We are already accustomed to the idea that stories about the travels of alien vehicles in the sky of the Earth are a product of the second half of the 20th century. Few people realize that the police archives of the First World War preserved hundreds of strange telegrams, messages and protocols of phenomena that could be attributed to sightings of UFO vehicles.
Russian ufologist Mikhail Gershtein and Belarusian historian Ilya Butov studied historical sources that appeared in 1914-1916. It turns out that the stories of witnesses in many ways resemble the current UFO phenomena, only without the terms known to us, such as - "Unidentified flying object" and "flying saucer".
Telegram from Major General A. A. Mavrin, received by the authorities of the Samara region.
It turns out that people who lived at that time used to call the objects they saw in the sky airships or airplanes. The problem was that the objects they saw, for some reason, had colored lights on the sides, reflectors and unusual maneuverability for that time, and sometimes they could even hover in the air. However, the inhabitants of the then Russian Empire did everything possible to somehow explain to themselves what they saw.
From time to time, there were situations when national newspapers wrote about such incidents. For example, one of the newspapers reported that an unidentified "plane" appeared over a military base and shone at it from the sky. This special event took place on July 26 and 27, 1914. This mysterious plane flew over the city of Zhitomir for two nights in a row.
Report on the observation of the "burning plane" on the night of August 11-12, 1914. In the Pskov region.
However, this case could not be investigated in detail, since on August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. Then everything unusual in the sky was attributed to Germany by default. However, this is not all, and on August 11, the commander of the Kazan Military District, Divisional General Alexei Alekseevich Mavrin, sent a telegram to the authorities of all regions. He demanded that he open fire, if possible, on all vehicles flying over the city.
This order, however, did not prevent the appearance of UFOs even over the Sermon itself. A day later, on August 13, another fast flying "plane" flew over the city. On August 14, at about 11 pm, a group of workers led by Kasyanov saw and described in their report a black cigar-shaped car flying quickly and quietly along the Malaya Kokshaga River.
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Report on the observation of the "plane" and its pilots July 30 (August 12) 1914 in the Orenburg province.
All attempts to shoot down these "planes" were unsuccessful. On August 15, the police opened fire on the "plane" flying at low altitude over Yekaterinoslav, today's Dnipropetrovsk. Under the command of the city commander, 25 gendarmes fired two volleys into the car, after which the imperturbable object quickly rose into the air and disappeared.
Shortly thereafter, on September 22, at the southern railway station of Razdelnaya, the quote "Plane with two white lights" appeared, which made a circle over the station. In this case, after a salvo from the guards company, they were illuminated by the headlights of an aircraft, and after several volleys, the object headed for the Vesely Kut station.
UFO maneuvers over Omsk on August 17, 1915. Prepared by the former university rector Nikolai Timofeevich Lewandovsky.
The emergence of "airplanes" within the country has caused particular concern. According to the information at the time, these were not Russian aircraft, and enemy aircraft could fly so deep only with additional landing and refueling. At the time, it was recognized that some unknown traitors were helping the Germans in the rear of Russia.
The gendarmes' documentation also contains reports of UFO pilots who apparently were no different from ordinary people. Valimukhametov, a resident of the Orenburg province, claimed that on September 21, 1914, at about 3-4 hours, he left the cordon on the Abzakov road with hay at the Beloretsk plant. After breaking out of the cordon, something caught fire, and everything became as clear as during the day. The man raised his head and saw a flying object above him, similar to a boat, on which sat three men in black high hats; two of them sat in the back and one in front, driving the "car".
One of them was a handsome man with a well-shaped black mustache. The flying object did not make much noise, it just blew like a steam locomotive; when those who flew in the airship noticed it, they immediately took off. The car began to climb faster until it finally disappeared. There was something in front of the flying airship that looked like a very bright red beacon, and, as it turned out later, the same thing was in the back and in the middle of the vehicle on both sides. A very bright mirror revolved around the "boat". And when the airship disappeared, darkness fell again.
Most observations of these objects do not imply their hostility towards humans. They simply avoided contact and were the only ones who followed what was happening on Earth. As for the observer witnesses themselves, they were ordinary people who did not have such an apparatus of concepts as we do, and therefore they had no idea about the concepts of other civilizations or aliens visiting humanity.
While in some cases the possibility of hallucinations or lies on the part of bystanders has been ruled out, it is difficult to assess whether any of the observers who claim to have seen these mysterious "planes" actually came into contact with them. After the Bolshevik Revolution, attempts to study these mysterious machines were suspended. But the guests themselves, apparently, did not disappear. Thirty years later they were called UFOs, and a few years later - "flying saucers."