The Great Soviet Crescent sightings, 1967

Spring 1967. The south-western Soviet Union. According to Air & Space, it started in March.

From Ukraine to the Caucasus, people watching the evening sky saw a crescent of light cross it from west to east. Silent. Always near sunset. Air & Space later wrote that it was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.

17 July 1967. On the bank of the Don in Rostov oblast, Docent Krasuntsev and his son saw two luminous points that looked like early artificial satellites. Then a sheaf of sparks or orange flame burst from one of them. "This sheaf, directed across the line of flight, within one or two seconds took the form of a crescent and flew on without changing its shape."

8 August. 20:40. At the mountain astrophysical station of the Academy of Sciences, 12 miles from Kislovodsk, astronomer Anatoli Sazanov and ten of the station's scientific staff watched an object "shaped like an asymmetrical crescent, with its convex side turned in direction of movement." It was "yellow with reddish tinge," about two-thirds of the Moon's diameter, flying horizontally from west to east. Faint ribbons trailed behind its horns like the condensation trail of a jet plane. A bright star of the first magnitude moved at a constant distance ahead.

19 September. Svatovsk at 7:20 p.m. Volzhskiy at 7:30. Donetsk and Zhdanov at 8:20. Then again on 18 October. Cossacks on horseback, airline pilots and military interceptor crews were among the witnesses.

In May 1967 the first official Soviet UFO study group met in Moscow, chaired by Major General Stolyarov with astronomer Felix Ziegel as deputy. On 10 November 1967 the two men appeared on Soviet central television and asked viewers for first-hand accounts. Letters flooded in. Ziegel summed up about 200 reports: "a luminous orange-colored crescent" that would "throw out jets, sometimes with sparks."

The backlash was swift. In late November the Academy of Sciences closed the group, and its physics department under Lev Artsimovich condemned UFO research. On 29 February 1968, Pravda called the UFO problem "unscientific." Ziegel was told to drop the subject.

In the United States, James E. McDonald told the House UFO symposium of 29 July 1968 that "satellites and meteors can be ruled out."

In 1982 James Oberg, an expert on the Soviet space programme then at NASA Johnson Space Center, offered another answer in the MUFON UFO Journal. Each crescent had appeared about 95 minutes after a Kosmos launch from Baikonur that same day. Roughly one orbit. Of 56 multiple-witness cases, 44 fell on launch dates. The launches were secret tests of the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS. The R-36-O fired retro-rockets over Soviet territory, and in the thin upper atmosphere its exhaust spread into a wide, curved plume lit by the setting sun. Moscow, Oberg wrote, "was no doubt pleased with this case of mistaken space identity."

Neither Ziegel nor McDonald had known about the classified programme. Still, the wave gave the Soviet Union its first public UFO debate. Ziegel went on to gather about 50,000 reports. In 1982 CSICOP, with Oberg, Philip J. Klass and Robert Sheaffer, applied the same launch-matching method to other Soviet and South American waves.