The Tři Sekery radar intercept

Western Bohemia, spring 1992. Near the village of Tři Sekery, in the Cheb district close to the Bavarian border, there was a military area. That would matter in what came next.

May 5, 1992. An unknown object appeared on the radars. This time it was heading in from Bavaria. According to the Czech research group Projekt Záře, it was first picked up over German territory flying at about 200 km/h, some 2,000 metres above the ground. Several radars, working on different frequencies, showed it clearly.

It crossed the border near Tři Sekery. It headed for the village of Hvozd, near Manětín. Then it turned north, toward Chomutov.

The army sent aircraft after it. The army documents now held in the archive of the writer Jaroslav Mareš say an L-39 Albatros went up first, from the airfield at Žatec, which was still active then. A Mil Mi-24 helicopter from Plzeň-Líně joined the chase later. Other accounts say several fighter jets and helicopters were sent, and that the weather was good.

The pilots did not catch the object. They did not even see it. Several radars showed the target, and one crew was supposed to be above it, the other below it. Both reported seeing nothing.

On the ground, people told a different story. A number of observers saw an unknown silvery object. It was elongated. It suddenly changed direction and speed. Projekt Záře says that later on, several witnesses independently reported a silvery elongated object at the places where the target was at the time.

Near Jirkov, at the foot of the Ore Mountains, the object vanished from the radars. Mareš described how it went. "It disappeared from the radars by vanishing upward. It overcame gravity within a few tenths of a second."

In autumn 1992 the Czechoslovak army went public with the incident itself. Its conclusion was brief. The event, it said, "lacks a logical explanation."

The military area at Tři Sekery raised the suspicion of spy reconnaissance. In the end that was apparently never confirmed. No one has alleged a hoax, and no conventional explanation has been published. The original 1992 statement, its exact wording and the outlet that carried it have not been traced in the sources available today.

For years the case lived on in short lists of Czech sightings and in the files of Projekt Záře, the group founded by Vladimír Šiška, under the title "Neviditelný fantom", the Invisible Phantom. In February 2023, while the United States was shooting down high-altitude objects, the Seznam Zprávy podcast Skutečné české záhady came back to it. Hosts Josef Klíma and Jaroslav Mareš set it beside the 1987 Vranov nad Dyjí case. In that case a Mi-24 crew was sent after a radar target coming in from Austria, with orders to identify it, force it down or destroy it. Both are Czech cases in which the army itself sent aircraft after something on its radars.