In nature, completely unrelated things often look alike. But a Russian flat Earth conspiracy theorist believes similitude is not an accident, therefore concluding that what we call today mountains are actually the preserved stumps of ancient, tree-like lifeforms.


YouTube user Людин Рɣси bases his theory on the assumption that Earth was once magnitudes of order more vibrant than it is today, housing life forms far more majestic than we’re left with today. He laments the destruction man has been so keen on laying to his home. “And all is left to us is a desert, which we turned into a scrapyard,” he says.

The Russian conspiracy theorist intends to bring your attention to the correlation between tree stumps and geologic formations from all around the world. The morphology of many mountains, he claims, bears a striking resemblance to the internal structure of trees as seen under a microscope. The presence of the hexagon, in his opinion, certifies that a system is biological in nature.

He therefore concludes that we have been duped once again by the scientific consensus, which is designed to keep us in the dark when it comes to our planet’s real history—a history during which the skyline was dominated by enormous and possibly sentient tree-like creatures. During some cataclysmic point in Earth’s past, these trees suffered a worldwide extinction, the only thing left to remind us of their existence being the gargantuan stumps we call mountains.

In determining the height of these speculative trees, Людин Рɣси uses a formula derived from the study of modern trees: a tree’s height is usually 20 times the diameter of its base. When applied to the case of the Devil’s Tower, a strange structure in northeastern Wyoming, this formula gives us a height of almost 4 miles. Never in the accepted history of Earth has an organism this big existed, save for fungal colonies like the honey mushroom forest in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. For comparison, the world’s tallest tree is a coastal redwood named Hyperion. Despite being a record-holder, at ‘only’ 380 feet in height, Hyperion is a mere speck compared to the hypothetical trees of old.

Mind you, these were not the same type of biological organism as modern trees. Like all living things on Earth, trees are carbon-based and when they die, their constituents are re-entered into the carbon cycle. But mountains are rocky so they must have a different provenance. Людин Рɣси claims the ancient mega-trees were silicon-based organisms. After their demise, they simply degraded into quartz, the second most common mineral in the Earth’s crust.

tree stumps

This brings up an interesting property called piezoelectricity. Present in crystals such as quartz or in biological matter like bone, proteins or even DNA, piezoelectricity is an accumulation of electric charge that occurs due to mechanical stress. Simply said, hit or squeeze a crystal hard enough and it will produce electricity. Think of cigarette lighters or any other portable sparkers. Now picture a crystalline structure standing several miles tall and imagine the voltage output just through the effects of gravity pulling down on it.

Silicon played a vital part in our own technological development; without it there would have been no transistors, no microchips and no computers. With sunlight as their main power source, these crystal trees could have served many functions, like power generation or communication devices. The Russian conspiracy theorist couldn’t help but make the connection between the Devil’s tower, which he says is a remnant of one such organism and the fact that it was prominently featured in the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Not only that, but the structure was a crucial plot element and constituted a powerful attractor for the aliens.

The idea of silicon-based life is derived from a hypothetical form of biochemistry where carbon atoms are substituted with silicon atoms, due to the fact that the two elements share many chemical properties. Just like carbon, silicon can form molecules that are large enough to carry and transmit biological information. Unlike carbon, silicon does not form the basis for tens of thousands of organic compounds. And for hypothetical silicon-based life forms to exist and flourish, certain conditions have to be met, conditions scientists are certain were never present on Earth.

crystal tree

While silica or quartz (SiO4) is abundant in the universe and on our planet, it simply cannot sustain life here. In order to do that, it would need to maintain a liquid form, but the melting point of quartz revolves around 3,000° F (1650 degrees Celsius). The Earth has never seen surface temperatures this high, not even in the Hadean era, its first geologic age that lasted from 4.5 to 4 billion years ago.

Людин Рɣси’s hypothesis, however romantic, does not hold water when subjected to scrutiny. The mountains and plateaus we see today were formed through verified and accepted geologic processes. The hexagon appears in both organic and mineral constructs because of the way molecules form bonds with each other. It isn’t always a clear indicator that it was intelligently or biologically-designed.

But the Russian does make one valid point: trees trump stumps. Get planting!