Buried with the Fighter Jet they crashed in — Forgotten Soviet Cemetery — (new country series)

Anyway, these bunkers... What was that? I just heard a boom. I don't know. You can never trust these old Soviet sites. These Soviet buildings, they all just, they crumble. Yeah, that is booms. I'm hearing a few of them coming from that direction. We're very close to the border with Russia, so I'm not going to think much more about it. If I keep going down this road, eventually I'm going to hit an old Soviet airbase. But the place that I want to take you to is this place. Military. Hello guys, and welcome back to the channel. From a new country, sunny little Estonia. We have a little renter car. We're gonna go on a road trip of this beautiful little ex-Soviet country in the northern part of the Baltics. In the past, I've been up to Lithuania and such, but this is my first time in Estonia. And right now we're up on the northern coast. Going out this way, where that ship is, maybe like if you look really closely in the distance, you can see Finland. Finland is only like about a two-hour ferry going across. It's really actually pretty close, right across the Gulf of Finland. And then if we went that way inland, we'd actually get to Russia, St. Petersburg. So it's a really interesting little place. Right now I'm planning out an adventure, an idea of something to do. I'm planning about going to some ex-Soviet places. One of these ex-Soviet places I was thinking about, there's two places today that we're going to go to. Number one is some abandoned missile launching sites, actually. I hear it's being razed. It's being demolished, supposedly. So there's that. And then also a really fascinating cemetery that we'll get to a little bit. So let's hit the road. Let's go on an adventure. Well, it appears that we found it. I think I found it. Maybe it's not entirely demolished, as I expected it might be. But at least you can see, you know, some of this fencing over here. There's still some of the old... Lots of mud, by the way. Brand new shoes, I'm so sorry. All of the old barbed wire fence and everything. It's still all rusted down and everything, but it still exists. No, I'm not entirely sure actually if I'm... Okay, a high dog. I'm not allowed if I'm... Not sure if I'm really allowed to actually go in here, but we'll push the boundary just a bit. The dog is not chained up or anything. Maybe it's... This guy ends up wearing a security vest. He's just staring at me. I don't know if I'm allowed to go here, but I guess we'll see what happens. All right, well, I think we found it. Walking through all the mud and everything. Maybe coming to Estonia in the springtime, but everything is all melted, muddy and everything. It's kind of cold out, but it's okay. I don't mind it. I spoke too soon. Like I said, these are literally brand new shoes. Okay, I think we can go this way. So obviously this part must be like where the trucks would load and everything. It looks like a loading dock of some kind of sort. It really just gives me like Chernobyl vibes. Okay, we're coming up on the big... The bunker now. But as you can see behind me, all of these piles of rocks and everything, this is what I would presume to be all of the other buildings like this because it used to be a huge complex. We're very close to the coast here of the Gulf of Finland. But I'm assuming all of these buildings were just raised because they're probably going to build it into residential or something like this because there's residential all over this area and we're probably only actually like 30 minutes away from the capital city of Tallinn. So it's a great like nature reserve kind of area here. Anyway, these bunkers... Oh, what was that? I just heard a boom. I don't know. You can never trust these old Soviet sites. Anyway, so these bunkers, they were built... The Soviets put like 40 of them or so. The United States saw them all though from the satellites. There was like 40 of them or something on the satellites. But I'm assuming that they were just storing the missiles in here in this one. Hello. I can never be sure if it's like a homeless person hiding in the corner. Which one surprised me? That looks like asbestos there. I'm not going to touch that. But it looks toxic. So I don't think I'm going to go inside. That doesn't look... It's not the clean air that Estonia is famous for. Anyway, I'm not going to go on top either because I think it might collapse. These Soviet buildings, they all just... They crumble. Yeah, that is booms. I'm hearing a few of them coming from that direction. We're very close to the border with Russia. So I'm not going to think much more about it. Okay, I think I'm going to head out now. Wow, that didn't sound good. This is my little Estonian hat. Got to make sure I put it on. It gets very cold here. Very cute little Estonian hat. Anyway, so we've reached our next destination. This is the most important thing I'm going to be doing for all of today. At least, actually maybe on this entire trip. This is one of the reasons why I came to Estonia. I found out about this place and I really, really wanted to visit it. So this is way out in the middle of nowhere. This is in the little village of Amari, I believe it's called. Amari with two A's, like an A dot dot on top. And so if I keep going down this road, eventually I'm going to hit an old Soviet airbase. And so that airbase was operated by two different squadrons of Soviet fighter jets, the Su-24s. Make sure nobody's coming. And so down this way then, that fighter jet runway, after the Soviets left then in 1991, that it turned into a NATO airbase. And then now that's actually operated to do Baltic reconnaissance, to basically watch the skies over the Baltics. But the place that I want to take you to, a really, really fascinating place, I got goosebumps thinking about it, is this place. It's so easy to miss if you're driving by. But if you look in the woods, you can see them. So this is a fighter jet pilot cemetery. Like I said, in the little village of Amari. So let's go check it out. So the legend goes about all of these aircraft wings, is that all of these pilots are the ones that died while they were in action. Military. I'm just going to hide behind the fin. But the way that the story goes is that a lot of these pilots, that they, of course, when they died, that they didn't want to put the bodies on the base itself. The base is only like six miles away. They wanted to put them somewhere else so that it wouldn't affect the morale of the other troops there and see, you know, a whole bunch of these tail fins all over the place to remind them of all of their buddies that died. And so technically, it's supposed to be that the wings are the wings of the aircraft that they were flying that crashed. Sometimes, though, that wasn't always possible. So I think they also used some of the wings that were just like old decommissioned planes. Planes that weren't really airworthy anymore, as you can kind of tell by like this one, you know. But actually what ended up happening a lot of the time is that the soldiers, they built these memorials here for them. And then they ended up sending their body back to their homeland, back to Russia or the villages wherever they came from. Really, really fascinating part of history. And then this one I should mention as well. So we have six aircraft wings or so. This one, there's not any aircraft wing, but it lists a whole bunch of people, mass casualty event. So what happened for this one is that it was one of the worst accidents that happened at the base. But it happened on the ground, not up in the air. And so there's like two different versions of the story. But essentially, it was like either when the plane was taxiing that it came down and it landed into a vehicle or two vehicles ran into each other and exploded. But however that happened, huge explosion. And it killed, the official Soviet reports were, I think, 12 people. But you can see on here that there's 16, 4, 4, yeah, 16 people. So mass casualty, 1978. Another fighter jet guy. There are some more monuments back here. Just other general Soviet ones. I don't know if you can have no name. Well, same with these ones. Here we have Captain Kirov and Lieutenant Taran. And this guy, only 24 years old. This guy, 27. In the early life of these jets, they were really unpredictable. Really, really dangerous. Very difficult to fly. Even Yuri Gagarin died at the hands of one of these fighter jets. Captain Lysheev, I think. Captain Yegorlaev, Yegorlaev, Yegorlaev. And Lieutenant Kirov, Commander Polka-Galkin. It's really fascinating because looking through it, it almost looks like the whole squad of all the fighter jets in there just buried underground. It's kind of haunting, really. Hidden in the forest, a woodpecker up there. And there you can hear at the NATO base. They're obviously doing some firing drills. Anyway, that's going to wrap it up for this video. A really, really fascinating part of Estonia's history. Really just hidden in the woods. And I don't know if forgotten is the right word, but a really fascinating place.