Kosmopoisk (, full name: Общеросси́йская нау́чно-иссле́довательская обще́ственная организа́ция, ОНИОО, translated "All-Russian Research Public Organization"), also known as Spacesearch, is a group with interests in ufology, cryptozoology, and other mystery investigations. It started in 1980, and expanded in 2001, to an international movement.
Membership
The organization has more than 2,500 active members, in more than 100 groups in 25 countries. It has organized more than 250 expeditions.
Expeditions
In the 1990s, the group made expeditions an annual event. To save costs, they would hitchhike as a main way of traveling. For instance, in 1999, the group made an expedition to the remote Labynkyr Lake in Yakutia, Sakha Republic, where an underwater monster, similar to Nessie, has been believed to exist since the 1960s. They hitchhiked the Kolyma federal road to get to Labynkyr Lake in Yakutia. They then collected their results of anomalous events into a database.
One of the events the group would investigate was the meteorite landing at Korenevo in Kaluga Oblast. The meteorite landed in October 1996. The group conducted expeditions annually from 1997 to 2003. They also held a Kosmopoisk conference in May in Korenevo. Its objective was not only to search for the impact point, but also a way to involve a large number of people, mostly from educational institutions, in the public research process. During one expedition to Kaluga they allegedly found a 300 million year old screw.
Another popular expedition site is the She-Bear Ridge (Russian: Медведицкая гряда; Medveditskaya gryada), which is situated in Volgograd Oblast. It is considered to be one of the most impressive anomalous zones in Russia, including multiple observations of "triangle UFOs", "crazy lightnings slope", mysterious tunnels, and a possible Lovondatr-7 time travel experiment. The group started exploring the ridge in the 1980s.
In 2002 and 2003, the group made expeditions to Brosno Lake in Tver Oblast in search of the Brosno Dragon, "Brosnya", an underwater creature. The group did a complete sonar underwater scan and coastal monitoring.