Vera Dragunova
| SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN | |
|---|---|
| Vera Dragunova | |
| RANK: | Colonel, later general officer |
| SERVICE: | GRU Division P |
| NATION: | USSR / Russian Federation |
| ON RECORD: | 1959–2000s |
| STATUS: | Retired |
| CLEARANCE: | — |
| SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN | |
Vera Dragunova was the senior military observer present at the 1959 breach of Ark Chasm, and subsequently the most consequential researcher GRU Division P fielded.
At the breach she lost volitional control of her own speech centre and recited Revelation aloud under the influence of the anomaly, from a text she had encountered in a sleep-state hallucination forty-eight hours earlier. She regained consciousness outside the perimeter by a means of extraction she was never able to account for. The Key was gone.
The 1965 annex
Her closed annex to the Phaeton founding file is the first document on either side of the war to identify the recurring figure as an archetype rather than as a series of sightings.
I cannot say with certainty that it is the same phenomenon, but the coincidences trouble me. I will continue to analyse the patterns. They are not random.
She was correct, she said so first, and she spent a career being the only person in either service who had understood the problem in 1965.
Retirement
Dragunova retired and did not go home. She took a posting at a Russian Antarctic station and remained there.
She is the only person on record to have left this work voluntarily, and the only one who could not make herself leave the continent it happened on.