Soviet Soldiers Turned to Stone in Siberia

Siberia. A Soviet military unit on training exercises. That is as precise as the account ever gets. No base, no district, no unit number. Even the date moves. The earliest version sets it in 1987. Coverage in 2025 says 1989 or 1990.

As the story tells it, 25 soldiers were in the field when “a quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer appeared above” them. One soldier fired a surface-to-air missile. The craft was hit. It crash-landed not far away.

Five figures came out of the wreck. “Five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes.” No version describes their clothing or any attempt to communicate. They merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape. Then the sphere began to buzz and hiss. It turned a brilliant white, growing bigger and bigger. Then it exploded in a bright white light.

When the light faded, 23 soldiers had been “turned into stone poles.” Two survived. Depending on the telling, they had been standing behind trees or in a shaded area. The petrified men and the remains of the craft were said to have been taken to a secret research base near Moscow. There, analysis supposedly found the bodies had “almost the same molecular structure as limestone.”

The story claims a 250-page KGB file on “the attack by a UFO on a military unit in Siberia.” It supposedly holds “documentary photographs and drawings, as well as testimonies by actual participants.” The story says it reached the CIA after Gorbachev broke up the KGB in 1991. It ends on an ominous line. “If the KGB file corresponds to reality, this is an extremely menacing case.”

The trail begins on 8 September 1992, in the American supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. In 1993 the Ukrainian local paper Ternopil Vechirnii reprinted it as “Cosmic Revenge.” It credited what it called “the authoritative Canadian magazine Weekly World News.” On 27 March 1993 the Kiev daily Holos Ukrayiny reprinted that. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, known as FBIS, translated the Holos Ukrayiny piece as routine press monitoring. The translation ended up in the CIA's files, and its release was approved in May 2000. Today it sits in the CIA's “UFOs: Fact or Fiction?” collection as “Paper Reports Alleged Evidence on Mishap Involving UFO.”

21 February 2017. The Daily Express ran the story as a declassified CIA report. Estonia's Vecherka and China Daily followed. In April 2025 it went around the world again, from Fox News and WION to MK.ru and the Kyiv Post.

The Estonian site Propastop called it a textbook case of “source laundering,” in which “each reference becomes more credible than the last.” Snopes traced it to Weekly World News and noted that the document was never classified. The “extremely menacing case” line comes from the newspaper, not from any CIA analyst. Former CIA officer Tracy Walder put it plainly: “This is not a document that the CIA originated.” Mike Baker, another former CIA officer, agreed: “I just don't think that they landed decades ago, turned Soviet soldiers into limestone and we're just now hearing about it.”

No witness has ever been named. No photograph, no KGB file and no stone soldier has ever turned up. What remains is a vivid tale, and a lesson in how a tabloid story can come to look like an intelligence file.