CIA document 0000042346 (PDF)

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

engaged in investigating UFO reports—the newly established center for UFO studies in the Palace of Culture of Power Engineers in Moscow and the Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere, and Radio Wave Propagation Institute, which has branches in Troitsk, Leningrad, and Irkutsk. Physicist Yuriy Platov of the Terrestrial Magnetism Institute does not believe the claims of scientists who maintain they have found remnants in Dalnegorsk of a UFO constructed by extraterrestrials, and he is convinced that the materials found at that site are really only the remnants of the unsuccessful launch of a Soviet rocket in that region. He believes that many of the other reports of UFOs can be explained by the inability of the observers to recognize the phenomenon known as "ball lightning."

The POISK article contrasted Platov's view with that of another physical scientist, Vladimir Azhazha, who was recently elected chairman of the new All-Union Commission for the Study of Unidentified Flying Objects of the Union of Scientific and Engineering Societies. Azhazha compared reports of a UFO crash in the USSR with a claim by UFO enthusiasts in the United States that a UFO had crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. He believes there is sufficient evidence to support the claims of UFO crashes in both cases--in Dalnegorsk and in Roswell. In the latter case, he cited the testimony of eyewitnesses who maintained that they had seen the bodies of four extraterrestrials lying near the smashed spacecraft. According to Platov, however, the eyewitnesses in the Roswell case were mistaken. He believes that the object that crashed was a USAF experimental rocket with four Rhesus monkeys aboard and that the accident was the result of an unsuccessful launch attempt at the dawn of the space era.

SOTSIALISTICHESKAYA INDUSTRIYA of 21 October noted that hundreds of residents had reported observing a UFO in Omsk and that many of these eyewitnesses had reported the sighting directly to the paper's office in Omsk. The article included a report by an "authoritative" military officer, Maj V. Loginov, who stated: "I must tell you straight off that radar did not detect this object, and so I am reporting visual observations. The object was passing over at an altitude of several kilometers. The visible shining sphere appeared to be about one and a half times as large as the moon's shape in the night sky. Four projectors—some parallel and some at angles to the Earth—were casting very bright beams. The object was in the field of vision for about 5 minutes...hovering...over the civil airport before descending a little. Then the projectors were turned off and a whirling plume trail instantaneously appeared around this shining sphere. The object began to recede rapidly in a direction from the northwest to the east at the same time that flights were being carried out from a neighboring airport. Pilots were able to observe it visually, but they could not detect it on their radar screens... Radar signals could not be reflected from it. This object was immediately reported up the chain-of-command, and our colleagues in the Altay Kray, in the area toward which the object flew, reported back to us within 5 minutes that they had it under visual observation. That meant that it had covered a distance of approximately 600 kilometers at a speed of about 7,000 kilometers per hour."

According to Loginov, all observations indicated that the object was a UFO being controlled by some kind of intelligence and that it was not merely some kind of anomalous atmospheric phenomenon.