The Robozero Wonder: a fireball over a Russian lake

The letter is dated 15 August 7171. That is the Byzantine count of years from creation. On the Julian calendar it was Saturday, 15 August 1663, the Feast of the Dormition. The place was the Robozero volost of Beloozero county, today the Belozersky District of Vologda Oblast. Modern accounts put Lake Robozero about 50 km southwest of Belozersk. The letter places the event 10 versts from the Loza estate of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, also known as the St Cyril Monastery.

The parish church was full. People "had assembled in great number". Retellings say a great noise drew them outside. One of them was Levka Fedorov, a farmer from the village of Mys on the Antushevo estate. He stood on the church porch and watched.

"At noon, a large ball of fire came down over Robozero, arriving from the clearest part of the cloudless heavens." It came from the north. It moved south along the lake, above the water. It measured "some 140 ft from one edge to the other", about 20 sazhen. Over the same distance ahead of it, two ardent rays extended. Bluish smoke rose from its sides. Then the big fire and two smaller ones disappeared.

It came back. "The same fire suddenly reappeared over the same lake." It darted from the south to the west, about half a versta from where it had vanished. Then it appeared a third time, "more terrific in width," and disappeared. In all, it had remained over Robozero, over water, for an hour and a half.

Some peasants rowed out toward it. They could not get near. "The fire burned them by the heat, not allowing them to get closer." The lake was lit to its greatest depth of 30 ft, and the fish swam away. Where the fire touched, the water looked "covered with rust under the reddish light." Later the wind blew a brownish film away.

Fedorov's account reached Ivashko Rzhevsky, a servitor of the monastery. Rzhevsky did not simply pass it on. He asked the priests of the Robozero district, and they "responded to me with a letter confirming that they had such sign." Then he sent his report, an otpiska, to Archimandrite Nikita and the elder Matfei. No record of the monastery's reply has been found.

A meteor was the first idea. Commentators set it aside. A meteor does not last 90 minutes, come back three times, or let a boat draw near. Ball lightning was raised too. But there was no storm, and the object was reportedly about 40 metres across, with rays ahead of it. Russian writers have also discussed mirages and atmospheric optics. Nobody seems to doubt the document itself. The numbers, though, are witness estimates in old units, and they reach us second-hand through Rzhevsky.

In 1842 the Archaeographic Commission printed the letter in Akty istoricheskie, volume IV. The original is said to be held in the archive of the St Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Soviet writer Yuri Roscius made it famous with his essay "The Robozero Wonder". Aura-Z reportedly printed a photograph of the letter in 1994. In 2010 Chris Aubeck and Jacques Vallée published an English translation in Wonders in the Sky.

In 1982, E. S. Gorshkov reportedly led a magnetometric expedition that found "anomalous geomagnetic field changes" along the supposed flight path. No primary publication has surfaced. Today the case is usually called Russia's most famous early UFO account.