Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency information report, dated 5 September 1958, is a traveler's account of a train trip from Leningrad to Moscow on the evening of 11 July. About an hour out of Leningrad, the source saw two bright lights with grey smoke trails rising vertically for about 10 minutes. An Intourist guide joked about satellites. Later in Moscow, an official called Ivanov joked about flying saucers and then reacted with apparent alarm when told the travelers knew what saucers look like.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Nothing of interest occurred during our Leningrad visit, and on the evening of 11 July we departed by train for Moscow. This 10 hour trip was uneventful except for one incident which took place when we were about one hour out of the Leningrad station. I was looking out of the train window toward the east when I noticed two bright lights with grey smoke trails rising vertically into the air. Because of the poor visibility and the distance involved I could not tell whether the lights were pre-pulsion flares of some sort or whether they were integral parts of larger objects. I could not judge the speed of ascent, nor could I tell how far away the objects were, but they remained in view, still in ascent, for about 10 minutes. I called then to the attention of the above-mentioned Intourist guide and he just laughed and said, "Maybe we're launching two more satellites." We forget the above incident until later in Moscow when the Russian speaking member of the tour and I were given a short sightseeing trip around the city by official when I shall call Ivanov and about when I shall current later. Our enquiries referred to Ivanov that we had seen two bright lights rising onward and took him if he travelled they might have been. Ivanov was driving alone in the front part of the car, and without turning he made a joking reference to Sputniks similar to the one made by our guides. When we told him that the lights appeared to be travelling too slowly to be rockets of that type he laughed again and said, "Well, maybe they were flying saucers." My friend, going along with the joke said, "Stop kidding us Ivanov; we know what flying saucers look like." As this, Ivanov immediately pulled the car off the road, stopped, and turned around to face us, evidently flustered. "You do know that flying saucers look like!" he inquired. When registered surprise at this concern he started the car up again and changed the subject completely. We did not discuss it with Ivanov or anyone else after that.
Not linked to a story yet.
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. 3 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.