Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an interview with cosmonaut Maj. Gen. Aleksey Leonov from the Soviet journal Aviatsiya i Kosmonavtika. Leonov describes the Soviet manned lunar program, its L-1 and N-1 failures and crew training, and criticizes Soviet secrecy and economic policy. Asked whether Apollo 11 astronauts saw extraterrestrials, he says UFO watchers took a remark out of context, since "they" meant Earth.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 2 of 8 reference orbit, and a capsule would separate from it and make a soft landing on the Moon. It's true, though, that unlike the American plan, ours involved landing just one person. But the operations on the Moon and the return to Earth were exactly the same. 15. I remember that the Soviet Union was conducting investigations of the Moon with unmanned satellites at the same time. They provided us with interesting information that was even more complete than what the Americans had at the time. But there was one other difference. 16. The accident aboard Apollo 13, involving an explosion of a fuel element, demonstrated the very flexible thinking of the American leaders. Having been honest in giving out all the details, they were able to rally the entire nation at the time. Literally all of America was watching that mission, living through it, thinking about how to rescue the crew and making suggestions. But we always hushed up our emergency situations, trying to show the superiority of Soviet engineering. In actual fact, we had many more emergencies than did the Americans. But that wasn't told to the people. Therefore, many got the impression that the development of outer space was a rather simple affair, and that the upkeep for the cosmonauts was costing the government a lot and was economically unjustified. 17. How did you follow the execution of the Apollo program by the Americans? 18. The entire world, except for the Soviet Union and China, watched the first step of man onto the Moon. But none of the Soviet people, except for at most a hundred people watching the news reports in one of the organizations, saw the launch of the craft, its landing on the Moon, or the activities of the crew. History has rightly judged our ideologues, Ponomarev and Suslov, and the course with which they guided the country. But the Americans have no false morality. In 1965, they gratefully accepted all our information on the walk in space and coordinated their own program with it. If at first they had planned to have an astronaut just stick his arm out of the craft, now they duplicated my space walk and even used a hand-held space gun that enabled the astronaut control his body somewhat in space. Returning to the American lunar program, let me say that there are no "'blank spots'" in it for me. Moreover, I have the flights of Apollo 10 through 17 saved on video cassette. 19. And have you seen any extraterrestrials in your films? The UFO watchers claim that the first men on the Moon saw them, and that extraterrestrials were watching the astronauts. Is this true? 20. Those who are prone to every kind of sensationalism have taken a phrase in the astronauts' conversation out of context and are
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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. 6 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.