We are already accustomed to the idea that stories about alien vehicles traveling in the heavens of the Earth are a product of the second half of the 20th century. Few people know that hundreds of strange telegrams, messages and protocols about the phenomena that today can be attributed to UFO sightings have been preserved in the military archives of the First World War.
Russian ufologist Mikhail Gershtein and Belarusian historian Ilya Butov studied historical sources that appeared in 1914-1916. It turns out that the stories of eyewitnesses in many ways resemble the current UFO phenomena, only without the terms we know, such as "unidentified flying object" and "flying saucer.
It turns out that the people who lived then called the objects they saw in the sky planes. The problem was that the objects they saw, for some reason, had colored lights, reflectors on the sides and maneuverability, which was unusual for those times, and sometimes they could even hover in the air. However, the inhabitants of the then Russian Empire did everything possible to somehow logically 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 fell from the sky. This particular event took place on July 26 and 27, 1914. This mysterious plane flew over the village of Zhitomir for two nights in a row.
However, it was not possible to study this issue in detail, since on August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. After that, everything unusual in the sky was assigned to Germany by default. However, this is not all, and on August 11, the commander of the Kazan Military District, Major General Aleksey Alekseevich Mavrin, sent a telegram to the authorities of all regions. In it, he demanded that, if possible, open fire on all vehicles flying over the city.
However, this order did not prevent the appearance of UFOs even over Kazan itself. A day later, on August 13, another fast flying "plane" flew over the city. And on August 14, at about 11 pm, a group of workers led by a technician from Kasyanov saw and described in their report a black cigar-shaped car flying quickly and silently over the Malaya Kokshaga River.
All attempts to shoot down these "planes" were unsuccessful. On August 15, the police opened fire on the "plane" flying at low altitude over Yekaterinoslavia, which today is Dnepropetrovsk. On the orders of the city commander, 25 gendarmes fired two volleys at the fly, after which the unshakable took off and disappeared.
Shortly thereafter, on September 22, at the southern railway station Razdelnaya, a quote appeared: “an airplane with two white lights flew around the station around the station.” In this case, after a company of security guards fired at the airplane, they were illuminated by the plane's searchlights, and after several volleys, the object went to station Vesely Kut.
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