Kosmos 1188: the "Dolphin" and "Jellyfish" UFO over Russia and South America

Saturday, 14 June 1980. At 20:52 UTC a Molniya-M rocket lifted off from Plesetsk Cosmodrome. On board was Kosmos 1188, an early-warning satellite carrying optical telescopes and infrared sensors. Moscow would not own up to such launches.

It was close to midnight. In Kalinin, Moscow, Ryazan, Gorkiy and Kazan, people watched the same thing pass, city after city. A huge reddish-orange object. Horseshoe or crescent shaped. Some called it a dolphin, others a giant U-shaped jellyfish.

In Tushino, ufologist Sergey Bozhich timed its disappearance at 11:58 PM. He called it "a truly terrifying sight" and said the reddish crescent "simply had to be an extraterrestrial spacecraft." Astronomer Feliks Zigel said he saw panic in the streets of Moscow. Cows bellowed and ducks flapped on the banks of the Volga. Zigel went on to interview 40 eyewitnesses.

At about 7 PM Argentine time, hundreds of people in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay looked up. A pilot said, "It looked like a full moon but fainter," and that it "was surrounded by a sort of halo." A controller at Aeroparque Jorge Newbery saw "a sort of sphere that was dim in the middle and brighter around the edges," while pilots and tower staff said it hovered within one kilometre of the airport. A pilot said it suddenly changed course and gained altitude rapidly. At Ezeiza, controllers saw a dot on their radarscope.

In Córdoba it seemed to take off from the runway and shoot up to 25,000 ft. A family driving home said a "circular flying mass" chased them. In Corrientes, newsman Omar Vallejos watched it hover over the river. Then it moved north and disappeared. At Aruanã in Brazil, four mathematics professors watched the cloud fade away after almost half an hour.

The Argentine Air Force said it was a cloud of ice lit by the sun or the moon. In June 1982 the CSICOP UFO subcommittee of Philip J. Klass, Robert Sheaffer and James Oberg named a different culprit. The inclination of the UFO's track almost exactly matched the latitude of Plesetsk. Excess fuel dumped by the rocket had formed a huge glowing cloud.

Oberg placed a fourth-stage burn around 400 miles up over the southern hemisphere. Within 10 minutes the cloud was about 30 miles across. The Russian sightings, he argued, were launch contrails lit by the midnight twilight sun. Dr Willy Smith of the Center for UFO Studies had estimated a speed of one to two kilometres per second, a figure which, scaled up by four, fits the true value of just over 7 km/s. The Soviet state programme agreed and called the "dolphin" a gas-dust cloud from the engines of the Kosmos 1188 carrier rocket, about 250 km long.

Not everyone agreed. Gordon Creighton of Flying Saucer Review called it "certainly one of the most fascinating yet produced anywhere in the world" and J. Allen Hynek called the Argentine phase "one of the most astonishing in years." Allan Hendry of CUFOS said "the exact nature of this one remains a mystery." Some details never fitted a cloud high in the sky: the hovering, the take-off from the runway, the car chase, the radar dot. Oberg put them down to errors of perception.

Kosmos 1188 is now a textbook space jellyfish. The witness reports alone revealed the satellite's approximate orbital inclination. Sokolov and Platov listed it among the most interesting records of "rocket effects."