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Felix Yurievich Ziegel ((ロシア語:Феликс Юрьевич Зигель), March 20, 1920 - November 20, 1988) was a Soviet researcher, Doctor of Science and docent of Cosmology at the Moscow Aviation Institute, author of more than forty popular books on astronomy and space exploration, generally regarded as a founder of Russian ufology. Ziegel, co-organizer of the first ever officially approved Soviet UFO studying group, became an overnight sensation when, on November 10, 1967, speaking on the Soviet central television, he made an extensive report on the UFO sightings registered in the USSR and encouraged viewers to send him and his colleagues first-hand accounts of their observations, which resulted in barrage of letters and reports. Having lost the final of his many battles with detractors in 1976, Ziegel continued his studies unofficially. He died in November 1988, leaving unpublished 17 volumes of his research in his daughter's archives. == Biography == Felix Ziegel was born in Moscow on March 20, 1920, son of a lawyer, Yury Konstantinovich Ziegel, a Russian-born ethnic German.〔 Ziegel often spoke (as his daughter wrote in her memoirs) of how he would start his future autobiography with the words: "I was sentenced to death before I was even born". In March 1920 Yury Ziegel's 22-year-old wife, Nadezhda Platonovna, found herself on the Cheka's death row, waiting to be put before the firing squad for alleged "counter-revolutionary activities". According to her granddaughter's memoirs. the sight of a "doomed young beauty in her last days of pregnancy" made such a disturbing effect upon a senior investigator officer that he promptly opened the door and let her go. One week after her miraculous release Nadezhda Ziegel gave birth to her son. The parents called him Felix, although not after Dzerzhinsky, the infamous "iron man" of the early Soviet revolutionary justice, as some of the family's friends half-seriously suggested, but after Prince Felix Yusupov, the man behind the Rasputin murder, whom husband and wife hero-worshipped, praising his "patriotism and unique courage."〔 Felix Ziegel, born a weak and sickly child, was sent to the family's countryside dacha in Tarusa to be there literally milked back to life. It was here in Tarusa that a six-year-old constructed a primitive telescope and started his first journal of astronomical observations. Regardless of the post-1917 hardships, Yuri Ziegel managed to give his son fine education, both technical and humanitarian. Young Felix, apart from being a fanatical astronomy enthusiast, showed deep interest in (and later - academic level knowledge of) history, philosophy, Russian Orthodox Church architecture and theology, the family being a very religious one. Influenced by his spiritual tutor, Alexander Vvedensky, whose sermons he attended regularly, Felix seriously considered the possibility of devoting himself to religion. Love for astronomy prevailed, though, and in 1938 he joined the Moscow University's Mekhmat (Mechanics & mathematics) faculty.〔 Two years earlier 16-year-old Felix Ziegel took part in his first ever scientific expedition: along with the team of senior scientists he traveled to Kazakhstan to observe the total eclipse of the Sun. It was there that Ziegel got acquainted with a member of an US expedition camped nearside. The name of the American was Donald Howard Menzel, the one whose book some years later would change his life. In 1939 Felix Ziegel, a 2nd year student, was expelled from the University after his father's arrest; the latter was falsely accused of plotting the destruction a factory in Tambov. It soon transpired that the anonymous report was compiled by a neighbour, motivated by the prospect of moving into the jailed man's flat. Yuri Ziegel was freed, but not until he spent two years in prison. According to Tatyana, his grand-daughter, Ziegel Senior returned physically and morally broken man. His leg had to be amputated – a direct consequence of so-called zhuravl ("the Crane") torture which involved causing a prisoner to stand on one leg during the interrogation.〔 In 1941, as the war broke out, Ziegels were deported to Alma-Ata. That was taken as a kind of favour, almost, since Felix, as an ethnic German, might have ended up easily in a labour camp or the much feared shtrafbat ranks. Soon he even managed to return to the University which he was graduated from in 1945. The same year his first book "Eclipses of the Moon" was published. In 1948 after three years' work in the USSR Academy of Science Felix Ziegel got his Candidate of Sciences degree in astronomy and started lecturing in Moscow institutes. In the late 1940s Ziegel made his debut as a public lecturer, speaking mostly in Moscow's Geodesic institute and The Planetarium, to a hugely favourable popular response. Ziegel's ''Life on Mars'' and ''Tunguska'' spoken-word shows were all-round favourites; one-kilometer queues of avid ticket-buyers stretched out to the venues. Ziegel's lectures were staged in the manner of modernist theater productions. The ''Tunguska'' show, based on the Alexander Kazantsev's sci-fi short story "Vzryv" (The Blast) had a soldier protagonist played by a professional actor; the latter sauntered all around the place, theoreticising about how the Tunguska disaster might have been the result of an atom bomb explosion akin to that of Hiroshima or an alien spacecraft crash, enthralled audience members gradually being involved into a discussion.〔 It was Ziegel who's put forward the first ever mathematically justified hypothesis for Tunguska blast having been the result of an alien spacecraft crash (which, according to the author, made a curve-like maneuver 600 kilometers in diameter before exploding in the air). The concept jarred with the official "meteorite theory" but a decade later the evidence was found proving the object indeed went off in the air, without contacting the Earth. The discovery was a result of numerous expeditions to the region in the 1960s made by enthusiasts who, in their own turn, cited early Ziegel's lectures as an original inspiration. In 1963 Ziegel, now a co-author (with V. P. Burdakov) of the first ever Soviet university textbook on cosmonautics and space exploration became the astronomy docent in the Moscow Aviation Institute. The same year he read Donald Menzel's book ''Flying Saucers'' published in Russian. Having seen through (as he later stated) the author's dismissive rhetoric, Ziegel became intrigued by the book's factual aspect. It reignited his old interest in all things extraterrestrial and, in retrospect, put an end to what looked like a highly promising academic career.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Felix Ziegel」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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