Musa Manarov's Mir UFO video (1991)

Spring 1991. The Mir space station was hosting a Soviet-British visit known as "Juno". Its resident crew, commander Viktor Afanasyev and flight engineer Musa Manarov, had only days left aboard. Manarov was no stranger to orbit. He was the first person to spend a full year in space, and he would log 541 days up there in total.

20 May 1991. Soyuz TM-12 docked with Mir, carrying Anatoly Artsebarsky, Sergei Krikalev and Helen Sharman. Manarov was at a window with a camera. He was filming the craft as it came in.

Then something else appeared. "I saw something that looked like it had broken off of the ship," Manarov later said. "Besides that, the object was spinning as it was moving away and the intensity of its shine changed." He could not judge how far away it was. He could only say "it wasn't close because the camera was adjusted to the infinity."

A Russian account adds more. The object looked like an antenna or some other elongated part. It rotated as it flew, passed beneath the docking spacecraft and went behind the station. Manarov struggled to bring it into focus. He called out: "Guys, you lost something!"

But nothing had come loose. "When I examined the ship, I realized that there was nothing that could have separated," he said. "Also, no alarm went off, everything was calm."

The next day, Soviet television's Vremya put the footage on air. In the centre hung a phosphorescent object. The correspondent noted that Manarov "has doubts, saying that he saw how that thing was coming off the craft." Then: "Of course, there is nothing cheerful in the fact that an object of quite a considerable size is flying around the station, even if it is not a part of the Soyuz cargo craft." The report called it "quite interesting indeed, and perhaps, fairly alarming."

The US Foreign Broadcast Information Service transcribed the broadcast under the title "Object Seen Floating Around Mir". The CIA kept it. It was later released as document C05517697 and posted by The Black Vault.

In 2009 Antonio Huneeus, writing for Open Minds, dated the film to 31 March 1991. He described a "cigar-shaped UFO" filmed "for over two minutes" during the approach of a Progress cargo flight. But Progress M-7 actually docked on 28 March, after aborted attempts. That cannot be right. Manarov's last flight ended on 26 May 1991.

Ground control reportedly brushed the sighting aside, on the grounds that large objects in orbit are tracked. The most common explanation follows Manarov's own first impression: a piece of insulation or other debris shed by the arriving ship. Against that stands his inspection. Nothing was missing. James Oberg, the NASA rendezvous specialist and long-time sceptic, has often explained space sightings as debris or ice.

No one has alleged the footage was faked. The clip appeared in Michael Hesemann's UFOs: The Footage Archives and circulates widely online, often under the wrong date. It stands as a case in which a cosmonaut filmed an unknown object, then described it on camera in his own words.