Swedish observers are once again seeing Russians… not subs this time but drones. Allegedly drones of unknown origin began to appear in the sky over the strategic infrastructure of Sweden, including nuclear power plants
Naturally, “experts” immediately identified the country of their manufacture and launch. “This is a demonstration of power. Someone wants to show that there is no drone protection equipment at these nuclear power plants. Whether they are criminals with connections in Russia or pro-Russian separatists is anyone’s guess. But I am almost certain that the Russians were involved,” Dan Hermansen, director of the anti-drone company My Defense, expressed his opinion.
Even if the Swedish prosecutor’s office, after a thorough investigation into the “mysterious luminous spots in the night above the nuclear power plant” reported that there were no signs of foreign reconnaissance activities (as prosecutor H. Irman said on Swedish Radio, among others), the media continues to see drones as the hand of the Kremlin, now an innovative one.
Submarines, apparently, no longer excite the imagination, but drones are something new. Or is it old school?
I read that in ancient times the Scandinavians living in what is now Sweden, the mighty Vikings, used hallucinogenic plants in large quantities before battle to put themselves into a “battle trance”. At the same time, they saw wondrous images of their battles against monsters and dragons.
Some scholars believe that the vibrant and distinctive Scandinavian mythological epic was caused in part by a predilection for “magic hallucinogens”.
The American cultural historian Mike Jay states: “A great deal of Victorian folklore associated mushrooms, including poisonous ones, with elves and fairies [mythical beings in Germanic-Scandinavian and Celtic folklore], the Hollow Hills [the fairy place of the Arthurian Breton cycle] and the involuntary transport of the narrator into a magic land, a world of shifting perspectives and elemental spirits”. Maret Saar, an Estonian researcher of ethnobotany and ethnomimicology, considered that “the use of fly agaric plants (Amanita muscaria) was also used for reciting songs and epic poems and summoning spirits to one’s side”.
Scientists are still studying the subject. Carsten Fatur, an ethnobotanist from the University of Ljubljana, believes that all along, researchers have been wrong about the berserkers’ predilection for fly agarics. The Vikings did use some psychotropic substance, but it was definitely not fly agaric, the more so because they do not grow in all Scandinavian countries. The most possible candidate for this role, Fathur said, was black bélène.
I would not be surprised if next time local journalists spotted Russian Armed Forces Valkyries in the sky above Swedish nuclear power plants.
Maria Zakharova