Vladimir Kovalyonok

Early life and background

Vladimir Vasilyevich Kovalyonok (Belarusian: Uladzimir Kavalyonak) was born on 3 March 1942 in the village of Bielaye in the Krupki district of what is now Belarus, at the time under German occupation. Like most Soviet cosmonauts of his generation he came to spaceflight through military aviation: he trained as an Air Force pilot and, on 5 July 1967, was admitted to the cosmonaut corps as part of the Air Force's fourth recruitment group, the same intake that supplied many of the crews of the Salyut era. His official biography, summarised on Wikipedia, is that of a conventional, highly decorated Soviet officer; it contains no reference to unidentified flying objects, and neither do the mission records kept by hobbyist archives such as Spacefacts.

That silence matters for this entry. Kovalyonok appears in the UFO literature not because of anything he is documented to have said or done in ufology, but because a widely repeated story places him at the centre of a close encounter in orbit. This article therefore treats two things separately: the verifiable career of a real and distinguished cosmonaut, and the unverified legend attached to his name.

Career

Soyuz 25 (October 1977)

Kovalyonok's first flight was as commander of Soyuz 25, launched in October 1977 with flight engineer Valery Ryumin, to visit the newly launched Salyut 6 station. Salyut 6 was a significant step forward for the Soviet programme because it had two docking ports, allowing visiting crews and unmanned Progress freighters to resupply the station. Soyuz 25 never achieved a hard dock. After repeated approach attempts the crew was unable to latch onto the station and had to return to Earth, so the crew returned without ever entering the station. The problem was attributed to the spacecraft's docking mechanism rather than to crew error, and Ryumin and Kovalyonok both flew again, but the episode was a public setback that the 1978 mission would redeem.

Soyuz 29/31 and the 139-day record (1978)

He did so quickly. In June 1978 Kovalyonok, again as commander, launched aboard Soyuz 29 with flight engineer Aleksandr Ivanchenkov for the station's second long-duration expedition (EO-2). The pair remained aboard for 139 days, then a Soviet endurance record, and during the stay hosted visiting crews, including the Interkosmos mission that carried East Germany's Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space. Because Soyuz 29's descent module was swapped for that of the visiting Soyuz 31, the crew returned in early November 1978 aboard the latter. For this flight Kovalyonok was made Hero of the Soviet Union (2 November 1978) and received honours from several allied states, among them the Hero of the German Democratic Republic title.

Soyuz T-4 (March–May 1981)

His third and last flight was Soyuz T-4, launched on 12 March 1981 with flight engineer Viktor Savinykh. The mission used the improved Soyuz-T spacecraft, and the two men spent roughly 74 to 76 days aboard before landing on 26 May 1981; sources differ by a day or two, and the Christian Science Monitor reported the landing in its 27 May 1981 issue. Kovalyonok was named Hero of the Soviet Union for a second time on 26 May 1981, the day of the landing. Across the three flights he accumulated 216 days, 9 hours and 8 minutes in space.

Later career

Kovalyonok left the cosmonaut team on 23 June 1984 and moved into senior military science administration. From 1990 to 1992 he directed the 30th Central Scientific Research Institute of the Ministry of Defence. He reached the rank of Colonel General and continued to receive state honours into the post-Soviet period, including Russian and Belarusian orders. He is listed as living.

The station in May 1981

Salyut 6 was by then a busy place, and its traffic is well documented. Over its life it hosted five long-duration crews and a series of short visits by Interkosmos guest cosmonauts from allied countries, with Progress freighters bringing fuel and supplies. To our knowledge, a visiting crew, Soyuz 40 with Leonid Popov and Romania's Dumitru Prunariu, was launched on 14 May 1981 and spent about a week on the station, which overlaps the 14–18 May window that most versions of the legend give for the "extended encounter". If so, four people rather than two were aboard during those days, and the visit would have been one of the best-observed weeks of the mission; no version of the story mentions the guests. We have not verified this against a primary schedule, and readers should check the Spacefacts crew pages before relying on it. Savinykh, for his part, went on to fly Soyuz T-13 in 1985, the mission that revived the dead Salyut 7, and Soyuz TM-5 in 1988, giving him a long public record in which a Salyut 6 sighting would have been an obvious subject.

The Salyut-6 legend

What the story says

In UFO circles, Kovalyonok is credited with one of the most dramatic encounters ever attributed to a space crew. In the usual telling, on or around 5 May 1981 he was exercising aboard Salyut 6 when he noticed an elliptical, barbell-shaped object outside a porthole. Over the following days (often given as 14–18 May) he and Savinykh are said to have watched a metallic, roughly 8–10 metre object with 24 windows arranged in three tiers approach to some tens of metres, with no visible propulsion. Behind the windows, three humanoid figures with thick eyebrows, straight noses and large, expressionless blue eyes are said to have looked back at the men. The crew supposedly tried to communicate with Morse code, binary sequences and a star map, and were answered, depending on the version, with a "logarithmic" reply rather than a mere echo. Some versions add that the object vanished in a burst of golden light and white smoke and that about 45 minutes of film was shown to Soviet officials in June 1981 and then classified. Versions of the narrative appear on UFO Evidence and How and Whys, among other sites.

Why it should be treated with caution

The account has the characteristics of a folk narrative rather than a documented case:

• No primary source. Every version we could trace is a retelling of an earlier retelling. We found no contemporaneous Soviet press report, no cosmonaut memoir, interview or debrief, no NASA or CIA document and no named Soviet official corroborating it. The 45 minutes of film is described only as "classified"; no frame of it has ever surfaced.
• Unstable details. The distance of the object is variously 30, 40 or 100 metres. One widely copied article, on the Journal News site, relocates the supposed event to "1980" and to the later Salyut 7 station, and inflates the beings to 30 metres tall. Such drift is typical of an oral legend, not of a record anchored to a log or transcript.
• Cosmonaut testimony points the other way. Kovalyonok, Savinykh and their colleagues have given numerous interviews over four decades. We are not aware of any in which they confirm the story, though we could not exhaustively search Russian-language sources, and readers should treat that as an absence of evidence rather than proof of denial.
• Pattern of attribution. Stories of cosmonauts glimpsing aliens on Salyut or Mir recur in the ufology of the 1980s and 1990s, many of them tied to the same handful of names and to claims of leaks from Soviet insiders. Their common traits (secret film, silenced witnesses, a famous name) make them hard to test.

An earlier version of this entry stated that the American space writer James Oberg had investigated the case and found no relevant launch that day. We could not verify that attribution in any source, and it has been removed rather than repeated. Oberg is widely known for writing sceptically about Soviet space "mysteries", but we cannot cite him on this specific story.

Possible mundane explanations

Even taking the core report at face value, conventional explanations are available for the kinds of thing crews do see near a station. Debris and ice crystals shed from the station itself, venting propellant, the glint of discarded hardware and the rapid sunset-and-sunrise cycle of low orbit (about 90 minutes) can produce illuminated, moving, apparently structured objects. Reflections in a window, a very common cause of "second objects" in orbital photography, add to the possibilities. The "golden explosions" and the object vanishing "as the station entered Earth's shadow" in the first-day description fit the behaviour of sunlit particles or fragments more naturally than that of a craft. This is speculation, not a finding; there is no primary account to test it against.

Reception and criticism

Within mainstream spaceflight history, Kovalyonok is remembered for the Salyut 6 endurance missions and for the docking failure of Soyuz 25, not for anything extraterrestrial. Within ufology, the Salyut-6 story is reproduced, with embellishment, on dozens of websites, and is frequently listed among "cosmonaut UFO encounters" alongside later claims connected to Salyut 7 and Mir. Careful researchers generally class it as unsubstantiated. The strongest critique is simple: a first-hand account by a two-time Hero of the Soviet Union would be one of the most important documents in the history of the subject, and yet the documentary trail leads back only to anonymous or secondary writers.

It is worth being clear on where the fault lies. There is no evidence that Kovalyonok himself promoted the story, and holding a decorated officer responsible for how his name is used would be unfair. He appears here as a case study in how real biography can be attached to an unverifiable narrative, rather than as a witness who has been shown to be unreliable.

Legacy

Kovalyonok's genuine legacy is that of a commander who helped establish long-duration spaceflight: a failed first docking, a recovery that produced a then-record 139-day stay, and a third mission that confirmed the new Soyuz-T craft on its first trip to Salyut 6. These flights laid groundwork for the later endurance programmes of Salyut 7 and Mir. His UFO legacy is a story that persists without him: the image of a spartan Soviet station, two tired cosmonauts, and faces behind lit windows is a durable one, and it will keep circulating until either a primary source is found or the legend is traced to its first teller.

Readers interested in the real record should consult the mission pages for Soyuz 25, Soyuz T-4 and Salyut 6. Those interested in the legend are advised to look for the earliest printed version of it, which none of the sources cited here supplies.