An Anomalous Broadcast from the Parallel World: Summer 2002

This is mine story. One summer day, I experimented with an analogue television set outdoors, fashioning a makeshift very own antenna to tune in signals. The antenna I placed on the iron structure for the swing, which is in the yard of our family house. Our yard earlier used to be a road, before our house was built there.

To my surprise, I locked onto a channel broadcasting in Cyrillic script, but in a language utterly unfamiliar to me, despite my fluency in Russian and all Slavic tongues, along with the ability to read and write Cyrillic proficiently.

The programme featured Europoid individuals, it were the people with distinctly European features, unlike the Asian appearances common in Central Asian or Siberian broadcasts. There was no audio, but the visuals were crystal clear, devoid of any interference. It appeared to be a news segment, which then transitioned to a weather forecast presented by a blonde woman clad in a greyish fur coat adorned with enormous thorns. The temperatures were displayed in an unknown scale, neither Celsius nor Fahrenheit, adding to the strangeness.

The signal persisted for only about two minutes before abruptly vanishing. I caught no city names or maps, as the forecast seemed localised, much like how some channels in our world prioritise their broadcast city before listing others. The attire and linguistic structure felt alien, as if from a parallel reality bleeding into our own. Who were these people, and from where did this transmission originate? It remains an unsolved puzzle.