Pleven mass sighting: two glowing spheres over Bohot, Bulgaria, 1978

Friday, December 29, 1978. Pleven district, northern Bulgaria. Over the next three hours, hundreds of people would watch the sky above the village of Bohot. Their story reached the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency that morning. Two days later it reached France.

05:40. An unusual luminous object appeared above Bohot. By 06:10, according to witnesses, it appeared about the size of the Moon and remained stationary at an altitude of approximately 1,000 m. It was spherical, bright red on one side and silvery on the other.

Around 7:00, a second, similar luminous sphere appeared from the direction of Bohot. It was moving horizontally at an altitude of only 400-500 m. Witnesses with binoculars said the two objects looked entirely identical, each giving off a bright, bluish radiance. The second sphere hovered over the village for some time. Then it rapidly ascended vertically and disappeared to the west.

The first object stayed. For about an hour it remained almost motionless over the city. Around 09:00 it slowly moved westward. And then it was gone.

BTA's Pleven correspondent, Dimitar Mustakerski, filed the account for the agency's internal Domestic Information bulletin. On December 31, the French daily Le Méridional ran a wire report headlined "U.F.O's in the sky of Bulgaria." It spoke of two absolutely identical objects seen by hundreds of witnesses, each releasing a strong red light on one side and a silvery light on the other. In nearby Vratsa, correspondent Emil Borisov reported winds of up to 120 km/h, and no celestial objects. The next morning in Sofia, thousands of people crowded along the central streets to watch a strange body with changing brightness and colour.

Prof. Kiril Serafimov, chair of the National Committee for the Study and Use of Outer Space, rejected an extraterrestrial origin and called it "a natural phenomenon still not explained." No sound effect was recorded, he said, and the phenomenon was not photographed. He was blunter in the BTA bulletin: "I said goodbye to flying saucers a long time ago." Yet he conceded: "I am convinced that some phenomenon did occur, as it was observed by many people, but it is impossible to say exactly what it was." He noted that Bulgarian air defence had not reacted at all.

In Sofia, Simeon Vladimirov of the University Astronomical Observatory had a simpler answer. "We trained the telescope on it and saw… Venus!" The party daily Rabotnichesko Delo reportedly followed with a Venus headline of its own and dismissed the episode as "celestial psychosis."

Venus had reached greatest brilliancy on December 20, 1978. It was the brightest object in the dawn sky and visible in daylight. Vladimirov argued that a person cannot remain perfectly still, so a fixed point seems to move, while wind-driven clouds could alter its colour. But the witnesses described two identical objects at the same time, one arriving horizontally, hovering and climbing straight up. Many researchers and eyewitnesses found the Venus explanation unconvincing, pointing to the objects' apparent maneuvering.

A 2010 article on ufo.bg claimed the object landed near Bohot and Dolni Dabnik, a detail neither 1978 report contains. It also gathered Sofia witnesses, among them the ufologist Dimitar Delyan and the poet Dimo Bolyarov, who described wingless cigar shapes on December 31. Then, on December 30, 2025, BTA opened its archive and published the original bulletin. Forty-seven years on, the surviving reports leave the same uncertainty. Many people saw a phenomenon over Pleven, but what it was remains disputed.