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Object M: The buried Estonian mystery the KGB spent years trying to reach | Reality Check
Posted
August 11, 2026
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In this episode of "Reality Check," Ross Coulthart sits down with Estonian filmmaker and author Mart Sander, whose new book, "Object M: Estonia's Buried Mystery," traces one of the strangest and least understood cases in Europe. In 1969, a man drilling a well in the Tallinn suburb of Merivälja struck something solid roughly seven meters down, and the fragments he broke loose eventually reached Soviet laboratories that concluded the alloy could not have been produced on this planet.
Sander walks Coulthart through the two decades of excavation that followed, the shafts sunk under the garden, the KGB files stamped top secret and the researchers who reported burns, blackouts and stranger effects the closer they got to whatever sits beneath the upper layer. He also lays out the counterarguments, from the meteorite explanation to the claim this is a forgotten first World War superalloy buried in a hurry, and explains why the physical evidence points in two directions more than a 100,000 years apart.
What neither man can account for is why, years after the Soviets left Estonia, two strangers turned up at the homeowner's door with a suitcase of cash for a small suburban house that nobody had ever proven held anything at all.
NEXT WEEK ON REALITY CHECK: A special edition entitled Secret Soviet UFOs. What happens when @RealityCheckNN goes to Estonia to investigate this case in person.
#unexplained #mystery #objectm
CREDITS
Host: Ross Coulthart
Executive Producer: Andy Gipson
Editorial Producer: Meagan Medick (@producermeagan)
Segment Producer: Christine Jenkinson
Associate Producer: Will Tomasi
Research Producer: Rob Jones
Editor: Anthony Diasio
On "Reality Check," NewsNation Special Correspondent Ross Coulthart takes a fact-based approach to tackle everything from unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) to mysteries often missing from the headlines.
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