The Height 611 UFO Crash at Dalnegorsk

Dalnegorsk is a mining town in Primorsky Krai, in the Soviet Far East. Inside the city limits rises Izvestkovaya Sopka, Limestone Hill. Locals know it as Height 611. Its summit sits about 1.5 km from the city bus station.

January 29, 1986. At 19:55, a reddish sphere appeared over the town. One account puts it at approximately three meters in diameter, "with no projections or cavities," its colour "similar to that of burning stainless steel." Others compared it to half the size of the Moon, and it made no sound. Yevgeny Serebov, then a boy, said it had "neither tail nor trail behind it."

It flew parallel to the ground at about 15 metres per second, 700 to 800 metres up. It slowly rose and fell, and its glow heated up each time it climbed. Then, on its approach to Height 611, the object "jerked," and fell down like a rock.

A faint dull impact. A flash like electric welding. Some witnesses saw it vanish. Others watched it give off light for about an hour, like a forest fire. Quarry manager Levakov said he "never knew that a body could fly noiselessly without any wings or engines."

February 3, 1986. A field team from the Far Eastern branch of the Academy of Sciences' committee on anomalous aerial phenomena reached the hill. It was led by Valery Dvuzhilny, a local biology teacher and ufologist. They found a scorched patch about 2 by 2 metres, rocks coated in black film and a tree stump that looked polished, or melted. Radiation readings were normal.

They collected about 70 g of lead droplets, 40 g of black glassy beads and 5 g of a strange "mesh." Its threads, about 17 µm thick, held gold wires sheathed in quartz. Film from two cameras at the site reportedly came out blank. No lab report has ever been published. Every analysis reaches us second-hand.

Dvuzhilny concluded it was "a malfunctioning alien space probe" and suggested the hour-long fire was its crew making electrical repairs before leaving. In 1988, V. Skavinsky of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics led an expedition. Ufologists from Japan, the USA, China, Canada, Belgium and Sweden followed. Vadim Chernobrov's Kosmopoisk group came in March 2004. No government or military conclusion has been found.

The physicist V. F. Psalomshchikov argued for a reconnaissance balloon. It moved silently at wind speed, he said, then became a fireball when its thermite self-destruct charge fired. Carbon-fibre composites would explain the mesh. The lead would be ballast, and Mikhail Gershtein reports it matched the Kholodnoe deposit in Siberia. Gershtein and Manuel Borraz later tied a separate wave of sightings, on 28 November 1987, to the re-entry of a Proton third stage.

They call it Russia's Roswell. The case reached television on Sightings in 1995, and books by Paul Stonehill and Philip Mantle. On 12 June 2015 a memorial plaque went up on the hill, naming Dvuzhilny as its first investigator. Local journalist Valery Bolshakov was less impressed. The only change he felt at the top was being out of breath from the climb.