"The People Were Gone Ater The Cloud Went Up and Floated Away"

There is mystical side to almost every war

Pravda
10-9-06

     The unknown pages of history eventually come to light as the secret archives become declassified, memoirs and witnesses’ accounts are published. However, both historians and researchers of anomalous events are still perplexed over some mystical cases that took place in days of old.

Nearly all books on abnormal events have a reference to the mysterious disappearance of the 4th Royal Norfolk Battalion during World War I. The inexplicable occurred on August 21, 1915, as the Allies were waging the bloody Battle of the Dardanelles to secure access to the seaway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. According to eyewitness accounts by three New Zealand soldiers, the 4th Royal Norfolk Regiment was instructed to assist a unit launching an offensive against the enemy lines on Position 60. A strange cloud fell over the soldiers as they were moving along the bed of a dried-up river. The people were gone after the cloud went up and floated away. The eyewitnesses claimed the cloud looked weird (“very dense as if it was some solid structure”). Besides, the cloud moved against the wind after engulfing the soldiers. At the end of the war the Turks confirmed that they had not captured any personnel of the 4th Royal Norfolk Battalion.

There were lots of theories with regard to that mysterious disappearance. Some ufologists believed the soldiers had been snatched by UFO disguised as a cloud. Others talked about a window to the other dimension, the one that went ajar for some reasons in the above location. Yet the historians were quite skeptical about the extraordinary explanations, and with reason.

First, why did it take so long for the three New Zealanders to speak out? They made the story public 50 years after the Battle of the Dardanelles. Second, it is the regiment that disappeared, not the battalion. The numbers got confused too. It is the 5th battalion, not the 4th one, that went missing on August 12th. Third, the bodies of 122 soldiers of the 5th Royal Norfolk Battalion were eventually discovered in September 1919. Taking into the account the scale of carnage (27 thousand Allied troops were killed and buried in an unmarked mass grave), the bodies of the remaining 145 soldiers of the battalion may have been lost in the process.

So the New Zealanders made the story up? It is hard to make a categorical judgment since the official wartime records indicate that a heavy fog actually fell over the battlefield on August 21. However, there is no mentioning whatsoever concerning any strange cloud.

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See Also: Possible Commemoration For The Downing of The Schutte-Lanz Airship in 1916