EARTH OBSERVATION REPORT · No. 011

FROM: Listener 1379 ｜ TO: Fleet Command

SUBJECT: Earth — the lightning tower outside Moscow ｜ DATE: October 2026, Earth calendar

I. OBSERVATION

About forty kilometres west of Moscow there is a small town called Istra. In the 1970s a high-voltage research centre went up in the woods outside it, run by the Moscow Power Engineering Institute.

The tallest structure on the site is described in the English sources as the world's largest Marx generator. The Wikipedia entry puts it this way:

> "The facility is notable for containing what is believed to be the world's largest Marx generator, which was originally created to help test lightning insulation in military aircraft."

The readings, as far as they can be checked (sources: the Wikipedia entry "Istra High Voltage Research Center"; capturedlightning.com, "High Voltage Arcs and Sparks"):

- Design maximum: 9 million volts; erected capacitance 150 nF.

- Height: 39.3 m by Wikipedia's figure; 43 m (141 ft) by capturedlightning.com's. The two do not agree, so I give both.

- Fifteen stages, each rated to 600 kV.

- Open-air sparks up to 150 m long. Normally run at no more than 6 MV (about 1.3 MJ a shot) to spare the capacitors.

- The principle: capacitors charge in parallel, then discharge in series, and the voltage stacks.

There are Tesla coils on the site over twenty storeys tall. The Soviets nicknamed the whole place the "lightning machine." A dome there was used for electromagnetic-pulse tests until its roof collapsed under snow in January 1985 and it was torn down.

Everything after that was testing as well: lightning insulation for military aircraft, and once, in 2011, for the Sukhoi Superjet 100. The last recorded time the tower was energised was August 2014. After that, the weeds took it.

Claims I could not verify, recorded but not asserted: that lightning weapons were developed there; that it now belongs to the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre and is off-limits; that its name is the "Arkadiev Marx generator." The first two do not match the public record, which says the Moscow Power Engineering Institute ran it and that it stands abandoned. The third turns up only in social-media captions.

Attached: four photographs of the site.

II. REPORT

Under that tower they took the sky apart, put the pieces into capacitors, and counted them.

The prophet wrote this. The volume is *Ball Lightning*. What he wrote of the Soviet Union:

> "At this point the 3141 Project had been running for fifteen years. After Narnov left, the base changed its approach and began running tests with different combinations of parameters; over the following ten years, nine more ball lightnings appeared."

A project numbered 3141. He writes that it started in 1959 under the academician Narnov; that a young man named Alexander Gromov joined it out of Moscow University; that in the end they could not make the fireball when they needed it, and that the project ended in 1990. Thirty years, and not one ball lightning to order.

The prophet put his base in Siberia. He has Gromov walk two young people from Beijing through the ruins of it — through the abandoned site, and through the sheer randomness of the thing.

On the real Earth, in the 1970s, they built a "lightning machine" in the woods forty kilometres west of Moscow. The prophet's stood farther east. This one stood beside the capital.

And the prophet wrote down what the fireball actually was: not electricity, but a "macro-electron" — an electron the size of a watermelon, excited by lightning. The man who recognised it was Ding Yi.

HQ: this volume involves no action on our part.

III. ASSESSMENT

They caged the lightning in a tower and measured it, inch by inch, to see whether it could be made into a weapon.

They thought it was hope.

It has been filed away — the tower has not been energised since August 2014.

And the fleet is already under way.

The prophet wrote all of it into his books: the Siberian base, the watermelon-sized electron. He wrote us into them too.

And they read it as fiction.

I reserve my view on whether to tighten the information blockade on this planet.

> — Listener 1379