There's this new theory.

Let me give it to you just the way I got it:

"English scientists ventured to challenge their world famous country-fellow Charles Darwin. Cambridge University scientists cast doubts on the hypothesis, which says that a human being originated from an ape-like ancestor. Our common ancestor is rather strange-looking, and it does not look like a human being at all. It is an anteater.

"Most likely, this scientific discovery will make the humanity pay a lot more attention to the mammals of the edentate species. To be more precise, it goes about African aardvark anteaters. These animals have a special scientific name, which is very hard to pronounce. It is translated from the Dutch language as a 'ground pig'."

If you got the feeling there might be something not quite...well, English, just for openers, about those two paragraphs, you'd be right. We're reading, my fellow ground piggies, from the pages of a newspaper which was the apple of Leon Trotsky's eye when he founded it in 1908. It's the famous Pravda, which, translated from Russian to English, means Truth. I'm sure Mr Trotsky did not have irony in mind originally, but things change, don't they?

From 1918, it was the Russian state newspaper. In those days, and during the cold war, it was a fairly grim publication. Its lightest moments were when it claimed, earnestly deadpan, that it was Russians who invented the lightbulb, the tank and anything else you can think of, from gunpowder to penicillin. Pravda's presses stopped running with the collapse of the Soviet Union in August, 1991.

But the journalists who worked for Pravda wouldn't let it die, and grabbed the name. Now, there is a newspaper, Pravda, which is published in Russia, and analyses events from the point of view of the interests of the Communist Party, and there is Pravda On-line, a completely different company (in which the story I've quoted above appeared) which appears only on the Internet, and takes a less political approach to its coverage of the news. So much less political, in fact, that the National Enquirer should look to its laurels.

Pravda On-line (http://english.pravda.ru/) is a mix of straight news and strange, off-the-wall pieces like the one above, all written in the kind of imperfectly-translated English that makes it sound like a script being read by Boris Badenov or Natasha, the dastardly Russian characters on one of the finest made-for-television cartoon series of all time, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

So when you read the long rant on their website about the West's favourite Russian, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, having actually been a KGB agent all this time, or about the glorious Volgograd University scientists who have discovered how to create perpetual energy, it's hard to shake off the notion that it's all there for laughs, having been written, perhaps, by a cunning team of parodists from Private Eye.

I used their search engine to see what Russians might think of Bermuda. Not much, was the answer. There were some business stories about company incorporations, one or two bits and pieces that turned out to be a great deal less interesting than they first looked, and a ton of stuff about the Bermuda triangle. Boy, do they love their Bermuda triangle:

"Here it will go about the place, which is traditionally considered to be the most horrible, the most mysterious place of the planet...A thousand of victims over a quarter of a century is definitely way too much. But this does not seem really scary, if you compare it to other facts. The number of car accident victims in Russia on a part of land of the same size made up 15 times as much over the same period of time. It is reasonable to compare the Bermuda and road victims, since the area of the Bermuda Triangle is rather a busy traffic site.

"Needless to mention, that the triangle does not kill every ship or plane that travels there. So, where does this infamous fame come from?"

Infamous fame...wish I'd thought of that.

Pravda tells stories about the Triangle that I, for one, had never heard before.

"An airliner that was approaching Miami once vanished from radar screens and then reappeared again in ten minutes. However, all clocks on board the plane were ten minutes behind the actual time. There was not even a passenger who noticed anything weird about that."

Here's another: "American News magazine published an article, which told the story of an American submarine. The submarine was travelling under the water at the depth of 70 metres (200 feet). Submariners suddenly heard a strange noise overboard. Then they sensed vibration that was going on for about a minute. Afterwards, it was noticed that all members of the crew added some years to their age. When the submarine surfaced, the satellite navigation system showed that the submarine was in the Indian Ocean, 300 miles off the eastern coast of Africa and about ten miles off the Bermudas. However, making any conclusions about this story is a premature thing to do. The US Navy never confirmed or rejected that information."

I guess they must have been busy (they will be, still, is my guess) trying to figure out how you can be ten miles from Bermuda, in the Indian Ocean and 300 miles off the eastern coast of Africa all at the same time, or even one after the other at any kind of speed.

It is also good to learn, from Pravda, that "the phenomenon of the Bermuda Triangle occurs in the Baltic Sea, as well".

Apparently, two fishing boats in 1979 went to a "fishing zone" about 70 kilometres off the port of Hel (I wouldn't make that up) in Gdansk.

"The fishing started," Pravda says. "Suddenly, several red balls appeared in the sky right above them. Although one of the fishing boats performed a zigzagged move by order of its captain, one of the red balls repeated all the manoeuvres of the boat; at that, the ball always remained ahead of it and exactly before the rostrum. Soon, members of the crew were gripped with unexplainable fear, and they had headaches and nausea; it was difficult to breathe. Simultaneously, all electrical appliances on the fishing boat stopped functioning.

"All of a sudden, after numerous changes of the boat's course, the red ball soared upwards and disappeared. At that very moment, the electrical appliances started operating. Both fishing boats veered and headed for the port of Hel. Members of the crew were immediately examined by doctors of the naval base; however, the doctors found only nervous disorders and exhaustion."

The story ends with these intriguing reflections.

"One of Poland's leading UFO experts, Robert Lesnjakewic, thinks that UFOs have a connection with similar tragedies in the Baltic Sea (as well as in the Bermuda triangle). The tragedies probably developed the following way: A UFO hovers over the boat, it emits its energy, which paralyses the boat's crew and puts all technical appliances out of operation. The ufologist thinks that one of the following variants may occur:

"The boat is carried into the time-space dimension of some other world.

"The boat is carried away to some other planet or to an internal underground world of the plant (this is in accordance with the hypothesis saying on the existence of the city states of Agarta and Shambala underground);

"UFO pilots take people from the boat and sink the boat itself;

"UFO pilots take the crew off the boat and don't touch the boat itself; the latter turns into a Flying Dutchman drifting without any visible damage."

But if you think that's strange, get a load of this, under what has to be one of the greatest headlines of all time: They live in their underwater cities and sometimes frighten people.

"Everybody knows about UFOs. And what about UUOs? I mean, Unknown Underwater Objects? The Paseidon (sic) kingdom sometimes surprises sailors with fluorescent heads, devil circles and other miracles. Explorer Fedor Gard recorded evidence of sailors who had seen a strange phenomenon: June 18, 1845, the vessel Viktoria crew saw in Mediterranean Sea three dazzling disks emerging. The disks seemed to be five times bigger than the Moon, and they were linked with each other with some thin fluorescent pivots..."

"So what are these objects? Nobody can say it. In 19th Century, scientists Adams and Jenkins assumed some intelligent creatures with gills live under water, accustomed to low temperatures and overpressure. Moreover, according to an old legend, in ancient times, there were Paseidonians living in ocean who were the human kind enlighteners. The underwater civilisation representatives were not similar to Apollo.

"Paseidonians are said to have taught Atlantes all science, so they even could travel in space. A woman from the city of Dnepropetrovsk who is said to have contacts with the extraterrestrial, got information about some mysterious civilisation founded by extraterrestrial and called Atsor. Their descendants, who knew Solar System laws, forecasted a monster catastrophe which would put an end to their civilisation. So, they built houses under ocean bottom. They resettled to their new houses before the cataclysm and still live there. While on the earth surface, only their probes can be observed, that above-mentioned underwater objects."

So. Got a taste for the bizarre? Just ask questions at Pravda.ru. The folks at the Department of Immigration should remember that, the next time somebody wants to bring in one of those foreign prophets. There's no need, they should say. All the weirdness you crave is just a click away, and free!

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