corn snake wildtiptip

Dark5's new channel! Subscribe to Dark Docs: http://bit.ly/DarkDocs
Presenting Russia's Abandoned Buran: The Lost Soviet Space Shuttle

DarkDocs is a new narrated documentary video from Dark5 taking an in-depth look at at some of the most mysterious stories on Earth. This week: Why did Russia Abandon a Space Shuttle in the Desert? Some experts believe Russia may have built the most sophisticated space plane to ever fly, but it sat for years lost in the desert after only one launch. How did these Soviet Space shuttle clone top its NASA American counterpart, and why did it never fly with its Energia rocket again?

Often claimed to be the only "official" government report of a unidentified object crash that wasn't explained away by an innocuous event (like the Roswell weather balloon)... still unsolved to this day, this is the Shag Harbour Incident. Subscribe to Dark Docs: http://bit.ly/DarkDocs

It was a “most unusual story” so difficult to believe that the U.S. Air Force felt obligated to turn the event into a training video to document “aviation history.” Marked “Official Use Only,” and to be shown only to “Authorized Personnel,” “Flight Without a Fin” showed a jet-powered bomber flying with its tail and vertical stabilizer sheared clean off. The video captured extensive real-life footage of the aircraft in flight, and the Directorate of Aerospace Safety hoped that it would “enhance pilot understanding of B-52 flight characteristics and heighten appreciation of its capabilities.”

Subscribe to Dark Docs: https://bitly.com/DarkDocs

The Vietnam War was still in its early years. The war of attrition had escalated on both sides. The North Vietnamese Army were emboldened by victories earlier that year and were working with guerrilla fighters of the dreaded Vietcong to move south and infiltrate U.S. and South Vietnamese strongholds.

It was the night of December 23rd, and U.S.-allied forces in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or the ARVN, were stationed at the Trahn Yend outpost on the Mekong River delta. The troops sensed a stealth attack from the Vietcong was imminent but were powerless to stop it. The local guerrilla army was closing in. ARVN officials had radioed a nearby U.S. Air Force base requesting aerial assistance. The situation was beyond tense.
The guerrillas were accustomed to this procedure and knew they had to simply retreat back into the jungles and fields and hide, and wait for the planes to exhaust their munitions. Eventually, the U.S. planes would assume the enemy had either been wiped out or withdrawn and would themselves retreat from the area. The guerillas would then re-emerge from the shadows and re-engage their attack.

For the Vietcong, though, that night was different. Huge streaks of bright red unleashed from the sky like glowing, thrashing tongues. They rained down in heavy, electric blankets in all directions. A new and powerful weapon had introduced itself that night: The Douglas AC-47. The glowing red of its ammunition gave the craft a nickname that quickly spread among the ARVN: “The Dragonship.”

The wreckage of the massive Airship Italia’s cabin lay strewn across the frozen tundra, along with nine men from its crew, some in critical condition. Meanwhile, the aircraft’s balloon component, loosed from the cabin by the impact of the crash, drifted away in the violent Arctic wind with several of crewmembers still aboard. The airship’s captain, the Italian pilot and General Umberto Nobile, lay helpless on the large ice pack, having just moments before watched the crash through a porthole window in the Italia’s cabin. His arm and leg were broken, and he felt a tightness in his chest, assuming he was done for.

The other survivors who were healthy enough to walk scavenged the crash site for supplies, and miraculously located two pre-packed survival kits and the small wireless transmitter they had brought along in case they needed to broadcast a distress signal back to Norway, where they had launched from. Using the materials they recovered - food, tents, weapons, and warm clothes - the survivors from the ship’s cabin set up a small camp and hunkered down to rest and prepare for the long haul on the drifting ice pack as they waited for rescue from their doomed attempt to reach the North Pole…