There was never a dull moment in Bulgaria in the 1990s. Communism had officially ended, the country’s future was uncertain, and the military dug a giant hole in the countryside to find an extraterrestrial hermaphroditic yellow monkey that held the key to existence.
Yes, you read that right. To us, it’s just another woo-woo conspiracy tale that’s fun to read about. To Bulgarians, this was a wacky story they grew up hearing before bed. But to residents of the country town of Tsarichina, it actually happened.
Operation Sunray
The bizarre story takes place from December 6, 1990, to November 19, 1992. A high-ranking Bulgarian military official, Colonel Tzvetko Kanev, received an unusual request from an unlikely source. Two psychic women claimed that something powerful and capable of restoring Bulgaria to its former glory lay beneath a small village in the western countryside. The women, Elisaveta Loginova and Marina Naplatanov, convinced the colonel to conduct the biggest and most expensive excavation in Bulgarian history, called Operation Sunray (or Lightbeam). For what? That’s where it gets tricky.
First, it is worth noting that the story has several variations. Secondly, English sources lack many vital details. But there’s enough out there to cobble together the bones of this incident.
At the excavation site. Photo: Dimitar Statkov
Here’s what most sources say. The two psychics claimed to be receiving messages from other realms, realities, or interdimensional beings. These wise whatevers told the women that the key to humanity’s origins lay beneath the town of Tsarichina in western Bulgaria. Tsarichina, a tiny village with a population of less than 100, was supposedly a hotbed of paranormal activity, earning it the English name of Bulgaria’s Area 51.
Equipment malfunctioned oddly on the site, the ground rumbled, and villagers complained of headaches and insomnia. When the military and psychics felt this discovery was out of their depth, they called the famous blind Bulgarian seer, Baba Vanga. (She even has an English Wikipedia page.) Baba Vanga told them of a creature of infinite knowledge that resided below the town.
When the Bulgarian military dug where this creature supposedly lived, they allegedly found a peculiar spiral tunnel with winding steps and walls covered in ancient symbols. As they ventured down the stairs, led by the psychics, soldiers started to collapse or disappear into the darkness as if attacked by an unseen assailant.
Stoically, the survivors continued until they came across a yellow, monkey-like creature in a sort of capsule that telepathically told the psychics that extraterrestrial beings created humans. At some point, Marina Naplatanov committed suicide. Then the cavern began to rumble, forcing the party to evacuate immediately. To protect this incredible secret, the military sealed the hole with concrete and left Tsarichina for good.
Deconstructing the story
Most readers will immediately see many problems with this outrageous yarn. So, let’s break down the basics. Is there a record of this excavation having happened? Surprisingly, yes. There is one source out there that can lend some semblance of legitimacy. The excavation was mentioned in a 2008 CIA logbook entry, which states, “Operation from 12/06/1990 to 11/19/1992 carried out by the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense, near the village of Tsarichina in the Western region of Kostinbroad, Bulgaria, in excavating object no. 1.”
Those who believe this story point to the talking yellow monkey as object number one. Others have another theory, that the yellow monkey stuff was a cover story in a search for the lost treasure of Samuel of Bulgaria. He was the tsar or emperor of the First Bulgarian Empire who spent the majority of his reign keeping the Byzantines and Ottomans at bay in the 10th and 11th centuries.
Samuel was a strong-willed, powerful, and revered monarch during a golden age of Bulgaria’s history. Though he wasn’t known for hoarding extreme amounts of wealth, stories circulated that he buried caches of gold beneath Tsarichina.
So where did this all come from? A Bulgarian journalist might have our answer.
Statue of Samuel of Bulgaria. Photo: Gergana Encheva/Shutterstock
A front-page story
In the early 1990s, Journalist Dimitar Statkov was on the hunt for a juicy front-page story. He and a handful of his colleagues just started the newspaper Nosten Trud, and they were eager to stand out from several competitors. In a remarkable stroke of luck, Statkov found one story help the newspaper gain the recognition it needed. Thanks to his many contacts in Bulgaria’s National Investigation Service (NIS), which specialized in major crimes, Statkov struck up a friendship with an employee willing to share interesting intel with him. The man told of a mysterious dig ongoing in the countryside for the past two years.
Intrigued, Statkov and a photographer traveled to Tsarichina, where military personnel firmly turned them away. But a determined Statkov and the photographer returned to the site with a hidden camera and managed to snap photos. A colleague of Statkov’s received additional information from an inside source that the military supposedly found a spiral tunnel and that psychics on site were channeling messages from realms beyond. Soldiers were exhausted from all the hard labor. So what were they looking for? According to Statkov:
Various versions were exchanged: Once, a hermaphrodite from the Planet Phaeton, from 80 million years ago — something like an ancestor of Adam and Eve — was searched for. Then they looked for the head of an eagle, in which some message was encoded. Then it was some wall that contained valuable information about the history of humanity and the protection of the family…then it became some kind of sarcophagus with a crystal…
Statkov eventually built up a theory, only slightly less far-fetched than the whole yellow monkey premise, that the excavation was a government attempt to claim a great discovery in the hope that the collapse of Communism would not render them obsolete. He pointed out that the husband of Elisaveta Loginova, one of the psychics who also later published a book on the dig, worked closely with government officials. The other supposed psychic, Marina Naplatanov, was herself the daughter of a government official involved in the excavation.
Conclusion
Obviously, no yellow monkey, secrets of the universe, or the like were involved. Many details took on a life of their own. Ariter Dimana Trankova, in Vagabond magazine, says, “The digs illustrate the Bulgarian modus operandi of searching for supernatural help and real or imagined greatness in the past as a way of dealing with living in dire economic circumstances, such as the turmoil in the 1990s.”
The failed excavation cost the Bulgarian government $16 million. However, not all was lost. The dig gained considerable fame in neighboring countries, and everyone in Bulgaria grew up hearing the story.
