"Contact with UFO" (conekt-ufo.narod.ru) — a personal page about sightings of unidentified flying objects, known from web-archive snapshots since December 16, 2001[1]. What ties it to Nizhny Novgorod is not its own text but a catalogue: the nn.ru directory, which billed itself as a catalogue of Nizhny Novgorod websites, listed it under "Society and Nizhny Novgorodians: Personal pages of Nizhny Novgorodians: Pages about anything," and its traffic was tracked by the regional counter Counter.nn.ru, where the site was registered under number 2639[5]. The surviving home page contains no address, no phone number, and no mention of the city[2]: everything known about the site's content amounts to the home page's introductory text and one line of catalogue annotation.

What was on the page

The page was made by hand: the browser window's title bar showed not the site's name but a file name — ConektUFO.index.htm[2]. There is no menu, no news feed, and no line of contact information in the preserved text — the home page opened with a philosophical introduction. The author began with the symbolism of the Indian lotus, which grows out of the silt at the bottom of a pond and opens in the light of the sun, and related this path to the three gunas of the Indian tradition: tamas, rajas, and sattva[2].

Next came a discussion of the changing of ages: Pisces is giving way to Aquarius, but far longer periods change too — the yugas; Kali Yuga is yielding to the next era, and before it comes Sandhya, which translates from Sanskrit as twilight — in this case, the author noted, dawn. From there the text turned to the site's subject: unusual phenomena are unpredictable and do not obey known laws, science is so far unable to explain them, and a "conditional vacuum" has formed in society — there is no new explanation, and the old one is worth nothing[2]. The catalogue annotation in the directory spoke of UFOs directly: "Deals with questions of direct UFO sightings"[5]. The inner pages did not make it into our material, so there is nothing to say about the sightings themselves.

The earliest snapshot, from December 2001, caught the page under a different title — UFO/pages1[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the directory, next to the site's name stood a line reading "Rating," which linked to counter.nn.ru/?2639 — the site was connected to the Nizhny Novgorod counter[5]. The number in that column changed from snapshot to snapshot. On June 3, 2002, in the "Projects: Hobbies" section, which then held 51 sites, "Contact with UFO" showed 3.07[8]; on July 25, in the same section — 15, ranked 14th out of 53[7]; on July 26, in the personal-pages section — 13[6]; on the night of November 18 — 27, ranked 31st out of 176[5]. These numbers should be compared with caution: over the summer of 2002 the scale itself changed — in the June listing the top spot in the section belonged to a site with 5.3, and in the July listing to one with 36[7][8].

For a home page with no organization behind it, this is a notable result. The "Pages about anything" section was the most populous in the personal-pages part of the directory for Nizhny Novgorodians — 176 addresses, eight pages of 25 lines each — and in the list sorted by rating, "Contact with UFO" stood within the top fifth, between two unnamed "home pages" with a score of 31 and "A Small Dump in the Big Net" with 25[5]. No votes for the site are recorded in our summary of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[9]. How the counter itself worked and what survives of its rating are examined in the articles "Nizhny Novgorod Internet" and "Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating."

Fate of the address

The site did not close — it froze. The snapshot from October 17, 2013 and the snapshot from August 19, 2019 contain the exact same text, word for word[2][3]; the same text also stands in the most recent snapshot, taken January 18, 2026[4]. In other words, for more than twelve years no one has touched the introduction about the lotus and the changing of the yugas, and the promised "direct sightings" have never been added.

When checked in August 2026, the site at this address was still responding. The titles of the first and most recent snapshots differ — UFO/pages1 in 2001 and ConektUFO.index.htm later — but both concern the subject of UFOs, so it appears to be the same site, having undergone a redesign[1][4].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (first snapshot) (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2019 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2026 (most recent snapshot) (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Personal pages of Nizhny Novgorodians: Pages about anything," November 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Pages about anything," July 2002 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Projects: Hobbies," July 25, 2002 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Projects: Hobbies," June 3, 2002 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)