Dear Dick:
Thanks for the note of June 6, explaining the function of the "Federation". Well, then, I'd like to partake of the services of the federation as a recognized researcher on the topic of common interest, Russian UFO reports. Please be more specific on how I can obtain the materials which you and your associates produce. In particular, for expenses to be redeemed, how can I obtain copies of the original Zigel volumes? Perhaps even borrowing them would be sufficient: does somebody in the Houston area have a set?
I accept your offer to include my own research results in your case files, and the bulk of this letter consists of such results. I would very much like to receive feedback, in English or in Russian, on my suggestions. As you know, I am frustrated by the lack of response to some of my major past studies, such as the 1982 MUFON UFO Journal article on the 1967 wave, which I identified with tests of the Soviet FOBS warhead. I don't even have any idea as to whether you agree or disagree with my thesis.
Thanks for your frankness: yes, I do select the types of cases which my particular expertise is most applicable to. This is justified in that ufologists studying Russian material, yourself included and Vallee as well (critique follows), continue to turn a blind eye to just such solutions to a subset of the mass of reports. To be specific, so far I've heard of nobody in the UFO field making any connection between some of the more spectacular events in the "Perm Triangle" and the fact that the region is in the primary impact zone of stages from space boosters launched at Plesetsk. I urge you to attempt some independent correlations of such events and I promise you that if you do you will find some intriguing results.
Specific case commentaries follow:
December 3, 1967, 3:04 PM: The "Mys Kammenny" ("Stoney Cape") UFO, named for the point of origin of an Ilyushin-18 flight carrying scientific personnel back to Moscow, from the records of Soviet ufologist Feliks Zigel. This "multiple sighting" involved scientific workers on the aircraft and traffic controllers on the ground. The "intensely bright" light followed the aircraft as it maneuvered. Actually it was the Kosmos-194 spy satellite being launched. American ufologist Bill Moore: "Zigel's reports tend to be limited to those UFO cases that have managed to withstand the most rigorous scientific investigation." Red Skies: A History of UFOs in Russia, UFO Report, June 1980.
September 20, 1977, 4:00 AM. TASS correspondent Nikolay Milov: "A huge star suddenly flared up, impulsively sending shafts of light to the Earth. The star spread out over Petrozavodsk in the shape of a jellyfish, showering the city with a multitude of very fine rays which created the image of pouring rain." Aleksandr Kazantsev, Soviet science fiction writer and UFO expert: "As far as I am concerned, it was a spaceship from outer space, carrying out reconnaissance." Aleksey Zolotov, expert on the Tunguska blast: "The object was a typical flying saucer -- the available evidence left no doubt whatsoever in my mind, clearly indicating the UFO nature of the event."
June 14, 1980, 11:55 PM. Soviet reports had a UFO seen in Kalinin, Moscow, Ryazan, Gorkiy, and Kazan. Soviet jet fighters scrambled to intercept the UFO. In the streets of Moscow, old women wailed it was the judgment day, and men directed people to air raid shelters in the face of an apparent nuclear attack. Several reports described manned scout ships patrolling city streets. Soviet ufologist Sergey Bozhich, an eyewitness: "It was a truly terrifying sight. I immediately realized that the reddish crescent just had to be an extraterrestrial spacecraft, for I have been studying UFOs for many years now and have already seen UFOs similar to this one." Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, dean of American ufologists, called it: "One of the most astonishing in years". Actually, it was the launching of the Kosmos-1188 early-warning satellite.
May 15, 1981, 1:30 AM. A "brilliant blue UFO half a kilometer wide" hovered over Vnukovo Airport outside Moscow for thirty minutes. A scout ship took up position over the Moscow railroad station for two hours, then dove into a nearby lake. People panicked in the streets. It was the launch of Meteor 2-7
October 2, 1991, 5:45 PM, seen by almost all the inhabitants of Arkhangelsk and elsewhere in northern Russia. A glowing light rose into the sky, passed directly over the city, and split in two. Both parts continued to the north, leaving a phosphorescent green cloud which lingered for about ten minutes. This was another ICBM test from Plesetsk.
And others. . . .
Now, how about the general issue of Soviet space and missile activity masquerading as UFO stimuli? I surveyed your article in the March/April 1991 issue of IUR on "UFO activities in the Soviet Union", and found you really hadn't scratched the surface in seeking obvious, prosaic explanations. Furthermore, your new Russian friends appear to be congenitally incapable of recognizing space and missile activity.
There's the Aug 3, 1990 case at 2345 hours in the Kirov region and also in the Tversk region. This coincides nicely with the launch observed widely in Finland that night just before local midnight, when Kosmos 2089 was blasting off from Plesetsk (liftoff time was 23:41 local). Do you believe there could be a connection? I do.
There's all the wonderful reports from Kazakhstan (home of the Baikonur cosmodrome) and the Kola Penninsula (across the bay from the Plesetsk cosmodrome). And doesn't the description of a "chevron-shaped lighted object" give you any clues as to what prosaic explanation you should check out first? And there's the pilot Kuzmin's view of a light in the sky north of him while he was flying south of the launch track out of Plesetsk in December 1989. Did you check any of those times and dates with known launchings? No, obviously not.
Now, don't oversimplify my research to claim that all Russian UFOs are space and missile events. They comprise only a fraction of the stimuli which have caused these reports. My hypothesis is more pessimistic: the Russian data shows that they and you don't know HOW to weed IFO's out of Russian UFO's with sufficient reliability to attempt any conclusions, ever. The space/missile phenomena are only ONE of hundreds of categories of IFO-types; they happen to be useful for study mainly because they can be well characterized in time and space, and tend to be observed over a wide area (giving rise to a great number of reports). Other types of IFOs which in the West are kept under control due to free information flow (aircraft, balloons, etc.) cannot ever be controlled in the Russian reports: we don't have the background data and probably never will. My conclusion, then, is one of the total futility of getting anything scientifically useful out of Russian reports.
The March 21, 1990 major encounter with air defense fighters -- let me be coy and let that case simmer for a little while longer to see if anybody else comes up with something. I've published enough hints and general suggestions, that somebody REALLY trying to solve it should be able to do so without my help. After all, I don't want to act like an irreplaceable one-man RussUFO debunking squad.
Regarding the marvelous Sep 7, 1984 case over Minsk. This is becoming the biggest Russian UFO story since Petrozavodsk in 1978. If I understand "Science in the USSR" correctly, the author admits there was a rocket launch seen from a wide area (I knew that, from reports in Finland, but it took me TWO YEARS to verify the exact date, based on airline schedules!!) but also posits a "true UFO" flying at the same time in exactly the line-of-sight to the rocket cloud. As Occam's Razor teaches us, entities should not be multiplied without requirement, and here the visual phenomena are consistent with the rocket (everyone saw the light to the northeast, but nobody saw a light south of them, for example) and the sketches look very similar to sketches over the decades by other witnesses to other launchings from Plesetsk or from the naval test range north of there. The launch was at 4:00 AM, not 3:00, and the author mistakenly says at first it was from Baikonur.
The radar account is unexplained, except as based on excitement (Klass has a "law" about that, looking on radar for a UFO somebody has told you is there).
Now for the medical accounts. First, I would be very eager to see the original documents from which the abstracts are allegedly taken. Both crews clearly were very excited by their encounter, and maybe a bit frightened. But unless we are willing to attribute pure magic to the phenomenon, how can we account for one cause leading to all those different medical effects? Presumably the people in the cockpit were exposed to the same forces, if any. The medical effects of radiation, microwaves, lasers, etc., are fairly well understood and are well documented, so no medical specialist has any right to use those terms for causes of "mystery ailments" of unprecedented characteristics. The total story is too confused to prove anything beyond the mere existence of confusion, and, possibly, the sad death of one of the pilots. But remember the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc . Just because one event follows another it does not prove it was caused by the other.
Now, the frightening implications for ufology are as follows: if a simple visual stimulus such as this documented rocket launching can lead to all these elaborations of maneuvers, responses, radar/visual coordination, physical effects, etc., and if those elaborations are completely unconnected with the original stimulus, then how can we ever trust any anecdotal reports?? That is, indeed, a frightening implication. I will argue the "skeptical" line. This case may be one in which we can test the NULL HYPOTHESIS to the limit, so let's plunge ahead where angels (and Azhazha) fear to tread.
Vallee's recent book is full of similar pseudo-UFOs which I believe I have already "solved". It does his credibility no good to have fallen for them a quarter century later, ten years after the publication of the solutions. See for example all those wonderfully detailed imaginations on pages 190-194, which mostly can be traced back to the series of Kosmos-FOBS-UFO secret fireballs (Kadikov on October 18 correctly triangulated the altitude and speed of the warhead, which should have given Vallee a hint to check out Soviet rocket activities!). And on pages 169-172 Vallee is a bit too proud that the Gindilis statistics look just like his own studies, but he shouldn't crow too soon, not before reading my conclusion to the MUFON 1982 paper: the Russian statistics were demonstrably based on pseudo-UFOs of the FOBS-Kosmos type, not true UFOs, so they should not look like Vallee's results if his results were true UFOs.
I'm grateful for him bringing to my attention the May 17, 1967 sightings (page 189), which I hadn't seen before. They fully conform to the Kosmos-FOBS-UFO model, since Kosmos-160 was launched at 16:05 GMT and flew over the Don-Volga area about 8:45 local time. Kamyshin is on the Volga near Saratov; Bakhrushev isn't in any of my atlases but I'll bet 100 rubles it's in the same area (check it out!).
Also, on page 138, Vallee refers to a Sep 19, 1968 case over Gagra. If his records are garbled and the year actually was 1967 (please re-verify with the Russians), that was Kosmos-178, right down to the hour. If it really was 1968, then I'll have to admit it is unidentified. And the case highlighted on page 153, a typical warhead test, needs to have its date checked, too. Was November 7, 1967 the date of the Chikanov sighting (if so, a true UFO) or the date of the letter? The most recent Kosmos-UFO had passed over Kazan a few days earlier, on October 28, at the same hour mentioned in the letter. Please re-verify the date in Zigel's manuscript. On page 201 Vallee classifies this case as having a discontinuous trajectory, so if it really was only a Kosmos-FOBS warhead, he'll have to abandon it.
In passing, as already mentioned, the "Cape Kamenniy" UFO is also solved by a rocket launching, from the then-new secret military spaceport at Plesetsk. See Vallee's page 138 compared to my report. On page 201 he assigns this story the highest evaluation in his coding scheme: "Firsthand personal interview with the witness by a source of proven reliability", "site visited by skilled analyst", and "No natural explanation possible, given the evidence". Looks like strike one, strike two, strike three, he's out on this one.
The identification of Russian UFO reports with secret space and rocket activity is a fertile field for further research. Here's a quick example. On page 130 Vallee highlights an astronomer's report from the Shemakhinskiy Observatory in the Caucasus Mountains, which reportedly occurred on November 30, 1964, at 1500 GMT. I'd never heard of it before, but the date rang a bell so I checked my files. On November 30, at 1312 GMT, the Zond-2 probe blasted off from Baikonur. After circling Earth once (which takes about an hour and forty minutes), it lit up its engine again over the Crimea to inject the probe towards Mars. Someone on the ground in darkness would have seen a flare in the sky and in the following minutes an expanding cloud of sunlit gas. That would have been "an unusual celestial object" in anyone's book, to be sure! If anyone can provide further details about this case, such as motion, I can work up a ground-track prediction to see if the two objects -- the Zond-2 booster and the UFO -- happen to coincide in time and space. You guys are interested in seeking prosaic explanations before classifying these as true UFOs, aren't you? Zigel didn't have enough data. And the second UFO report highlighted on the same page was explained in my old MUFON paper as the Kosmos-183 space warhead fireball entry.
Just to restate my opinion on these infamous Russian pseudo-UFO cases, caused by Plesetsk launchings or by FOBS fireballs or similar rocket activities from Baikonur. Such prosaic but highly classified stimuli are far more common in Russia (but they are hardly unknown in the West, either!), and they have been a major factor in shaping the unique peculiarities of "the Russian UFO phenomenon". They haven't caused every sighting, of course, but they have been responsible for some of the most famous ones. Don't try the gambit of asserting that these solutions aren't believable because they don't explain other cases, other dates, other places -- they aren't intended to. But these cases DO HELP CALIBRATE the reliability of the Russian ufologists who investigated them and pronounced them innocent of any prosaic explanation: such investigators clearly still have a lot to learn about ufology and about their own country. They have yet to prove they deserve your trust. For example, in my opinion, anybody who insists something anomalous occurred over Petrozavodsk on Sep 20, 1977, is a naive fool. And how about people who refuse to see the connection between the 1967 FOBS warhead tests and the "crescent UFO wave"? What are they?
Each case needs to be examined individually before "the big picture" can be drawn. I quote Vallee from page 196: "Good science is a science of measurement.... UFO research cannot get anywhere until its practitioners recognize the need for a solid taxonomy that can be reliably applied." In this brief treatment, I believe I have established that Vallee (and you) have failed to meet these standards, that you (and your Russian colleagues) have proven incapable of filtering out one particular artificial stimulus (rocket/space events) from the body of reports, so who knows how many others also remain imbedded within the data? Any taxonomist with that kind of error rate would be laughed out of any real scientific field. I applaud the desire to set and meet higher standards, and I express my continuing willingness to assist in this process. I would humbly suggest my help is needed, and that the ironic mockery on Vallees snide attack on me on pages 30-31 is self-defeating because it blinded him to insights which would have steered him clear of the embarrassing errors which fill this new book.
In closing and in addition, for one last example, there is nothing extraordinary in somebody spotting strange winged rockets along the Volga River in 1948-1949, since it was at just that time that the first Soviet cruise missiles were being test fired from the Kapustin Yar range south of Stalingrad. In recent years a number of private memoirs have been published on that subject in Moscow. But calling them UFOs and using Apraksin's decades-old often-retold stories as evidence for some fundamentally inexplicable phenomenon is not right.
Cheers and challenges, Jim O.
PS Please recopy/redistribute
as widely as possible in Russia.
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