How the Post-Cold War Soviet Breakdown Exposed the Elusive Almas THE WEEKLY STRANGE Episode 121

[00:00:00]Late on a freezing pitch black night in November of 1992, a seasoned Russian Border Patrol officer named Captain Igor Vulov is huddling inside a remote concrete guard post along the newly disputed border between Russia and Georgia, high in the Cauus Mountains.

[00:00:18]The Soviet Union had collapsed just a year prior, leaving this entire mountainous region in a state of chaotic geopolitical tension. Vulov is monitoring a narrow rocky mountain pass known for smugglers when suddenly the perimeter motion sensors trigger an alarm. He grabs his flashlight, steps out into the biting wind, and sweeps the beam across the jagged rocks. At first, he sees nothing, but then less than 40 ft away, the beam reflects off two large, dull orange eyes. Vulkoff freezes as a massive broad shouldered bipeedal figure standing nearly 7 feet tall steps out into the open. It is entirely covered in thick matted dark brown hair and its face is heavily muscled with a low sloping forehead and a flat nose.

[00:01:10]The creature doesn't run. Instead, it bears its teeth, takes a deep, aggressive step toward the officer, and lets out a low, guttural growl that vibrates right through Volkov's chest.

[00:01:22]Terrified, the captain reaches for his sidearm. But before he can even unholster it, the massive figure turns with an explosive speed and leaps over a steep rocky ridge and vanishes into the pitch black mountain ravine below. What did Vulov see? Find out only on this episode of the weekly strange.

[00:02:02]Hello everyone and welcome to the weekly strange. I'm your host John F. Muras, author, actor, adventurer. All right, so this is the third episode in my Almas trilogy. For decades, an encounter like the one Vulov had would have been immediately seized by a specialized Soviet military branch, locked away in a top secret Moscow archive, and never spoken of again. But in the early 1990s, the Iron Curtain had just collapsed. The old state sponsored secrecy apparatus was completely breaking down, and a terrifying ancient mystery was suddenly exposed to the modern world. To understand how a highly trained border officer found himself staring at an impossible archaic homminid in the high caucuses, we have to look back at the massive chaotic transition that swept through Central Asia and the former Soviet territories starting in 1991.

[00:02:55]For the better part of the 20th century, the Soviet government maintained absolute ironfisted control over the vast isolated mountain ranges of the continent. From the rugged caucuses to the brutal premier mountains and the sprawling Alai region bordering Mongolia. If a local shepherd, a collective farmer, or a military outpost encountered an almas, the legendary relicked wild man of Central Asia, the state handled the data with strict bureaucratic compartmentalization.

[00:03:26]In fact, back in 1958, the Soviet Academy of Sciences had gone so far as to launch the official Commission for the Study of the Snowman, deploying military scientific drag nets into the mountains to forensically track down these creatures. As I detailed in my previous Alma's episode, they gathered footprint casts, hair samples, and hundreds of matching eyewitness reports from indigenous hunters. But when the state realized they couldn't weaponize or easily categorize the phenomenon and as political priorities shifted in Moscow, the official funding was pulled, the data was buried, and the Almus was officially relegated to the status of bourgeoa superstition. The public was told that these creatures simply did not exist. But then the Soviet Union collapses almost overnight. The highly restricted, heavily fortified internal and external military borders of the USSR dissolve. Massive state- managed agricultural systems collapse, and funding for remote frontier outposts completely vanishes. This geopolitical breakdown triggers two massive competing vectors that bring the Almas mystery roaring back into the modern era. First, the economic collapse forces thousands of local villagers, shepherds, and indigenous hunters deeper into the isolated mountain valleys than they had ever dared to go before, simply trying to find new grazing lands, timber, and wild game to survive the winter. Second, the sudden vacuum of state authority means that Western researchers, cryptozoolologists, and independent anthropologists can finally enter these long- forbidden, heavily militarized border zones for the very first time in modern history. As the 1990s progress, a flood of new raw reports begins to pour out of the newly independent republics.

[00:05:25]Independent researchers tracking the data notice a distinct, troubling trend.

[00:05:29]The Almas encounters are no longer just coming from deep unmapped wilderness areas because the breakdown of human infrastructure is forcing rural populations to push further into the wilderness. And because severe winter weather cycles are disrupting the high alitude ecosystems, the Almas are being actively driven down from their traditional high elevation sanctuaries into lower foothills. They are looking for food and in doing so they are walking directly into the human footprint. By the time the mid1990s arrive, the scattered uncoordinated reports catch the attention of a new generation of investigators. Armed with handheld video cameras, plaster for footprint casts, and basic field equipment, these researchers step into the vacuum left by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. They quickly realize they aren't dealing with a dead historical legend or a trick of the light. They're tracking a living, breathing biological population that is actively struggling to survive in a rapidly fracturing habitat. But as the transition from the old Soviet world to the modern 21st century accelerates, the nature of the evidence shifts from passing visual sightings to hard physical trackways left behind in the remote mountain passes. And as you'll see, we're going to look at the exact factual accounts of the researchers who plunged into the Dagistan foothills and the treacherous Pomeir Highway, where they found themselves actively tracking fresh footprints through the snow, only to realize that something immense was tracking them right back. On a freezing morning in October of 2003, an independent research expedition is slowly navigating a treacherous dirt and gravel stretch of the Premere Highway, a high alitude road cutting through the isolated mountains linking Tajikhstan in Kyrgyzstan. The team is led by a dedicated field investigator who has spent years compiling regional reports of relicked hominids. The air at 11,000 ft is thin, biting, and dead quiet.

[00:07:44]Suddenly, the lead vehicle grinds to a halt. The driver points through the dustcovered windshield toward a fresh, pristine patch of alpine snow, blanketing a flat ridge just off the shoulder of the road. The researchers scramble out of the trucks, their boots crunching loudly in the frost. As they approach the snowbank, their breath misting in the freezing air, they freeze. Stretched out before them is a perfectly preserved single file trackway crossing the road and heading straight up a sheer rocky incline. But these aren't the tracks of a mountain bear or snow leopard. They are looking at a series of massive bipeedal footprints measuring over 14 in in length. The stride length between each print is enormous, nearly 5 ft apart, indicating an entity of immense height and physical power. The team leader kneels down in the snow, pulling a tape measure from his pack. As he examines the anatomy of the prince, he realizes the detail is astonishing. The foot is exceptionally wide with a distinct deep heel strike and five flat short toes. Most significantly, the big toe is slightly offset, showing an anatomical structure designed for gripping vertical, rocky terrain with absolute stability. The edges of the prints are razor sharp.

[00:09:06]They were left mere minutes before the vehicles arrived. The researcher reaches for his camera, snaps several photographs, and begins preparing a batch of plaster to cast the trackway.

[00:09:18]But as the liquid plaster cures in the freezing cold, the team leader catches a sudden brief movement out of the corner of his eye. He stands up and looks past the snowbank, scanning the jagged slate gray mountain ridges towering thousands of feet above them. The wind suddenly shifts, carrying a distinct heavy pungent musky odor that smells like a mixture of wet animal hair and decay.

[00:09:44]And then he sees them high up on a vertical windswept scree slope that would be suicidal for a human to climb without ropes. A line of fresh dark tracks is rapidly appearing in the snow, moving parallel to the expedition's vehicles. The entity isn't running away.

[00:10:02]It's moving methodically along the high ridge line, looking down at the researchers with absolute situational dominance, tracking their progress through its territory before completely vanishing behind a wall of gray lowhanging clouds. Now, how did these massive bipeedal trackways continue to materialize along the highly remote borders of Central Asia throughout the late 90s and early 2000s? Well, we have to look at the shifting reality of the postsviet landscape. With the old military border restrictions entirely gone, the independent republics of Central Asia became a wild frontier for independent scientific investigation.

[00:10:42]Researchers were no longer relying on decades old state sanctioned folklore.

[00:10:48]They were gathering fresh realtime data from witnesses who had no choice but to coexist with these creatures. In the late 1990s, a series of compelling reports began emerging from the rugged foothills of Dagistan, a mountainous republic in the North Caucasus.

[00:11:06]Following the breakdown of state- managed agricultural systems, local villages were forced to abandon their collectivized farms and push their private livestock deeper into the isolated valleys. And as they did, they began reporting regular unsettling encounters with what they locally called the Captar or the Almas. According to documented field reports from this era, these creatures were no longer staying hidden in the high alitude peaks. Severe extended winter weather cycles in the Caucases were systematically locking down their traditional hunting grounds under feet of solid ice, driving the Almas down into the lower valleys in search of food. Local shepherds reported finding their sheep pens broken into during the night. The intruders didn't slaughter the flock the way a pack of wolves would. Instead, they selectively took a single animal, carrying it away over the rocky ridges on two legs.

[00:12:04]Witnesses from these rural Dagastani villages described seeing the almost at dusk, silhouetted against the gray rocks of the foothills. The descriptions were terrifyingly uniform. They were massive, covered in a coat of dark reddish brown hair that became noticeably thicker around the neck and shoulders, forming a natural protection against the biting mountain winds. Their arms were disproportionately long compared to a human and they moved with a fluid bent knee gate that allowed them to traverse steep rocky inclines with staggering velocity. But what separated these modern accounts from mere mythological monsters was the sheer biological mundane nature of their behavior.

[00:12:46]Hunters reported watching the Almas from a distance through binoculars, observing them foraging for wild berries, turning over massive flat stones to hunt for small rodents, and actively avoiding any direct confrontation with armed humans.

[00:13:01]They were behaving exactly like a highly intelligent, intensely reclusive apex primate that had learned over centuries that human contact was an absolute death sentence. As the 2000s progressed, independent investigators began realizing that relying solely on chance visual encounters and footprint casts wasn't going to be enough to solve the mystery. The world was rapidly changing.

[00:13:27]The introduction of cellular networks, satellite mapping, and modern industrial mining operations began encroaching on even the most remote mountain passes of the Alai region. The ancient unmapped territory that had protected the Almas for millennia was shrinking at an exponential rate. If science was going to validate the existence of this relic homminid before human development pushed it into total extinction, researchers needed to move away from old school tracking methods. They needed to weaponize the 21st century's most advanced tools. And now we're going to look at how the investigation shifted from the mud and snow of the mountain passes to the sterile high-tech environment of international genetics laboratories where a single lock of anomalous hair would eventually trigger a fierce scientific debate over the true identity of the last wild people of the earth. On a bright morning in 2011, a prominent research scientist steps into a sterile climate control genetics laboratory at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He's wearing full protective gear, latex gloves, a face mask, and a clean white lab coat to prevent any possible crosscontamination of human DNA. He carefully opens a secure padded shipping container sent from an independent field expedition that had just returned from the remote Alai Mountains. Inside is a single glass vial containing a cluster of coarse dark reddish brown hairs. These hairs hadn't been picked up off the ground. They had been forensically recovered from a crude natural bedding site tucked deep inside an isolated limestone cave. The scientist carefully extracts a single strand, places it under a high-powered digital microscope, and initiates a comprehensive mitochondrial DNA sequencing test. He sets the computer to compare the samples genetic markers against the world's most exhaustive biological database containing the DNA profile of every known mammal, primate, and human population on Earth. He hits enter, leaves the machine to grind through the calculations overnight, and walks out. When he returns the next morning, and looks at the monitor, his jaw drops. The screen is flashing a sharp error code. The DNA sequence of the hair doesn't match a mountain bear.

[00:15:55]It doesn't match a wolf, and it doesn't match a modern human being. It is an entirely unclassified archaic hominin sequence, a genetic signature that science dictates should have gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

[00:16:10]So, how did this lock of hair from the Altai Mountains completely disrupt the mainstream anthropological establishment? Well, we have to take a look at the massive technological revolution that swept through the field of cryptozoolology in the 2010s. For decades, mainstream science had safely dismissed the Almas as nothing more than regional folklore, misidentified bears, or cultural tall tales. But the introduction of affordable digital camera traps, satellite tracking, and advanced next generation DNA sequencing completely changed the rules of the game. Researchers were no longer just coming home with plaster footprint casts and shaky eyewitness testimonies. They were returning from the mountains of Central Asia with hard physical biological data. Throughout the 2010s, international research teams began deploying arrays of rugged infrared triggered trail cameras across known ALM hotspots in the North Caucasus and the Altai Republic. These cameras were left out in the wilderness for months at a time, strapped to trees near remote watering holes and narrow game trails.

[00:17:19]When the teams returned to retrieve the memory cards and analyze thousands of captured images, they began finding data that defied explanation. While the cameras captured plenty of snow leopards, ibecks, and brown bears, they also captured anomalies. In several instances, the infrared sensors were triggered in the dead of night, capturing massive blurred heat emitting silhouettes moving past the lenses on two legs at extreme speeds. Most tellingly, multiple cameras were found completely destroyed, ripped clean off their mounts at a height of over 8 ft from the ground. Their thick plastic casings crushed by a crushing grip that left behind deep non-human puncture marks. Something highly intelligent, highly territorial, and vastly stronger than a human was actively identifying these surveillance networks and systematically neutralizing them. But the real turning point of the modern era didn't happen on a trail camera. It happened in the dirt of the caves. In 2012, Oxford University professor Brian Sykes launched the Oxford Monsters Project, a serious scientific initiative designed to apply highlevel genetic testing to anomalous hair samples submitted by researchers from all over the world, including the independent republics of the former Soviet Union.

[00:18:42]When the results of the global study were published, they ignited a fierce intellectual turf war. While many samples from other regions were identified as known animals, a specific subset of hairs recovered from the isolated regions of the Caucasus in the Altai Mountains consistently returned highly anomalous genetic markers. The sequencing data revealed that these hairs belonged to an unrecognized line of archaic hominins. The genetic tracking showed a close evolutionary relationship to ancient human lineages like the Dennisovvens and late surviving Neanderls. For the first time, independent researchers had the hard data to back up their theories. The Almus wasn't a mythical monster, and it wasn't a giant ape. It was a relicked population of prehistoric archaic humans that had somehow managed to survive the ice ages, outlast the mammoths, and find a way to endure in the most unforgiving vertical landscapes on the planet. But as the 2020s arrived, the data took a final sobering turn. The very same modern technology that allowed us to finally prove the biological reality of the Almas is also the very thing that is potentially driving them into total oblivion. Today, the remote mountain ranges of Central Asia are no longer the untouched, forgotten frontiers they were during the Cold War. Massive industrial mining operations are actively blasting through the isolated valleys of the Alai to reach precious metals. High altitude highways are being paved, bringing a constant stream of commercial trucking directly through ancient migratory corridors. Satellite communication arrays and military border surveillance drones now crisscross the skies over the premier mountains, bathing the dark valleys in constant highdefinition thermal imaging. The ancient unmapped territory that protected this relicked hominin population for millennia has officially shrunk to near zero. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 may have pulled back the iron curtain and exposed the reality of the Almas to the modern world, but it also started a relentless industrial countdown timer. The hard physical trackways, the destroyed camera traps, and the anomalous DNA signatures all tell the exact same story. Are we currently witnessing the final tragic chapters of an ancient species? Are the last wild people of the earth being systematically squeezed out of existence, retreating into the final unmapped shadows of the peaks, waiting for the modern world to finally close the file on them forever? Or will they find another way to endure and survive?

[00:21:35]Only time will tell if the Almas continue to hang on.

[00:21:40]Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the Weekly Strange. If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to subscribe to the channel, like the video, and turn on the notification bell so you don't miss any of my new uploads.

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[00:22:08]Good night.