I've been doing some research regarding the topic of UFOs in USSR and Russia. There is a lot to share, and there are also a lot of questions.
But I did find an article (in Russian) dated 22.03.2010 that looks like a very good summary. I highly recommend reading it.
But I did find an article (in Russian) dated 22.03.2010 that looks like a very good summary. I highly recommend reading it.
Our state has spent hundreds of billions of rubles on the search for UFOs. Wasted effort?
The activities of the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, established in 1998, unexpectedly attracted the attention of the authorities this year. Boris Gryzlov hastened to compare the Commission's activities with the Inquisition and accused it of obscurantism. The reason: theoretical disputes have turned into practical disputes affecting the material interests of major officials, and many publications of the departmental bulletin "In Defense of Science" are worthy of criminal charges.
In the latest issue, two articles are devoted to seemingly long-forgotten unidentified flying objects. Why ufology has again attracted such attention and who is right in this dispute? Are these the representatives of the Academy, who for a long time, and at the request of the state engaged in the study of UFOs, or politicians who ordered their services?
Those who believe that the search for UFOs is fun for exalted and mentally unstable people are in for a surprise: the Soviet and then the Russian state have been doing this for decades. The level of research was the highest, with the participation of the Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Defense and a host of educational institutions and research centers.
Research was funded at the highest level, and even in the most difficult years. Brezhnev, Andropov and Yeltsin dreamed of establishing contact with alien life forms, and only Gorbachev treated the UFO problem with distrust – with him, the budget costs of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations were cut fourfold. The latest open data on research in the field of anomalous phenomena dates back to 1999, but it is at least naive to say that the program has been discontinued.
Until 1977, the KGB in the Soviet Union dealt exclusively with all things that were not generally understood. The "bureaucrats" did not study mysterious phenomena, but only recorded them and reported them "upstairs".
Not that there were few such mysteries, on the contrary, it was just that research required quite different costs, and the KGB had enough to do. Everything changed in the fall of 1977. On September 20, about 4 a.m., a huge, jellyfish-like object about 100 meters in diameter hovered in the air above Petrozavodsk.
It first hovered over the city, and then began to move along Lenin Street, stopped and increased in size. The glow intensified, and the UFO showered the city with many thin ray red jets, which gave the impression of heavy rain. In the morning, thin round holes appeared in the windows of the upper floors of the houses, and melted pieces of glass lay on the window sills. Such an even, crack-free chipping could not have been achieved with the technology of the time.
The few cars that drove around the city at night had their engines shut down. From the city center, the jellyfish moved to the port area on Lake Onega and hovered over the Volga-Balt vessel, covering the cargo ship with the same "red rain". After the radiation "bombardment", the UFO abruptly took off and went into the sky.
Yuri Gromov, director of the Petrozavodsk Hydrometeorological Observatory, said at the time that "employees of the Karelian meteorological service did not observe anything similar in nature." A strange vision, despite the early morning, was seen by thousands of people. There were so many witnesses that it was not possible to silence the event.
Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, was personally informed about the mysterious phenomenon. Brezhnev just recently came to believe in the unknown: after a stroke and subsequent clinical death, and after psychics, including the notorious Juna, succeeded in his treatment. As a result, the Secretary General suddenly had a special trust in all sorts of inexplicable things.
Brezhnev ordered to discuss the Petrozavodsk phenomenon not anywhere, but at the USSR Academy of Sciences. Scientists did not want to take UFO flights in the Karelian sky seriously. But how would they tell Brezhnev about their disbelief? Many people knew that Leonid Ilyich had a fixation on the mysterious. As a result, the academics decided to shift responsibility to another department. The Academy of Sciences formed a joint commission with the participation of the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR, the Ministry of Defense, the KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and several other departments.
After consulting, the representatives of the high authorities decided: If Brezhnev asks, we must do it. The official goal is to understand the nature of incomprehensible phenomena and, if possible, use the data obtained for the development of the domestic military-industrial complex. So it is useful for the defense industry, and they distanced themselves from weird things. You never know, flying saucers or not flying saucers...
And a few months later, an additional item was included in the state plan of research and development work on defense topics - "Study of anomalous atmospheric phenomena, the causes of their occurrence and their influence on the operation of military equipment and the condition of the personnel". It was 1978 and became the year of the start of the USSR state program for the study of UFOs. In America, a similar program was launched in 1947, in Great Britain - in 1949 (projects Sign, Grudge, Blue Book). We delayed for some 30 years.
Since it was somehow inconvenient to use the abbreviation "UFO" in official documents, instead of it was used the streamlined term "anomalous phenomenon". To eliminate unwanted public outcry, it was decided to make the research closed. In connection with this circumstance, the publication of any information about UFOs in the media was restricted, and prepared materials were recommended to editors to send to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR "for review".
In 1978, two UFO research centers appeared – in the Ministry of Defense and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR ("Grid AN" and "Grid MO"). The name of the project has changed several times: on August 22, 1980, by decision of the Military Industrial Complex No. 255, the topic was extended for 1981-1985 and included in the five–year plan with a new cipher - Galaktika-AN, and five years later it was renamed Horizon-AN.
The decision to split the research was made mainly in order to avoid inconsistencies with funding. The researchers received money separately, but the information storage was common: the domestic "Angar-18" was called NII-22 (or military unit 67947, the deployment was near Moscow Mytishchi). There was also a branch of NII-22 in Leningrad – military unit 62728, it was there, according to rumors, that a giant storage facility for various space artifacts was equipped.
The Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation of the USSR Academy of Sciences (IZMIR AN), located in Troitsk, became the head center in the "Grid of the Academy of Sciences", and corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Migulin was appointed head of the "academic" direction of UFO research.
From 1978 to 1980, both "Grids" annually received about 40 million rubles per year. In the next five years, their budgets increased sixfold – money unthinkable at that time! The increase in funding occurred because the Grids were included in the secret Citadel plan, which was personally supervised by Yuri Andropov, who at that time headed the KGB.
According to the official version, the Citadel plan was developed to protect the Earth's surface from the effects of asteroids, but a significant reservation was made in the explanatory note to the plan: "...asteroids and other space objects that may pose a threat." The main task of the Citadel is space exploration by means of two or three superheavy space satellites with nuclear power plants placed beyond the orbit of Pluto, the most remote planet in the Solar System.
The Energia launch vehicle, which was supposed to launch Buran into orbit, could lift not one, but two such Burans into space, because it was originally designed specifically for launching Citadel satellites into orbit.
In addition to the space program, both Grids participated in another educational program. On the basis of the Mytishchi Research Institute-22 (v/h 67947) in 1981, an educational institution was established, the purpose of which was to train our Soviet "men in black". The Moscow Institute of Engineers of Geodesy, Aerial Photography and Cartography (MIIGAiK), the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education of the RSFSR and the Institute of Space Research took part in its creation.
It is unknown whether this educational institution is in operation today, but as of December 1999, it not only had students, but was also included in the official register of educational institutions of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Among the subjects studied were such exotic subjects as "classification of unidentified objects", "fundamentals of communication with representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations" and "safety rules for contact with objects of extraterrestrial origin". Nonsense? Perhaps that's what it seemed to the students, but they still had to take tests in these subjects.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took over the country. Marveling at the considerable spending on strange government programs, in which such high authorities as the Ministry of Defense and the Academy of Sciences were involved, he demanded the curators of both "Grids" to himself "on the carpet". The result was another renaming of the program and a fourfold reduction in funding.
In fact, only funds remained in the budgets for the completion of research according to the Citadel plan. It is said that Mikhail Sergeyevich did not even want to examine "evidence that money was not wasted" – the wreckage of UFOs and other exhibits of the Research Institute-22. Initially, Gorbachev seemed to be going to close the Grids altogether, but did not do so after studying the materials of the so–called Borisoglebsky accidents - two plane crashes involving aircraft based at the Borisoglebsky air hub in the Voronezh Region.
One of them occurred in April 1984: the crew of the MiG-21 training flight, performing a training flight, received a warning about the detection of a mark from an unknown object on the radar screen near the flight zone. After a while, the plane kind of bumped into something. After a strong impact, the engine stalled, and the MiG began to fall.
The crew successfully ejected. Exactly a year later, a similar incident was recorded: shortly before the crash, an unknown object was also observed near the plane at an altitude of 1,500 meters. At the same time, during an inspection of the crash site in the Povorin area, the search team found a humanoid figure three and a half meters tall in the forest. The giant was wearing silver-colored clothes.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, under Yeltsin, studies of anomalous phenomena were continued, but they were already funded entirely from the budget of the Ministry of Defense. Until 1993. And then – it is not known which line they continued to spend money on. But it is known who exactly spent them: all research in the field of paranormal phenomena, as well as the costs of them, was switched over by one person – KGB Major General Georgy Rogozin, Korzhakov's first deputy in the Presidential Security Service (and in 1996 he also became deputy chief of Yeltsin's election staff).
While still a KGB officer, the future deputy head of Yeltsin's security service oversaw research in the field of paranormal phenomena, but he is rumored to have earned some contempt among scientists. It was claimed that it was this stormy activity that at one time prompted the Deputy chairman of the Expert Group of the Academy of Sciences on Anomalous Phenomena, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Yulia Platov and the coordinator of research on anomalous phenomena in the Ministry of Defense and the USSR Academy of Sciences, retired Colonel Boris Sokolov, Candidate of Technical Sciences, to publish in the Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences an article "The study of unidentified flying objects in the USSR."
The authors claimed that for all the years of research on anomalous phenomena, not a single contact with extraterrestrial civilizations has been established, not a single humanoid has been caught and not a single UFO has been studied. Thus, all the multimillion-dollar financing went to waste. Experts, as one, noted that such an article could not have appeared for any other purpose than to finally close the "UFO project". At the same time, it recognized three important facts: for many years, secret UFO research was conducted in the country; scientists encountered truly unidentified objects that they could not explain; UFOs may be involved in plane crashes.
What are the results of 30 years of research? What was stored in the "secret bins" of UFO researchers? When the Institute of High Temperatures and the Institute of Space Research withdrew from the Grid program in 1980, some of the artifacts under study were transferred to NII-22. The transportation of "alien goods" was carried out by a certain Office of the head of works near Moscow with a three–digit number - a paramilitary organization engaged in renting equipment of various kinds. Numerous drivers of passing cars also saw the "alcohol–preserved" aliens - it was already dawn, so there were plenty of witnesses.
This story ended up in the so–called "Blue Folder" of the KGB - a stack of documentary evidence of the existence of supernatural phenomena, which in 1991, Deputy Chairman of the KGB Nikolai Sham handed over to cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, then head of the All-Union Ufological Association. There were quite a lot of interesting documents in the folder, for example, copies of work journals and military reports of specialists who worked under the Grid AN program.
There are curious passages in this archive: "In June 1979, several vehicles of unknown origin landed in the vicinity of Derzhavinsk, Turgai region, Kazakh SSR. Their crews spent more than a day on the ground, doing reconnaissance and some kind of research - while they did absolutely no harm to people. The creatures were very tall (over 3 meters), with a fragile build. Their bodies were black, and there was something like a skirt around their hips. There were no noses or mouths visible on the faces, only two large pink eyes."
And here is another story from the "Blue Folder": unidentified flying objects were repeatedly spotted at a military training ground in the Nizhny Novgorod region near Dzerzhinsk, and the commander of unit 21374, which owned the training ground, Major General Viktor Todorakiev, asked his superiors to do something. The authorities, having made sure that the general was certainly sober and in his right mind, sent Inna Petrovskaya, the scientific secretary of the Grid AN program, to Dzerzhinsk.
And that's what Petrovskaya reported: "65 different UFOs were observed at the training ground – shining hemispheres, orbs, disks, dumbbells and ellipses, which appeared up to six times a month. Some UFOs even landed on the territory of a military unit." Petrovskaya, who had hitherto been extremely skeptical of UFOs, as they say, believed and for quite a long time harassed her superiors with demands to install television surveillance in places where "flying saucers" fly most often.
Fiction? A mass obsession? Or are these stories invented in order to "recapture" multimillion-dollar budgets? Over the past 10 years, the governments of France, Great Britain and Germany have refused to study UFOs, but the United States still officially has a full-fledged state research program. Today we have a secret Research Institute-4 (today the 4th Central Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense) engaged in not too secret developments for the Strategic Missile Forces. NII-22 joined the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Research Institute "Poisk" and deals more with burglar alarms than unidentified phenomena.
However, three years ago, the Grid was resumed on the basis of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems. Now it is called "Attack – a direction for the organization of research in the field of anomalous phenomena in terrestrial nature and space." It is possible that the project involves employees who worked on the study of unusual phenomena back in Soviet times. And if the research is resumed, it means that there was and is something to explore.
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