Documents / FOIA release
This CIA release, dated 2013-06-24, is an English translation of "UFOs: What Are They?", an article by F. Yu. Zigel' printed in the Soviet magazine Smena in February 1967. Zigel' reviews reported sightings, including the Mantell crash, Clyde Tombaugh's 1949 observation, Antarctic station reports and radar detections. He then weighs five explanations: hoaxes, optical illusions, secret aircraft, an unknown natural phenomenon and craft from other planets. He concludes that no hypothesis is final and that the phenomenon calls for careful scientific study.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
UFOs--WHAT ARE THEY? (F.Yu. Zigel') Source: Smena (Change), No 7, February 1967, pages 27-29 (Prefatory Note. The publishing house of Hayka (Science) is preparing for publication a collection of scientific articles Naselennyy Kosmos (The Inhabited Cosmos) (chief editor, B. P. Konstantinov, Vice President Academy of Sciences USSR) in which along with consideration of such problems as the distribution of life in space, the habitability of the planets, communications with extraterrestrial civilizations, the mastery of the cosmos by mankind, space law, and other subjects, it is intended to give attention to the problem of unidentified flying objects (UFO). In the present article the editor-compiler of the collection Naselennyy Kosmos, Docent F. Yu. Zigel' discusses various UFO observations and attempts at explanation of them.) Figure 1. This photograph was made in a park in New York of the object which you see in the center of the photograph a few seconds before it vanished. It is unidentified. According to sighters it was grayish-orange in color and, in addition emitted a yellow light. While the object was suspended in the air the man who took this picture, a professional photographer, was able to take this photograph. The history of science covers thousands of year. During this period human consciousness has many times experienced deep shock as a result of a fundamental discontinuity in ideas. How many centuries were required for the now-evident idea of the sphericity of the Earth to win general acceptance! What scandalous absurdity did Copernicus endure from his contemporaries because of his hypothesis that the Earth moves. And the thoughts of Giordano Bruno about the limitless of space, and the geometry of Lobachevskiy, and Einstein's theory of relativity, the quanta nature of radiation and the fantasies of cybernetics? This is not all but no further examples are necessary since readers themselves can easily continue the list
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. 8 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.