Soviet UFO Wave (1967)

Background

The Soviet Union officially dismissed UFO reports as nonsense through the 1950s and most of the 1960s. Soviet newspapers did not print sightings, which the press treated as unscientific. That changed in 1967, when a wave of sightings drew attention across the southwestern USSR and the Caucasus. The wave is often called the Soviet Union's first major UFO flap. Rumors circulated of sightings in the Caucasus and Siberia, but the state press did not report them at the time, according to a 12 November 1967 New York Times report datelined Moscow.

Events

The sightings were concentrated in mid-to-late 1967. Witnesses included astronomers at observatories in the Caucasus, who reported crescent-shaped objects with bright companion lights, and aircrews. In late 1967 Soviet television invited public reports, which fed the wave. In November 1967 the Associated Press reported that the government had set up a special commission, reportedly led by General Anatoli Stolyerov of the Soviet Air Force, to look into UFO reports. A Soviet scientist named F. Zigel had said earlier that year that radar had been picking up unidentified objects for about twenty years, which the AP presented as a shift in official attitude.

The official response was short-lived. Private UFO groups were banned, the subject was dropped from the controlled media, and the commission was later disbanded. A CIA information report from the same period, based on conversations with Soviet scientists, quoted one observer that "no official treatment of the UFO problem has been given in the USSR," and noted that scientists were influenced by official ridicule of the topic.

Investigation and explanations

The most influential explanation came from space analyst James E. Oberg of NASA, who argued in "The Great Soviet UFO Coverup" (MUFON UFO Journal, 1982) that most of the 1967 reports were caused by secret Soviet military activity. Oberg attributed the crescent shapes to shock waves and the star-like lights to burning retro-rocket fragments from tests of the Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS), a weapon that placed warheads in low orbit before deorbiting them. He counted roughly eight FOBS flights between May and October 1967, many matching multiple-witness reports. Oberg also argued that launches from the Plesetsk military space center, whose sunlit plumes can look like objects in the sky, explained other famous Soviet cases.

The Soviet Academy of Sciences' statistical study, the Gindilis report, catalogued 256 cases (published 1979). Western ufologists, including J. Allen Hynek and Richard Haines, cited it as support for the reality of UFOs. Oberg argued that FOBS and other conventional sightings contaminated the dataset, so its statistics did not support that conclusion.

Case for and against

The skeptical reading has real support. A 1982 Christian Science Monitor report by Robert C. Cowen described a study by Philip Klass, Robert Sheaffer, and Oberg that tied several sightings to Plesetsk launches and a visible-track match at about 62.7 degrees latitude. Cowen also noted that Oberg's fuel-dump explanation was not proved conclusively, and that other explanations, such as explosive separation of a satellite from its booster, were possible.

The case is contested because the explanations rest on inference, not on documents that tie specific sightings to specific launches. Many Soviet sightings were never published, and the secret FOBS flight records remain largely closed. The official Soviet position is itself uncertain: Cowen wrote that it is hard to tell whether Soviet scientists were deceptive or simply unaware of the military launches.

Current status

The 1967 wave is now seen as a turning point in Soviet UFO history. The state's brief openness gave way to suppression, and the episode left an enduring question about how much of the Soviet UFO record was military in origin. Later Soviet cases, such as Petrozavodsk in 1977, were analyzed with similar arguments.