The Minsk UFO: Two Aeroflot Tu-134 Crews Over Byelorussia, 1984

An Aeroflot Tu-134A of the Estonian Civil Aviation Directorate was working the route Tbilisi, Rostov-on-Don, Tallinn. In the small hours of 7 September 1984 it was on the leg from Minsk to Tallinn, at about 10,600 metres. Igor Cherkashin was in command. Beside him sat co-pilot Gennady Lazurin, with navigator Yegor Ognev and flight engineer Gennady Kozlov.

About 4:07 in the morning. Lazurin saw a bright star in the form of an ellipse. A bright yellow light source, the size of a five-kopeck coin. Moments later a thin, thread-like vertical beam of light fell from it to the earth. The beam widened into a bluish-white cone. Two more cones followed.

Then the beam rose from the ground and fixed on the aircraft. The crew saw a blinding white point surrounded by concentric rings, from red at the centre to dark violet at the outer edge. At exactly 4:10 the object flashed green. It became a sky-blue cloud with clear, sharp edges, about half the Moon's diameter. Lights flashed inside it. "The cloud was flying in a parallel line to the plane, about 50 kilometers afar."

Later the cloud thinned. What remained looked like a wingless aircraft. "It was like an airplane only without a stabilizer," Cherkashin said. The crew last saw it around 05:20, near landing, as a boomerang over the Gulf of Finland. During the flight, Lazurin sketched each stage in his notebook.

They were not alone. A second Tu-134A, under commander Valery Gotsiridze, was flying from Leningrad toward Tbilisi on the opposite course, about 500 metres lower. Co-pilot Yuri Kabachnikov was plain about it. "It was a cigar-looking object with three beams of bright light coming out of it." The Minsk controller turned them toward it. The object turned sharply to the left and lit up the aircraft. Controllers at Minsk, Vilnius and Riga reportedly saw a strange glow. None of them found anything suspicious on radar.

30 January 1985. Trud ran the story as "Exactly at 4:10", by Vladimir Vostrukhin. It quoted N.A. Zheltukhin saying the pilots "were dealing with what we call a UFO". Russian sources say the issue sold out within hours. The Party authorities ruled the publication "erroneous and harmful". The editor was reprimanded or dismissed. FBIS translated the article for the CIA.

Darker claims followed. Gotsiridze was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in October 1985 and died that November. Kabachnikov was grounded and blamed "electromagnetic irradiation". Yet as Pravda.ru noted, "no other pilot, not to mention any passengers, had any complaints."

The Soviet military spoke of "the effect of atmospheric phenomena on electromagnetic waves". The researcher K.K. Khazanovich gathered crew interviews and bearings from Ventspils and Leningrad. He concluded it was a launch from Plesetsk at about 04:06. In his view the beam was an illusion, a sunlit exhaust trail seen against a dark sky.

In 2009 James Oberg revisited the case in Skeptical Inquirer, under the title "The Minsk UFO Case: Misperception and Exaggeration". Oberg found witnesses in Sweden and Finland who had seen a similar display that morning. Their bearings crossed over the Barents Sea. He judged it a secret Soviet missile launch, hundreds of kilometres away rather than 50. The story had also grown with time. In Khazanovich's 1987 tape recordings, Kabachnikov's own commander, navigator and flight engineer reportedly described only diffuse light.

Two cockpits. Named crews. Notebook sketches drawn in flight. It remains the best-known airliner UFO case of the Soviet era, and where the light was launched from is still argued.