Vadim K. Ilyin

About the Author
Vadim K. Ilyin, who was born in Russia and now lives in St. Petersburg, graduated from the Leningrad Mechanical Institute in 1956. He has worked as an engineer, as well as group, laboratory, and department manager in different institutions. He has more than 30 years of experience in translating technical literature and fiction from English and Polish languages into Russian, and is the author of several articles.

Material for this article was obtained "on the terms of [the author's] full discretion" from the late Vyatcheslav Shtyepa, a full member of the Ufological Committee of the Russian Geographical Society, who in February 2000 became editor of the NLO ("UFO") magazine of the Saint-Petersburg Kaleidoscope Publishing House. Shtyepa died suddenly this past June. Tatiana V. Kamchatova is now editor of NLO ("UFO") magazine. According to Vyatcheslav, the materials given to the author have not been previously published.

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With the coming of "glasnost" it became known that the most formidable department of the USSR had been collecting documents concerning UFOs in the so-called "Blue Folder"-KGB documents that were taken off the security list in October 1991 upon the inquiry of Russian cosmonaut Pavel Popovitch. Many copies of such documents are kept in the archival depository of the Russian Geographical Society's Ufological Committee.

The fact of UFO existence was more than once confirmed by Soviet military men. UFOs were observed from the ground and from the air, as well as registered on the radar screens.

UFO fired upon

One of the documents from the "Blue Folder" describes a UFO encounter that happened in 1984 in Turkestan Military District. Anti-aircraft defense system near the city of Astrakhan "notched up" the object that flew along the Caspian Sea coast at an altitude of 2000 meters above sea level and was heading to the frontier. It did not respond to the interrogations. Its shape resembled a sphere. Two fighters were scrambled, but all the attempts to shoot the UFO down failed.

Moreover, when the object was fired at, it descended down to one hundred meters above the ground to an altitude that made further firing by the fighters impossible. It is necessary to mention that despite the firing, the speed of the UFO did not change. During the flight the object passed above several military unit locations, and this made it possible to take photographs.

When the UFO approached the town of Krasnovodsk, a helicopter was scrambled to make an attempt to shoot the intruder down, but the UFO quickly climbed and hovered at the altitude that was inaccessible for the helicopter. After the pilots had spent all their ammunition the helicopter descended for landing, whereas the UFO sharply changed its course and headed toward the open sea. Soon after, the object disappeared from sight and was lost by radars.

Disk comes out of object

In 1985 a radar station under Captain L. Valuev in the Krasnovodsk region registered an unknown object at an altitude of 20,000 meters. Its dimension was about 1000 meters! The object did not move, but after some time a small disc having a diameter of approximately five meters flew out of the large object. This smaller disc-shaped UFO landed at the Krasnovodsk spit.

Patrol-boats of Kaspian flotilla rushed to the landing place of the UFO, but when they approached it at a distance about 100 meters, the UFO took off and flew away for about a kilometre. Patrol-boats approached the UFO again, and it again flew away from them. The situation was repeated five times! Finally the object went up with tremendous speed. Its mark on the radar screen coincided with the mark of the mother craft, and then the large UFO went off into Space.

Tremendous speed

Another "Blue Folder" report reads: "On the 25th of November, 1986, at 12:50 Moscow time civil flight control service as well as the military department of that service in the airport of Magadan (a city in Eastern Siberia) discovered an unidentified target. At that time the aeroplane ÀÍ-12 No 11421 was approaching the target at the altitude of 7200 meters. The captain of the plane was warned by traffic control service about the situation.

"When the plane and UFO passed clear of each other the object turned right in the direction toward Shelekhov bay and raised its speed to 900-1000 kilometres per hour. The growth of UFO speed continued and at 13:00 it achieved 3000 kilometres per hour. Retaining this speed, the object moved away to the shore of Kamchatka, and at a distance of 150 kilometres from the coastline it disappeared from radar screens."

Dull orange oval object

Another report reads: "Herein I report that on the 23rd of May, 1985, scheduled flights were carried out in 227th bomber air regiment ("Hurba" airfield in Komsomolsk region of Khabarovsk Territory). At 22:35 local time in the airfield area an unidentified flying object was noticed. The dull-orange object had oval shape and was travelling from the West to the East at a height of 200-300 meters with a speed about 500-600 kilometres per hour. This unidentified flying object was observed by chief flight control officer Lt. Col. A. A. Alifanov, close zone flight control officer Captain A. U. Shevnin, and the head of regiment weather group, Captain V. P. Stikin. The next day at 00:40 the same phenomenon was observed for 10-12 minutes at the "Litovko" range in Komsomolsk region of Khabarovsk Territory by senior navigator Major V. V. Kudriavtsev and by weather group engineer First Lt. V. V. Maltsev. This time the oval-shaped object was of dull-white colour and emitted rays of light upwards and downwards. Downward rays were much brighter than upward ones. The object travelled at a high altitude and with a great speed."

A downed object?

At the beginning of August, 1987, five military men from the Leningrad Military District were commissioned to the North of Karelia with a special task. The task was to guard an object of unknown origin that was discovered not long before on the terrain of another military unit near the town of Vyborg. The object was 14 metres long, 4 metres wide and 2.5 metres high. There were no doors or hatches on the object body.

All attempts to open it failed. There were attempts to break off something from the object, but they succeeded only in extracting some strange rods from the stern part of the enigmatic device. At the end of September the object disappeared from a hangar without leaving a trace.

Multiple observations

On the 30th of September, 1989 a large article about UFOs was published by the local newspaper Chernomorskaya Zdravnitsa ("The Black Sea Health-Centre") in the town of Sochi. The article informed that in July of that year crews of four different aeroplanes independently observed two "flying saucers" high in the sky. They made evolutions with incredible speed, and changed their positions and even shapes. There is a following report in the "Blue Packet":

"On the 26th of July, 1989, about 14:40 I, R. H. Stepanian, have got an information from the crew of an airborne vessel that flew from the Simferopol direction about their sighting of unidentified objects at a distance of 30-50 kilometres. This is what the pilots told me by the radio:

"A couple of strange objects are hanging at the left of us. At first there was one of them, but shortly after, another appeared. One is almost exactly square, whereas another is elongated, having the shape of rhombus. Both of them are swiftly going away just now. And now they are beginning to separate. Here they are-at the left and behind us, but the distance from them continues to increase."

Sharp turn & high speed

The next document from the "Blue Folder" runs:

"On the 21st of October, 1989, near the village Burkhala in Yagodinsky District of Magadan Region several local residents observed an unknown flying object. When the object approached the electric power transmission line, it changed course sharply and climbed up. One of the eyewitnesses, who formerly had served at the Baikonur space-centre, estimated the speed of the object as near to 1000 kilometres per hour . He noted also that not one aircraft known to him would be able to perform such evolutions.

When flying above the eyewitnesses the object reduced its speed noticeably so they were able to see it in detail. The flight was absolutely soundless. There was impression that clearance lights shined along the contour of the object, from seven to nine in number."

Flashes of white light

The last document in the "Blue Folder" reports:

"On the 21st of March, 1990, officers in Alexandrovsky Town Department of Internal Affairs accepted a number of telephone calls from town and district residents about the appearance of unidentified flying objects in airspace.

"After obtaining more exact information it was established that rather large number of residents in the towns of Alexandrov, Strunino, Karabanov, villages Arsaki, Zhulino and in several other settlements became eyewitnesses of a UFO-and in several cases of two UFOs-on the 21st of March between 20:00 and 23:30. The flight of UFOs was accompanied by flashes of white light that followed one another after two or three seconds and resembled arc welding.

"But all eyewitnesses found difficulty in describing the appearance of the UFOs. In Karabanov one of the UFOs allegedly hovered above the Eternal Fire Memorial for the perished warriors, and a ray of light emitted from the object illuminated earth surface.

"A fighter piloted by first class aviator Lt. Col. A. A. Sementchenko was scrambled towards the UFOs. He flew near one of the 'flying saucers' and saw against a background of Pereyaslavl-Zalessky town illumination 'a black body with two white flashing lights.'

"Shortly after the lieutenant colonel's report was published by the Soviet main military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star), it was confirmed in the report that the author had revealed by sight a target having two bright white flashing lights. 'The target changed flight direction and altitude in the range of 1000 metres,' he wrote. The experienced pilot saw an enigmatic object and was not able to identify it!"