Balbals
The residents of the village of Shaty in the Tyup district are accustomed to wonders. The surrounding world is full of fairy-tale characters, ancestral spirits, and inexplicable manifestations of otherworldly forces, as well as still unsolved natural mysteries. Everyone here, from young to old, knows about one such phenomenon. "Shaty" translates from Kyrgyz as "ladder."
The villagers have a deep respect for ancient traditions. They collect old silver and copper women's jewelry. Items made of leather and wood, stone millstones, parts of riding gear, arrowheads, and fragments of battle chainmail are carefully passed down from generation to generation. However, the most valuable are the numerous balbals—stone sculptures of ancestors—collected in the school museum.
The Shaty balbals are truly astonishing. They are so expressive and lifelike that they seem to belong to the chisel of a great unknown Master. Through the impassive stone surface, the real features of living people who lived on the shores of Issyk-Kul thousands of years ago emerge. What is surprising and absolutely uncharacteristic for this type of creativity of the pre-Kyrgyz is that numerous female granite statues have been left near the village. They depict the image of a beautiful Eastern beauty with large slanted eyes, a sculpted nose, and delicate plump lips. This stone gallery has moved to the school walls from the Karabatkak area, located between the villages of Shaty and Sary-Bulak, where incomprehensible things related to balbals occur.
There is an opinion regarding balbals that in ancient times, the ancestors of the present-day Kyrgyz would pile a high burial mound over the grave of a noble tribesman after his death. At the top of this mound, they would erect a stone statue facing east. Thus, the deceased would materialize in granite, becoming the protector of the entire clan.
But what is most astonishing is that the Karabatkak balbals appear in their chosen pristine corner quite unexpectedly and from nowhere. Especially at night. Any resident of Shaty will tell you many stories about how, in a place that was empty just yesterday, villagers herding cattle for grazing would stumble upon a statue of an ancestor that seemed to have grown from the ground overnight. There can be no talk of forgery or mystification— the attitude toward the "stone people," as the sculptures are called here, is mystically reverent; only a madman would dare to joke with them.
Interestingly, the behavior of dogs near such a find is notable; they are in a panic and refuse to approach the inanimate stone. It is as if some unknown force emanates from it, causing the animals to whimper, tuck their tails, and hastily retreat.
Memories involuntarily arise of the crawling boulders of Death Valley in California. There, the movement of the stones is visually noticeable, leaving a clearly distinguishable deep trail behind them. The Stone of King Arthur in Wales has entered the annals of ufological research, as it inexplicably moves from place to place. No less famous is the Blue Stone on the shore of Lake Plescheevo, which spontaneously emerged from the water onto land, with numerous witnesses to this event.
Researchers of anomalous phenomena believe that such phenomena are somewhat akin to telekinesis or poltergeist activity. Interestingly, representatives of official science also acknowledge the movement of stones, preferring to provide more or less acceptable realistic explanations for this fact. However, there is another hypothesis based on the special properties of the crystalline lattice of minerals.
The essence of this hypothesis is that the crystalline lattice, like the human brain, can not only accumulate a large volume of selected information but also operate it at its discretion. In other words, it can think. Consequently, this leads to the conclusion that we are dealing with a completely different form of life, fundamentally different from our protein-based one. The level and quality of information received by protein structures and minerals from the environment are so different that it is unlikely that there can be any direct contact. Nevertheless, in everyday life, we often communicate with stones, using them as decorations. In doing so, we invariably take into account their direct impact on humans and our bodies. One could make a fantastic assumption that on one planet, two forms of intelligent life coexist without conflict—protein compounds endowed with intelligence and thinking stones. The latter choose their own ways of interacting with the environment, even independently seeking a place for their permanent habitat.
But why do stones move only in certain, very selected places on the globe?
Here, it is worth recalling the so-called ley lines, which are supposedly hypothetical energy flows running above the surface of the earth, forming a grid around our planet. These energy channels were discovered and recorded in the 1960s by English scientists studying druidic sanctuaries. At their intersections, ley lines make the terrain magical, endowing it with phenomenal possibilities. Perhaps the Shaty anomaly is located at such an "energy crossroads," where, due to still unknown mysterious forces, stone blocks shaped by human hands "come to life," revealing their astonishing abilities.
Anomalous Zones of Kyrgyzstan. "The Snowman" of the Ala-Archa Gorge