Documents / FOIA release
This CIA release, approved in 2005, is a 1968 compilation of translated Soviet press items on scientific affairs. It centers on a 29 February 1968 PRAVDA article by Ye. Mustel, D. Martynov and V. Leshkovtsev, together with a TASS report on it. The article dismisses flying saucers as misidentified aircraft, balloons, satellites and optical effects. It says a luminous object over Sofia was a NATO sounding balloon and calls Adamski a charlatan. It also reports that the USSR Academy of Sciences found the UFO reports had no scientific foundation.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
6 March 1968 dd 2 USSR SCIENTIFIC AFFAIRS SCIENTISTS REFUTE CLAIMS OF 'UFO' SIGHTINGS Moscow PRAVDA 29 Feb 68 p 6 L [Article by Ye. Mustel, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and chairman of the USSR Academy of Sciences Astronomic Council; D. Martynov, doctor of mathematical physics and president of the All-Union Astronomical and Geodesic Society; and V. Leshkovtsev, secretary of the national Soviet physicists committee: "What? Flying Saucers Again?"] [Text] Recently there have again been sensational reports in some of our newspapers and in television broadcasts about so-called "unidentified objects." "Flying saucers" now figure under this designation, although Soviet and foreign scientists exploded this myth several years ago. Let us remind readers that what is meant by this are the flashing, flying objects which individuals have observed from time to time in different parts of the world. Some of these people even made sketches and have taken photographs of the "flying saucers." As Menzel, the well known U.S. astrophysicist, has shown by his painstaking analysis of phenomena of this kind, approximately 80 percent of the information forthcoming about "flying saucers" is linked with information about planes that have been spotted, balloons that have been seen, kites, bright meteors, sounding balloons, searchlights, and even bright planets and the moon as glimpsed through clouds. The remaining objects observed may be explained by various atmospherical optical phenomena: mirages, the reflection and the refraction of light in ice crystals present in the air, and the Aurora Borealis. In the last decade a lot of changes have occured in the atmosphere's upper layers and in the space surrounding the earth. On 4 October 1957 a Soviet artificial earth sputnik was launched into orbit. Menzel called this "the first real flying saucer." At present the number of sputniks launched by the Soviet Union in the "Cosmos" series alone amounts to more than 200. The flights of the artificial sputniks and their rocket carriers and the numerous orbiting of meteorological and geophysical rockets may also be mistaken by the inexperienced observer for "flying saucers." What is the reason for all this fuss about "flying saucers?" Is it perhaps that reliable facts have been picked up which can be analyzed scientifically and yet cannot be explained by modern science? Scandalmongers at home and abroad usually point out that they have at their fingertips irrefutable facts proving the existence of such objects. When these facts are examined very closely they fall into three categories. In the first category are cases of deliberate misinformation, various shams and shifty dodges. A typical example of these "facts" are the stories of the U.S. charlatan Adamsky. He has described his "encounters" with Martians and Venusians in two books illustrated with copious photographs. It should be said that any amateur photographer can produce photographs of "flying saucers" without much difficulty by using elementary optical effects such as the flashes given off when rays strike an object obliquely. F E O I
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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. 8 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.