because I didn't want to walk over there. But then I said, out loud, oh well, I tried. I said I'd come out again when the light was better and fetch him. I made it back up an hour and a half later, and I was finished, and I sat by the fire and got some water into me, and then I watched it back. There's nothing in it. I don't mean he's small in it, or blurry, or lost in the dark. I mean that when the camera swings round to where he was, and it does, I'm pointing right at him. You can hear me saying that's him, that's him right there, it's trees. It's a big trunk and a gap behind it and snow, and there is nothing standing in the gap. Wounded back and did it again with my face right up against the viewfinder. Nothing. I was there. I stood in the snow and shouted at that man for two minutes. I saw the shape of his shoulders. I know what I was looking at, and I know what I've had to eat this week, but the prints are real. He went down there, and I followed him down there, so he's out there somewhere, whether or not I. Anyway, that's where I stopped it. I said I'd come out again. I didn't. It went dark at half four, and I sat here. It's morning with mud on my hands. Both of them up past the wrist on the right, dried and cracking off in the creases. And my boots were soaked through, not damp, through, right into the sock, and I'd put them by the fire the night before, but there's no mud up here, it's snow and rock and frozen scree the whole way around this aeroplane, and I've walked all of it. There's mud under the trees, which is the one place I've set out loud on this tape that I wasn't going, and I've got no memory of it, a week of three hours a night and nothing much to eat. I don't know what day it is, I've been keeping it on the cuts on my left hand, and some of those are just cuts. It doesn't matter, it's the same day, light at eight, dark at half four. I looked for him twice, I made it as far as the first of the trees the second day after he walked off, then it snowed, the prints went, and I couldn't find that big trunk again. They all looked the same once you're in among them. I've been waking up. wrong. I take my boots off at night and put them by the fire, and I wake up and they're on. I wake up out from under the blanket, all the way out, lying on the floor beside it. Three days ago, I woke up down at the back of the cabin, behind the last row, with my head against the bulkhead, and every time I've got the mud on me. So I've done something about it, I've put the camera up on the seat, back facing where I sleep, and pressed it, and gone to sleep. Because it's one of two things, either I'm getting up in the night, which is a thing people do. Everybody knows somebody who walks in their sleep, or somebody's coming in, and I'd like to know which one. First night, there was nothing on it. 45 minutes of me lying on the floor not moving, and then the tape runs out, and it's black, and that's it. You can hear the fire, which should have been a relief and wasn't, because 45 minutes, I did the arithmetic sitting there. I'm getting three, four hours a night at the very best. This thing gives me 45 minutes, so the most I can ever see is about a fifth of a night. I did it again the second night, and started it later. I've watched it. I need to sit down for this. Right. There's a stretch, a good way in, most of the way through the tape. I'm on the floor, and I'm still, and then I sit up. I sit up first, and then I stand up. And I'm facing the wrong way. I'm facing down the cabin towards the back, away from the fire. And then I start talking. It's a whisper. It's not loud. You can only just get it even with your ear against the thing. And it doesn't stop. It's not a sentence and a gap and another sentence, the way people talk and they're sleep. It's continuous. It goes on and on without a break in it anywhere. Eleven minutes. I timed it. Eleven minutes. And then I lie back down. I turned to the volume all the way up and put my ear flat against the speaker. I thought if I got it louder, I'd hear what I was saying, and it would be a shopping list or my mother or nothing at all. And this is the part I can't get to the bottom of. Sometimes through it, it's language. It's got the shape of talking, and it goes up at the ends the way a question does. And I'd sit there and think, "That's words. I'm saying words." I've tried to make the sound myself. I can't get near it. But then I don't know what I'd be trying to copy. Sleep talking. That's what that is. Xenia does it. She's done it since she was small, whole conversations, and my mother would answer her from the other room and she'd answer back. And in the morning she'd have nothing. That's a thing bodies do. It's me in an empty aeroplane whispering at nobody for 11 minutes. I'll put the fire up. Battery went in the middle of the night after that. There's 20 odd minutes and then it stops. And whatever happened in the rest of that night is gone, and it's staying gone. I'm not doing it again. It costs me tape, and it's a fifth of a night. I've said that, the fifth of a night. I know I've said that, and I want some of this left for when they come. It's been over a week. So somebody's told them by now. Somebody's been to that door and my mother has opened it. I'd like them to know I did try. I'd like Zhukov to see the bit where I did the plan because it was a good plan, and I did all of it, and it didn't matter. Nothing came over today. Hang on. Listen. Can you hear that? There. There it is again. That's somebody talking. That's outside. That's out past the wing somewhere, down the slope, and that's not the wind. I know what the wind does up here. I've been listening to it for nine days. That's a voice. Hold on. Sorry, hold on. Why is it quiet like that? Why would they be whispering? You wouldn't whisper. If you'd walked four days into this and you'd found a plane on a mountain you'd shout. So why would they? He took the camera with him. That's the last thing he says, and then there's 51 minutes of him walking, and he doesn't say one word in any of it. There's the torch, and there's his breathing, and there's the sound his boots make and snow, and the cameras down by his side most of the way. So what you're looking at is the ground going past in a bit of sky when his arm swings. He doesn't call out again. He doesn't stop. At 51 minutes, the camera switches off, and that is the end of the cassette. I've had a lot of letters about this, and the letters all want it to be one thing. So let me tell you what I think, and then I'll give you the facts, and you can do what you like with them. I think he lost his mind. I don't say that lightly, and I don't say it unkindly. That is a 25-year-old alone for nine or eleven days, barely eating, three hours of sleep a night, in an aeroplane on a mountain in October, with a head injury nobody ever looked at. We had the audio run, and cleaned up, and slowed down, and there's nothing in it, and a man in that condition who hears a voice outside and walks down a mountain at night isn't a mystery. He's a tragedy. Most of what comes across my desk is the facts. Flight 6-1-1-4 departed Novi Urangoy for Perm on the 14th of October 1995, with 33 people on board. 29 passengers for crew. There was no distress call. The commander, Boris Novikov, had 19 years on the type. The file was closed in 1997. Arkady Ivanovich Belov was 54 years old and worked for a haulage firm in Solikomsk. The camera and all nine cassettes were recovered together in the spring of 2004, from a decommissioned military installation about 60 kilometers northeast of where I'm not going to say. It's an ordinary building, a generator room, some racking, a lot of water damage. It had been sealed since 1958. They cut it open in 2004, and the camera was inside it. So, if you know anything about Flight 6-1-1-4, if you flew that route, if you worked a radio room in that part of the country in 1995, if you were in a room where somebody was told to get off the line, the address is at the end of the program, and we read everything. Next week, we're in Tavaire, with a woman who says her husband still gets on the number 4 tram every Thursday, and her husband died in 1998. So, do join us for that. From all of us here, thank you for your company. Good night. Rex here. It's been a bit of a hectic week, so thank you so much for bearing with me and sticking around for tonight's story. New narratives are already in the works and coming as fast as possible. Whether you're watching on YouTube or on Spotify and other podcast platforms, I'm really glad to have you along for the ride. If you enjoyed tonight's story, dropping a like or leaving a comment goes a massive way in supporting the channel. And if you have an original story idea you'd love to hear brought to life, let me know down below. That's all for tonight. Look after yourselves, keep the lights on, and until next time, sleep well.