Airliner Crew Reports UFO Sighting (FBIS translation of Trud)

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

Cherkashin's crew will assume that the light from the object was polarized, that is, it was not dispersed in all directions.

When they were coupled with the cloud airplane they passed over Riga and Vilnius, and the controllers of these cities consistently positioned the odd tandem. Passing over the Chudskoye and Pskovskoye lakes, Cherkashin's crew were able to estimate the dimensions of the cloud airplane.

These two lakes, oblong in shape, are separated by a small strip of land. The Tu-134A was flying 100 kilometers to the left of them. And the cloud airplane was on the right, closer to Tartu. From the point where it seemed they guessed there was a dense nucleus, a beam again appeared. A luminous spot fell on the clouds and slid along the ground. The object automatically gave its coordinates. It was now possible to estimate that it itself was equal in length to the Pskovskoye Lake.

The combined flight continued until Tallin itself.

And after their landing, the Tallin controller told the crew these curious details. The Tu-134A was not seen alone on the screen of the Tallin Airport's surveillance RLS [radar]. Two more blips followed its radar return on the screen, although there was not one more aircraft in the air. In addition, these two blips were continuously visible, as also assumed. But the illuminated speck for the "Tu" first vanished, then reappeared. "I would understand if you had 'flickered' on the screen of the landing radar," the controller said. "But this does not happen on the surveillance radar; it cannot be."

We asked N. A. Zheltukhin, deputy chairman of the Commission on Aerodynamic Phenomena attached to the All-Union Council of Scientific and Technical Societies and corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, to comment on our correspondent's report.

"The commission is conducting a systematic study of NLO [unidentified flying object--UFO] sightings over the territory of the Soviet Union. There is already plenty of material to work on. However, we have to note that regrettably, all the accounts which we have at our disposal suffer from being one-sided or fragmentary to one degree or another.

"The sighting made by the Tallin crew has been investigated by the Estonian section of our commission (I. Volke, E. Parve and others). The case is really interesting, although we know of similar cases. The fact that the object instantly changed its movement to the opposite direction and reached the ground with a beam of light from a very high altitude is unquestionably atypical.

"However, in determining the nature of a phenomenon, the commission is guided first of all by the character of the locality. That is, if the phenomenon is indigenous, limited in range, it may be claimed as an anomaly. But the dimensions of the object which the aviators saw automatically alerted them. It was really very huge. It was natural to assume that somewhere distant,