Vladimir Kovalyonok's Salyut 6 sighting

March 12, 1981. Soyuz T-4 lifted off from Baikonur. On board were commander Vladimir Kovalyonok and flight engineer Viktor Savinykh, the sixth and last long-duration crew of the Salyut 6 space station. It was Kovalyonok's third flight. Savinykh's first.

May 5, 1981. About 6 PM. Salyut 6 was over the area of South Africa, moving towards the Indian Ocean, about to fly through the terminator into Earth's shadow. Through a porthole, Kovalyonok saw "an object which I could not explain." It was elliptical, like a melon. In front of it was something like "a gyrating depressed cone." It looked the size of a finger. It "flew with us," he said, on its own orbit.

He called Savinykh over. Then the object burst. "A kind of explosion happened, very beautiful to watch, of golden light." One or two seconds later, a second explosion followed somewhere else. "Two spheres appeared, golden and very beautiful." The object had split into two interconnected pieces, "reminiscent of a dumb-bell." At one end, something like gas was discharging.

Then only white smoke. Then a cloud-like sphere. As Salyut 6 entered the darkness of the Earth shadow, it was gone. Kovalyonok reported it to Mission Control immediately.

There is no photograph. Russian retellings say Kovalyonok sent Savinykh for a camera, and the object exploded before it could be used. Back on Earth, Kovalyonok said, he learned that specialists had registered considerable radiation emission that day. No data or agency has ever been named, and no official finding has been published.

The first version to spread was far wilder. Reporter Henry Gris wrote in the National Enquirer that an alien spaceship had flown in tandem with Salyut 6 for two days. That story is generally considered apocryphal. In a 1993 videotaped interview with Giorgio Bongiovanni for Italian television, Kovalyonok confirmed that a sighting happened. Not the Hollywood-like alien flyby.

In 2002, Michael Hesemann showed a filmed interview with Kovalyonok at the International UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada. Hesemann also reproduced the cosmonaut's own sketch of the object. In 2004, Kovalyonok spoke to Pravda. "It was probably a UFO, but it was definitely not mysticism," he said. Two people had watched it at the same time. "I do not believe it when astronauts say they have never seen anything extraordinary in space."

James Oberg has argued that cosmonaut sightings like this are rocket launches seen from orbit. Here he pointed to three coincidences. The station was just entering Earth's shadow, ideal lighting for a sunlit exhaust plume. It was passing south of South Africa's missile test range at Overberg and over Prince Marion Island. And Israel was then helping South Africa develop Jericho missiles. His candidate is a Jericho-2 launched from an Israeli naval ship. The melon becomes a plume. The golden explosions become stage separation.

Critics of Oberg's idea note that no missile tests were recorded on that day. Yet a secret launch would leave no public record. The silence settles nothing.

Kovalyonok later rose to Colonel General in the Soviet Air Force, with 216 days in space. No independent account from Savinykh has been found. His story still travels alongside other cosmonaut and astronaut accounts. In 2014, one website compared a golden sphere near the ISS to "the Russian sighting of 1981."