Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency compilation, dated 5 August 1977, reproduces translated Soviet TASS news items from 22 September 1977 on national and scientific affairs. The central item reports that on 20 September residents of Petrozavodsk, Karelia, saw a huge star that moved over the city like a medusa, showered it with fine rays and then headed toward Lake Onega. The local observatory director called it an unexplained riddle. Other items cover the Prognoz-6 launch and a women's Il-62 flight record.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
The director of the Petrozavodsk hydrometeorological observatory, Yu, Gromov, told a ESS correspondent that the staff of the European meteorological service have not previously observed analogies of this kind in nature. What caused this phenomenon and its nature remains a riddle, because the weather observation posts did not record any severe deviations in the atmosphere, either in the previous 24 hours or in the time period prior to it. We also know, stressed Yu, Gromov, that no technical experiments were being carried out at the time. However, although it left behind no material evidence, it is also impossible to describe this rare phenomenon as a mirage, as there were many eyewitnesses who observed it from various parts of the city and whose evidence is identical on many points. SOVIET WOMEN SET WORLD FLIGHT RECORD IN IL-62 LD221522Y Moscow TASS in English 1459 GMT 22 Sep 77 LD [Text] Moscow, September 22, TASS--Two world records were set today by the flagship of Aeroflot, the IL-62 jet passenger plane. According to preliminary data, both ground-based instruments and instruments on board the plane recorded that the IL-62, piloted by a crew of six women, had set a world distance record along a closed route--10,388 kilometres. The second world record--average speed along a closed route of 10,000 kilometres, now amounts to 804 kilometres per hour. The plane landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport at 15 hours 22 minutes today.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 2 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.