Balls of Light. Light Orbs
Indigenous Mansi who lived in the area at the time saw a phenomenon they could not explain. A Mansi woman who saw it said to BBC reporter Lucy Ash, “We were coming back from the forest and we could see the village ahead of us. This bright, burning object appeared. It was wider at the front, and narrower in the back, and there were sparks flying off it.” She says village elders warned that it was a bad omen. Vladislav Karelin, a member of the 1959 search party, says the search team saw a fireball move from east to west, with other witnesses saying it moved from south to north, indicating some sort of object that had control of its movement, like a missile. Oxidizer and debris from the rockets, raining down on the tent, would have caused “confusion and pain” that drove the hikers out of their tent.