Pereslavl-Zalessky Radar and Fighter-Jet Incident (Gen. Igor Maltsev's Statement)

Spring 1990. Glasnost had opened the Soviet press, and UFO reports that once stayed buried were now in print. North of Moscow, around Pereslavl-Zalessky, Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad), Fryazino and Kirzhach, an object was seen repeatedly that March, according to Russian accounts. In Belgium, F-16s would be scrambled before the month was out.

The night of March 21, 1990. Air defence radar tracked a target. A ground radar station reported a rapidly moving, shining object with red lights, and another with white lights that followed the first.

At 21:38, Lt. Col. A. A. Semenchenko received "the command to go on an alert exercise." His task was to detect and identify a target at 2,000 meters. At 22:05 he had it. "I visually detected the target, designated by two flashing white lights." He closed to about 500 to 600 meters and saw its silhouette against the city lights. The target did not respond to the "identify, friend or foe" request.

From the ground, witnesses described something enormous. A disc 100 to 200 meters in diameter, with two pulsating lights on its sides. It rotated around its axis. It flew an "S-turn" in both the horizontal and vertical planes. It hovered. Then it moved at speeds "exceeding that of the modern jet fighter by 2 or 3 times," somewhere between 1,000 and 7,000 meters up. It made no sound at all. One later account says it was visible for about four hours.

Unit commanders gathered more than 100 visual observations and passed them to Col.-Gen. Igor Maltsev, Chief of the Main Staff of the Air Defence Forces. On April 19, 1990, the newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna published his summary, "UFOs on Air Defense Radars." Moscow News followed with statements from Sergeant Fedorovich and Captains Birin, Filatov and Lapin.

Maltsev chose his words carefully. "I am not a specialist on UFOs, and, therefore, I can only correlate the data and express my own supposition." His supposition was plain. "Terrestrial machines could hardly have any such capabilities." Gen. Ivan Tretyak, head of the Air Defence Forces, reportedly backed the report.

In July 1990 the Arizona Republic carried the story to American readers. Physicist Bruce Maccabee later wrote that Maltsev's series of official reports about the March 21 sighting "caused quite a stir at upper CIA levels."

At home, the price was personal. A 2026 Komsomolskaya Pravda article says Maltsev had given his account to military journalist Mikhail Zakharchuk. After publication, Maltsev reportedly phoned him in distress and asked not to be named. Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov had become furious. The incident, the article says, was left out of the official Setka UFO study reports.

No one has accused the witnesses of fabrication, and no sceptical study of this case has surfaced. The open question sits in the data itself. Ground observers described a vast disc. The pilot, at 500 to 600 meters, saw two flashing lights and a dim silhouette. Tretyak hinted that Soviet counter-stealth work might shed light on UFOs, and later summed up the incident more cautiously.

In 1996, reporter George Knapp interviewed Maltsev in Moscow. The general said pilots had a standing order to leave UFOs alone, because of their possible "incredible capacities for retaliation." More than three decades on, his statement remains the heart of the case. A senior Soviet air defence commander, putting his own name to an object he could not explain.