Voronezh UFO Incident

Autumn 1989. Glasnost had loosened the Soviet press. Voronezh, a city of about 780,000 people, lay some 300 miles south of Moscow. On its left bank sat Yuzhny Park. Locals called it "Kozly," the goat park.

Wednesday, September 27. About 6:30 in the evening. The day was fading. Boys in the park saw a pink glow in the sky, then a sphere of red-burgundy color. The first published account put it at about ten meters in diameter. It circled at a height of about 12 meters, and the grass beneath it lay pressed down. It flew away. Within minutes it returned and hovered over the park.

The children said a hatch opened in the lower part of the sphere. A being about 3 m tall stepped out. It had a very small head and three eyes. Two were whitish. The third, in the middle, was red and had no pupil. It wore silvery overalls and bronze boots. With it came a small robot, a box with something like a head on top. Coming lower, the sphere brushed a poplar tree. The tree stayed bent.

Then came the strangest moment. One boy cried out in fear. The alien looked at him, and he froze. The being aimed a tube at a 16-year-old boy, and he vanished. He reappeared only when the object left. It departed, witnesses said, "without any noise, without causing any wind."

On October 3 the regional Communist Party paper Kommuna ran "Football with Aliens," written by engineer and UFO enthusiast Alexander Mosolov. On October 9 TASS carried it worldwide. AP, UPI, the New York Times and the Washington Post followed. On October 11 Vremya, the main Soviet television news program, aired a report.

Genrikh Silanov of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory described a circle 20 meters in diameter with four dents 4 to 5 centimeters deep. He spoke of two pieces of deep-red rock and said "the substance cannot be found on earth." Police lieutenant Sergei Matveyev said he saw "a body flying in the sky." He did not confirm the aliens.

City council chairman Viktor Atlasov set up a commission chaired by Igor Surovtsev of Voronezh State University. Forensic experts, doctors, nuclear physicists, chemists and biologists took part. After about two months came the verdict. "No expert detected any anomalies." Cesium traces were blamed on Chernobyl fallout and local industry. B. A. Chobur, acting commander of the airport air squadron, said radar recorded no unidentified targets within 200 km. He allowed that such objects might not show on radar.

Doubts came quickly. TASS correspondent Vladimir Lebedev admitted he saw nothing himself and did not rule out "fantasizing." Silanov later said "don't believe all you hear from Tass," and identified the rock as hematite. On October 21 Kommuna conceded that adults had not seen the aliens and that the children's accounts contradicted each other. Vladimir Pozner's crew pointed to "the creative imagination of young children." In Skeptical Inquirer, Paul Kurtz called it a "paranormal pandemonium" released by glasnost.

No hoax confession has ever surfaced. The children grew up, and they still disagree. Sergey Makarov says "I saw them," though the memory now feels "like a fairy tale." Alexei Panin saw only silhouettes against a bright disc. Researcher Peter Robbins called it Russia's best known CE3 incident. It remains a park, a handful of children, and a question that never closed.