Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency release, dated 26 December 1967, contains an English text of a Soviet article on UFOs. It reports that the USSR formed a UFO investigation committee under DOSAF in November 1967, led by Air Force Major General Porfir Stolyarov. The writer argues that the Tunguska explosion looked like a nuclear blast and that the object maneuvered before it, and concludes that the body may have been an artificial craft from another planet. The article calls for calm international scientific study.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Some people think that UFOs have appeared in the earth's atmosphere only during the past two decades. This is not the case. The UFO phenomenon has been observed throughout the history of mankind. There are medieval and ancient reports strikingly similar to ours. Among the earlier UFO reports, as so example, may be the well-documented observations of a "large saucer" in 1882 and a "procession of bolides" in 1913. These reports still await investigation. The most remarkable UFO phenomenon is the famous "Tungusky meteorite." In recent years Soviet scientists have established that the Tungusky explosion had every parameter of an atmospheric nuclear blast. The USSR Academy of Sciences Reports (Volume 172, Nos. 4 and 3, 1967) include studies by Alexei Zolotov which attempt to prove that the Tungusky body could not be a meteorite or a comet. In the summer of 1967 the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research at Dubna published a study by Vladimir Kekhedov, who concludes that the Tungusky blast left considerable residual radioactivity. Finally, as recently as 1966, after analyzing the sum total of observations on the Tungusky body's flight, this writer showed that before the blast the Tungusky body described in the atmosphere a tremendous arc of about 375 miles in extent (in azimuth), that is, carried out a maneuver. All these new results warrant the conclusion that the Tungusky body access to have been an artificial flying craft from some other planet. Should this be finally confirmed by investigations now in progress, the significance of the Tunguaky disaster would be inesticable. But this, incidentally, will pose new problems. If we are indeed being studied by creatures from other planets, what is their purpose? Why are they so studiously avoiding any direct contact? Is their unsociability the result of so high a level of development that they study us from that "height" just as we look upon and study ants? Or is there still the possibility of common understanding since we are born in the same Universe and obey the same laws of nature? The study of UTOs may lead to quite different conclusions and present mankind with quite different problems. The important thing now is for us to discard any preconceived notions about UTOs and to organize on a global scale a calm, sensation-free, and strictly scientific study of this strange phenomenon. The subject and aim of the investigation are so serious that they justify any efforts. It goes without saying that international cooperation is vital.
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.