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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Fri May 26, 2023 7:03 pm 
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Now at last it can be revealed!

Death Probe--The Untold Story

In September 1977 the Soviet Union launched its Venerakhod 1 Venus rover probe. Nuclear powered, heavily armored to withstand the harsh conditions on the surface of Venus, and equipped with a kind of primitive artificial intelligence guidance system, the ambitious Venerakhod 1 was meant to give interplanetary probes a dramatic leap in capability.

Unfortunately, a failure of an upper stage of Venerakhod 1’s Proton launch vehicle resulted in a suborbital trajectory that brought the probe down in North America, in the northern part of the state of Wyoming. The probe landed several miles to the southeast of the isolated hamlet of Winchester late on the evening of Saturday, September 10.

Few people in the sparsely-populated region were out and about late to see the mysterious and spectacular “meteorite” that fell near Winchester that night. As nearly as could later be determined, the probe spent the rest of the evening and most of the next day in a dormant mode. At some point on the night of September 11/12 it activated. The powerful, armored machine began moving across the Wyoming countryside in a generally northerly direction.

The first known sighting of Venerakhod 1 occurred on the morning of Monday, September 12, at the farm of Zachary Meesham.


First Encounter

Martha Louise Coleman, daughter of Zachary Meesham:

I had just had my first baby, and Mama had gone to Casper to be with me. That left Daddy alone at the farm. He went out that morning to feed the livestock as usual. He noticed that Jet, their horse, seemed very disturbed by something. So did his dog, Bandit. They were very agitated. As he was wondering what was going on, Daddy heard a strange whirring or pulsing sound coming from the other side of a nearby fence row. It got louder and louder. Then he caught a glimpse of something moving back there.

Then, boom! This…this thing came crashing through the fence. Daddy said it looked like a cross between a dune buggy and a tank. It stopped. The top part of it rotated around. Almost like it was looking the scene over. Then it slowly started coming toward Daddy.

Daddy was standing next to his pickup truck. He reached in and pulled out his deer rifle and fired. He said he saw the bullet hit and just bounce off. The thing kept coming like nothing had happened.
Daddy panicked. He dropped the rifle, jumped into his truck, started the engine, and took off, just a second or two before the thing reached him. He was so scared he didn’t even think about Bandit! All he could think about was getting away and going up to Worland to get the sheriff.

He was almost to Worland before he remembered Bandit. He felt so bad about leaving his faithful dog behind! But he didn’t dare go back to try to rescue Bandit. Then when he got to Worland he heard a whimper from the bed of his pickup. It was Bandit, crouching behind the cab! I guess just as Daddy was starting the engine to light out of there, Bandit thought to jump up into the bed. It was a good thing Daddy had the tailgate down.

Richard Davis, Washakie County Sheriff’s Deputy (retired):

Sheriff Dixon was as startled as he could be when Zach Meesham came busting into his office babbling about this robot from Mars that had attacked his farm. Zach was known for being about as levelheaded a man as there was anywhere in the county. He was even known to be a teetotaler. And here he was with this crazy story. Well, the Sheriff couldn’t just brush something like that off.

Sheriff Dixon dispatched me to go back to the Meesham farm with Zach. We didn’t see anything strange moving around when we got there. But we could tell that something had torn through the place. A couple of sections of fencing had just been knocked down. Some bushes and such were crushed down like something heavy had run over them. Their horse was gone. We found him wandering around okay a few hours later.

The strangest thing we saw was Zach’s deer rifle. We found it laying there by the horse paddock, close to where he said he’d dropped it. It was a Winchester 308. And something had bent the barrel into an “L” shape! I could tell right then that something very, very weird was going on.

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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Fri May 26, 2023 7:06 pm 
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Federal Involvement

Thanks to radar, the United States military was aware of the arrival in northern Wyoming of an unidentified object that seemed to have originated in the Soviet Union. An organizational snafu delayed the arrival on the scene of Federal agents until the afternoon of September 12. The agents included Oscar Goldman and Steven Austin of the Office of Scientific Investigation.

Federal agents spoke with the Washakie County Sheriff’s Department and interviewed Zachary Meesham. They also began combing the area with helicopters and search teams to find the mysterious mobile machine that Meesham had sighted. It was not found at the site where it had originally come to Earth. Further contact with the probe was not made until the morning of Wednesday, September 14.

Clifton Jefferson, United States Air Force (retired):


We still don’t know where in the world the probe was during all that time. All I can say is that there was a lot of ground to cover, some of it pretty rugged, and our detachment was kept small for reasons of secrecy. There was enough ground cover that the two helicopters we had on the search could have missed it from the air. It seems to have moved intermittently during that time. We’re fairly sure with hindsight that it managed to slip into an area we had already covered without being observed, and stayed there for a while.

A helicopter finally spotted it a little after 0800 hours on Wednesday. Wiley [the officer in command at the scene] and I, and Goldman, Colonel Austin, and a couple of others made up the party that approached it on the ground. It was just sitting there when we spotted it.

Colonel Austin approached it on foot while the rest of us hung back. Goldman assured us that Austin was the best one to make the approach. We soon found out why. When Austin approached to within a couple of yards of it, the thing suddenly came to life. It began charging him!

The next thing the rest of us knew, Austin and the probe were darting back and forth in the clearing where they were. It extended a mechanical arm of some kind that we figured must have been meant for picking up mineral samples. It looked like it was trying to grab him. I don’t know what it was “thinking” in that mechanical brain it had. It must have been hopelessly confused at having to function in an environment so different from what it had been programmed to explore.

At one point, after a few moments of this running around, it seemed to have Austen cornered against a rock outcropping. He escaped by hurdling over it in a single flying leap. This thing was about the size of a small car, about six feet high in the center, and he cleared it in a single leap! Then he ran over to where we were, moving faster than I’d ever seen a human being move under his own power.

Of course the rest of us—except for Goldman—couldn’t believe our eyes. We didn’t have any time to stand around gawking. The probe was starting to come after the rest of us. We piled into our jeeps and got out of Dodge. It almost hit our jeep as we were getting under way. I drew my side arm and fired a couple of shots into it at almost point-blank range. No effect. One of the men fired a rifle at the probe with similar results.

We were all sworn to secrecy about what we’d just witnessed, including what we’d seen Colonel Austin do. I wondered for years how in the world he was able to jump and run like I saw him do that morning. It wasn’t until a year or two after he died at the beginning of 2013 that they declassified the fact that he had received extensive reconstruction with high-performance bionics. Those of us who remembered seeing him in action finally understood.

Later that same day, the party keeping the probe under surveillance found itself reinforced from an unexpected quarter. Since the beginning of the incident, the United States government had been requesting information from the Soviets through the highest diplomatic channels about what was going on. Soviet authorities decided to come clean about Venerakhod 1 and offer assistance.

They dispatched Yuri Popov and Irina Leonova, members of the Venerakhod design team who spoke fluent English and had experience dealing with Western scientists. Popov and Leonova began offering the benefit of their knowledge of the probe and its systems immediately upon their arrival on the scene.

Clifton Jefferson:


They got there at almost exactly the same time as the TOW anti-tank team that we’d called in as a contingency backup. Popov and Leonova just about flipped at the idea of us even thinking about shooting the probe with an armor-piercing rocket. They lost no time informing us that the Venerakhod 1 was equipped with a top-secret compact nuclear power unit. If we fired an anti-tank weapon through the center mass, there was a real chance we might scatter radioactive isotopes everywhere. They wouldn’t calm down until we’d sent away the TOW team.

Our observation of the probe’s movements indicated that it was heading north, on a course to intercept the town of Worland. We feared that it would wreak havoc if we didn’t stop it. Not to mention ending once and for all any chance of keeping the whole thing a secret. We asked our Russian engineers what they could propose to stop the probe.

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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Fri May 26, 2023 7:09 pm 
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Evacuation

Clifton Jefferson

They suggested that we drop very high-temperature incendiary explosives right in front of the probe’s path. The idea was to burn up some of the probe’s systems without actually blowing it up. With hindsight, the plan they worked out that evening sounds only marginally less dangerous than shooting it with the TOW would have been.

By morning we were ready to try it. Somehow they managed on short notice to bring in a pair of Bell Cobra attack helicopters armed with napalm and thermite incendiary payloads. When we spotted the probe moving along at a pretty good clip, we had the Cobras make precision strikes directly in front of and behind it.

Our team was watching from a nearby rise. The strike made a spectacular display of fire, generated huge amounts of smoke, set fire to a couple of acres of brush. And the next thing we knew, the probe had passed through the smoke and was still heading north toward the town. It looked scorched, but its movement seemed unimpaired. Its ability to withstand temperatures even greater than it was designed to handle on Venus impressed its designers.

We knew then that we were probably going to have to evacuate the town to the north.

Richard Davis:

We got word from the Feds late Thursday morning that we needed to evacuate the town immediately. They said that a military aircraft had crashed and started a bad wildfire that was heading straight for Worland. Well, we could see the smoke all right, but we couldn’t believe the danger was that imminent. The season hadn’t been that dry. Surely it wouldn’t be necessary to evacuate the whole town?

They insisted. We had about six hours to evacuate over four thousand people. I don’t know how we did it. They sent in a couple hundred military personnel to help. Basically we went around ordering everybody to take what they needed and either head east toward Buffalo or north toward Basin. We used school buses to evacuate those who couldn’t drive. The military made a few trucks and buses available as well.

The whole thing was kind of chaotic. We were having to plan everything on the fly. People were panicky. There were already all sorts of rumors going around about UFOs, and Russian spies snooping around, and secret government weapons tests. Fortunately, everybody kept it together pretty well. I guess things turned out okay, all things considered.

Naturally there were some people who refused to go. People in Wyoming have never liked the government trying to tell them what to do. And you’ve always got those who don’t believe the emergency is really that bad. We ended up with a sprinkling of holdouts here and there. Not too many. Worland definitely looked like a ghost town when the last of us pulled out that evening. Behind us it looked from the smoke like they were already getting the fire under control. We figured it was a case of panicking officials overreacting.

Brooke Taylor, Worland resident:

I was only ten at the time. We were in English class when we got word that we were all being sent home from school, and that the town was being evacuated because of a wildfire to the south. We could see the smoke. They said that an Air Force jet had crashed or something.

Kids were saying all kinds of wild things. Johnny Ruger said that an atomic bomb had gone off, and that we were really running away from the radiation. Todd Oliver called him a doofus and said that the fire obviously couldn’t have been started by a nuclear weapon, because everybody knows that nuclear explosions cause mushroom clouds. I hoped that he was right. Then Johnny said that atomic radiation clouds could be released through ways besides nuclear explosions. Or maybe the Air Force had accidentally set off some kind of chemical weapon.

They sent us home before we had lunch, so Mom had us get peanut butter sandwiches while she packed some clothes and other necessities for us. Dad came home from work and helped her get stuff together. We loaded up his pickup truck and Mom’s car with everything we could round up quickly. A couple of soldiers came by and told us to hurry up. We did!

We went to Buffalo. We had family there that we could stay with. The traffic was awful until we were well out of town. Other people went to stay with relatives in different places, or got motel rooms if they could find them.
A lot of people ended up in a big tent camp the military set up at Buffalo. My friend Amy’s family had to go there. Amy said that the tents were cold at night, and there was no privacy, and the food was bad, and there was no good place to go to the bathroom, and there was hardly any water and nothing to do. She said it was just about the worst couple of days of her life.

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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Fri May 26, 2023 7:10 pm 
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Confrontation at Worland

Clifton Jefferson:

The probe ended up not getting to Worland until well after dark. Then it just hung around the outskirts of town. Popov, Leonova, Goldman, and Colonel Austin came up with a new plan to stop the probe once and for all during the night.

The next morning, Friday the 16th, I and a few others used jeeps and small arms fire to herd the probe toward the Worland Municipal Airport just east of town. It was just a little airstrip, but it did have a good bit of open space with relatively little around to damage. We pulled back and let the probe come to rest in the middle of the airport grounds. Getting it there took some of the fanciest, scariest driving I ever saw.

Once we had it in place, a Chinook heavy lift helicopter flew in with Colonel Austin aboard. He rappelled out of the helicopter on a cable with a grappling hook. He somehow got the hook into a lifting ring on top of the probe. I think they must have used that to lift it up into the rocket to launch it.

With the cable pulled taught, the probe couldn’t really do much of anything except spin around, trying to go this way and that. Austin dropped down on top of it and started trying to attach a small explosive charge to it. He had to put the charge in a certain spot where the Russians said that its control systems would be most vulnerable to damage.

It was an incredible sight. Austin looked like he was trying to ride some fantastic kind of wild animal. The probe’s mechanical arm tried grabbing at him a couple of times. I’ve never seen anybody take those kinds of chances before. He could easily have fallen off and been crushed under the probe’s tracks.

Finally, Austin got the charge fastened in place. He took a flying leap that was as incredible as the one I’d seen two days earlier, and went streaking across the grounds as fast as a racehorse. Once he was out of the way the Chinook lifted the probe a few feet from the ground. It hung there swinging back and forth, spinning its tracks.

Then they set off the charge by remote control. The flash and smoke didn’t look all that big from where I was watching. Then the helicopter set the probe down hard on the tarmac. Then it dropped its cable.

The probe’s tracks were wrecked in the drop. It tried to spin them for a bit. We saw a puff or two of smoke come out from where the charge had gone off. Then the probe went quiet. After about half an hour, Austin approached it in a hazard suit with a Geiger counter. He came back with word that there was no serious release of radiation. And the probe was definitely dead.

I think everybody started cheering. All the Americans did, anyway. Popov and Leonova were quiet. I’m sure they were as glad as anybody that we’d successfully stopped the probe, but you know they must have felt terrible at seeing their work wrecked like that.

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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Fri May 26, 2023 7:14 pm 
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Cover-up--and Aftermath

The United States and Soviet governments agreed in the interests of mutual national security to keep the Venerakhod 1 incident’s true causes a secret. The American government found pretexts to delay the probe’s agreed-upon return for several months. This allowed the Office of Scientific Investigation to give the Venerakhod 1 and its systems a thorough examination. After the probe was returned, the Soviets placed it and its partially-built Venerakhod 2 sister probe into storage. Eventually both probes were quietly dismantled and destroyed.

Inevitably there were many conspiracy theories surrounding the strange 1977 incident in Wyoming. Information about the incident began seeping out in the former Soviet Union during the 1990s. By 1999 there were enough garbled stories circulating about the Venerakhod 1 that the Clinton Administration decided to set the record straight by declassifying most of the relevant documents. Several articles, and at least two books, including an official history, have since been written in the United States.


Richard Davis:

Oh yeah, we knew from the start that there must be a lot more to it than that supposed story about a crashed jet. Several Washakie County citizens besides Zach Meesham caught glimpses of the probe. There were all sorts of stories about alien visitors, and secret government weapons tests, Russian spies, and misplaced nuclear weapons.

I guess we were lucky that nobody got hurt, and there was no major damage. Everybody just got their lives turned upside down for a few days. We’re still pretty upset around here that the government took over twenty years to finally tell us what really happened. I mean, if they’d told us, people could’ve been saved years of worrying about radiation hazards and so forth.

Or maybe not. Maybe even if they had told us everything from the start, there would have still been lots of wild rumors. I guess you’re always going to have those anytime something weird happens.

Brooke Taylor:

The radiation rumors were the worst. Local farmers had trouble selling their produce for years because of fears that the produce and the land were radioactive. I think that caused a lot of people in Worland to have a backlash against radiation stories. It got so you didn’t want to talk about.

Some people still worried about radiation a lot. At least a couple of families moved away because of that. Amy’s mother really wanted the family to move away. Her husband wouldn’t hear of it. They had some real arguments over it. I think that might have been one of the things that caused them to break up a few years later. When Amy’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, she blamed her ex-husband for it, for making them stay in Worland.

There are still people who try to blame any cancer in Worland on the radioactive “Death Probe.” The local doctors and public health people have tried over and over again to point to statistics that say that Washakie County’s cancer rate is pretty much the same as for the rest of the state. They just won’t listen.

Martha Louise Coleman:

Daddy died in 1991, so he never knew the truth about what he had seen. He had so much trouble with news people and conspiracy theorists trying to talk to him that he got to where he refused to talk about it. He often wondered whether some of the conspiracy theorists might be right.

I knew he never stopped thinking about it. That encounter with that strange mechanical thing that seemed to come from outer space—well, it did, kind of—haunted him. Late in life he gave me the most detailed account of it that he could. His story hadn’t really changed over the years. It was something that he was never able to forget.

Clifton Jefferson:

People can find all kinds of things that we could have done differently in hindsight. Hindsight is always 20/20. The decision-makers who were on the scene had to think fast and respond as best they could to a very fluid and stressful situation. People should remember that.

I still believe that the evacuation was the right thing to do. Sure, the Venerakhod 1 wasn’t powerful enough to devastate the whole town. It still could have seriously hurt or even killed somebody. It could have created a dangerous panic. And there was always at least a slight chance that something might have cracked it open and spread radioactive isotopes all over the town. It was better to get the people out than to take even a slight chance of that happening while they were there.

I understand the cover-up too. There were a lot of potential national security issues involved. Many details of the Venerakhod 1’s systems and power plant are still classified. That said, I’m glad we don’t have to keep everything a secret and lie to the public any longer.

The one man who comes out of the whole thing looking the best is Colonel Austin. I saw Steve Austin perform feats of daring that can match anything I’ve ever witnessed. He may have had super bionic limbs, but what he really had was some incredible guts.

We’re starting to learn now that Austin figured prominently in several far-out incidents that occurred in the 1970s. He served his nation well. It’s good to see him starting finally to receive his due.

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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Sat May 27, 2023 2:08 am 
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This is wonderful - thank you for writing it.

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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2023 11:16 am 
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Thanks for reading, Simon. Glad you enjoyed it!

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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.


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 Post subject: Death Probe--The Untold Story
PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2023 8:58 pm 
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I always enjoy what you write.

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"They'll bite your finger off given a chance" - Junkie Luv (regarding Zebras)


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