Do you believe in any of the weirder things out there? UFOs, aliens, geopathogenic zones… I definitely believe in geopathogenic zones. When I was in the army, I was stationed on the Chinese border, in the missile forces. We had six missile installations, and one of them was always out of order. It was very strange: whenever there was an inspection, everything was fine. The moment inspectors were gone, it would stop working again. We always blamed the support staff: they forgot a ratchet inside the installation, or they didn’t put enough insulation… But whenever we took the installation apart and put another one in its place – the new one wouldn’t work! Many years later, I realized that the missile must have been located in a geopathogenic zone. It had some sort of negative energy that affected electronics and people. Back then, we didn’t know how to explain it – we just thought it was some sort of magic. I can tell you one thing: nobody picked mushrooms in that dugout! There were mushrooms in the dugout? Oh yeah, the whole area was full of them, but nobody touched them. We’d pick mushrooms and berries all around the area, but nobody wanted to go near that dugout. Do you think there are many natural phenomena that haven’t been discovered? I would say 80% of reality is still unknown to us. Take the ball lighting, for example. I was nearly killed by a ball lighting when I was a kid. I was 12. It was august; I was mowing the lawn. Suddenly, the rain started coming down in a torrent. My grandfather and I hid in a tent. I looked through the opening, and there’s this shimmering golden orb, just hanging there, sparkling and crackling. It looked like an orange. Raindrops were trickling down its surface. I stuck my head out of the tent – and the ball charged at my head. My grandfather managed to pull me back into the tent just in time, otherwise I would’ve been dead. The “orange” floated further and further away across the lawn, then it burst open and disappeared. As a science fiction writer, do you have a theory to explain the ball lighting? Can it be an alien version of the Mars Roamer – some sort of tool that collects soil samples, measures radiation levels, things like that? I doubt it. I’m partial to a more scientific explanation. There was a scientist named Sukhonos – he thought that the ball lighting was an example of ether vortex. Ether is a hypothetical substance that permeates everything, including vacuum. The great Einstein called ether by a weird name, “the lambda member.” Sounds a bit indecent. I guess that’s why he ended up rejecting this definition… I’m joking. Back then, there were no instruments that could measure or disprove the existence of ether. Now we have such instruments, and this allows us to tweak our ideas about the world. But unfortunately, science tends to be reactionary – imagine our scientists publicly admitting that they’ve been studying and teaching the wrong things all their lives. On the other hand, maybe it’s actually a good thing that we’re so slow to learn the truth. You know, there’s a theory about why we’re not allowed to go out into space in any real way…