Published in Perspective
June 2025
In the 1840s, a dinosaur was discovered on a Kazakh island. Not a fossil – a giant flying lizard, complete with leathery black wings and a beak bristling with teeth, which hatched from an egg on Barsa-Kelmes, a chunk of rock in the Aral Sea whose name is usually translated as Place of No Return. The fisherman who had encountered it fled for his life. Later, he returned to the island to find it dead in an abandoned yurt and managed to remove a tooth, which was subsequently analysed. It was found to be that of a pterosaur from the days of the Jurassic. The story was handed down to the fisherman’s son and recorded by a Russian journalist in 1959.
My first sight of the Aral Sea comes from a rocky bluff at the edge of the Ustyurt Plateau in western Uzbekistan. The slender, brackish lake below was once part of the fourth-largest inland sea in the world; until the 1960s it covered 26,000 square miles and supplied one sixth of the Soviet Union’s fish catch. Now it’s a tenth of its former size, split into disconnected pools, while the seabed its vanishing has exposed – covered with millions of bone-white shells – has the dubious distinction of being the world’s youngest desert. The dinosaur island of Barsa-Kelmes is now just a raised bump in the land. From my viewpoint on the plateau, I am looking at the site of one of modern history’s most calamitous ecocides.
The reasons for the sea’s disappearance are simple and well documented. Technically an endorheic lake, a body of water with no natural outlet, its existence was dependent on the inflow of two rivers – the Amu Darya and Syr Darya – which, from the 1960s onwards, were diverted into 20,000 miles of canals to irrigate cotton plantations. The canals were often poorly made and much of the water leaked away. Over the course of the next few decades the Aral rapidly declined; the water became anoxic, killing most aquatic life; the once-booming Uzbek and Kazakh fishing industries collapsed. Now the port cities of Muynak and Aralsk are stranded miles from the nearest shore. The fleets of rusting trawlers beached on desert sand have become the centrepiece of a ghoulish tourist industry. The death of the Aral is a paradigm of anthropogenic environmental disaster, a tragedy that is entirely and unmistakably human.
What is less known about the Aral are the tales of the paranormal.
The appearance of a pterosaur is far from being the only thing that gives the Place of No Return its uncanny reputation. The island has long been associated with strange distortions in time. In one Kazakh folk tale, Koblandy Batyr, a legendary warrior, battled seven evil brothers before retreating to Barsa-Kelmes to rest for three days and three nights. Returning to continue the fight, he found that the brothers had aged by thirty-three years, and were now old men, who instantly surrendered. For all that time, the hero had been in a separate temporal field. Variants of this myth reemerged in the twentieth century: a group of prisoners escaping the gulag hid on the island for months that turned out to have been years; scientists went missing for days that they swore had only been hours. Kazakh nomads disappeared and reappeared decades later. The island was sometimes surrounded by a mysterious fog that blocked out radio signals. In the 1990s, it became known as a hotbed of UFO sightings as mysterious floating craft were seen, causing instruments to malfunction on planes sent to investigate. One story claims that three humanoid extra-terrestrials were killed in a firefight by KGB special forces.
So far, so science fiction; but in this devastated landscape fiction weirdly blends with fact. Over the border in Uzbekistan lies another former island called Vozrozhdeniya, the name of which translates as Rebirth or Resurrection. Now – astonishingly – it is a protected nature reserve, but until 1992 it hosted a facility known as Aralsk-7. For almost fifty years, biological weapons were tested here, including smallpox, anthrax and bubonic plague. Its work was highly classified, but secrets like that can’t be kept. In 1971, a passing research ship called the Lev Berg sailed into an aerosol cloud and a scientist fell ill, transmitting smallpox to the nearest town. She survived but three others died, including her younger brother. A pair of fishermen found dead in their boat two years later were suspected to have caught the plague. And in 1988 an anthrax outbreak was the probable cause of 50,000 saiga antelope dropping dead where they grazed in a matter of hours.
When the Soviet Union collapsed the site was evacuated, including an entire town of 1,500 workers. In 2002 an American team arrived to disinfect tonnes of anthrax slurry, covering it with powdered bleach, but Araksk-7’s toxins are thought to have seeped into the soil. Anthrax spores can lie dormant for centuries, waiting to be disinterred. Now wildlife has returned to the island – including saiga, which in recent decades have gone from being ‘critically endangered’ to merely ‘near threatened’ – but under this place of resurrection, death still lurks.
In a gleaming white 4X4, my tour group descends the plateau to what’s left of the Aral Sea, a shallow, viscous lake so salty it’s impossible to swim in. Thousands of tiny pink brine shrimp – better known as Sea-Monkeys – wriggle in the murk, one of the only extremophile species that can survive here. Here and elsewhere in the world’s youngest desert, millions of tonnes of sand and dust, laced with salt and carcinogenic particles from industrial pollution, are lifted into the atmosphere and carried across Central Asia every year. The summers are hotter; the winters are dryer; the wider region is wracked by drought. The term ‘post-apocalyptic’ is often used hyperbolically, but I’ve never been anywhere that fits the definition so closely.
In 1992, the Russian sci-fi author Sergei Lukyanenko admitted that the UFO sightings had been a long-running hoax. The stories had been published in popular science magazines and, in the chaotic years of the Soviet Union’s collapse, had merged with certain paranoid trends in the public imagination: the millenarian tendencies that accompanied the ‘end of history’. Lukyanenko had been inspired by the tale of the pterosaur, which, it turned out, had been a hoax as well. The journalist who had recounted the conversation with the fisherman’s son had simply invented it, and the story – like a weaponised smallpox cloud – went viral.
A poisoned island, mysterious weapons, psychopathic governments: the Aral is haunted by the darkest ghosts of the twentieth century. On my way back from this blasted place, taking the train to Samarkand, I stop for a couple of days in the city of Bukhara. Here, after seeing the famous mud-walled Ark and the blue-domed mosques, I happen to meet the priest of the city’s small Catholic church. This affable Polish man tells me, with no prompting at all, another modern fairy tale that strays into the realm of sci-fi. Rather than vanishing over six decades, he claims that the Aral Sea disappeared in a single night. ‘On that day the Russians tested a nuclear bomb on the Kazakh Steppe. I don’t know, the tectonic plates – I guess they must have shifted. At the same time, the Caspian Sea filled up. The water went there, and the fish – they ended up in the Caspian! Who knows? Maybe it’s not correct. But on that day, in 1966, there was a massive earthquake in Tashkent…’
It’s true, there was an earthquake then. It destroyed half the city. And they did test bombs on the Kazakh Steppe. And the sea did disappear. The priest has simply put these facts – each unbelievable in its way – together into a narrative that seems to make more sense to him. This is no different from the birth of any conspiracy theory.
When something incomprehensible happens, reality bends in weird ways, like the warped temporal field of an island visited by UFOs. When the impossible occurs, credibility stretches wider. Against the enormity of the ecocide that happened here, paranormal activities – blended with the real-life horrors of the site at Aralsk-7 – seem less like fantasies than a cultural coping mechanism. They are scarcely less believable than what really happened.
For decades, intelligent people watched as an ecological catastrophe occurred, not only doing nothing to stop it but finding ways to justify it in the name of economic development. In the space of a few generations, a sea disappeared. Perhaps, in the centuries to come, this will be another fairy tale – the lingering legacy of the Place of No Return.