In the fall and winter of 1977, many Petrozavodsk residents were, if not frightened, then alarmed. In the early morning of September 20, more than a hundred townspeople witnessed something unknown and mysterious. They noticed a large and bright star over Lake Onega - in shape it resembled a jellyfish, which impulsively sent out many thinnest rays and slowly approached the city. A few days later and until the beginning of 1978, strange holes in the glass appeared in the windows of Petrozavodsk houses - many of them were almost round in shape and with seemingly melted edges. How they originated and whether they were associated with UFOs over Lake Onega is still a mystery, over which researchers have been fighting in vain for 40 years.
It was unreal and fantastic
If you believe the newspaper publications of those years, the space object appeared over Petrozavodsk at about 4 am and was visible for only 10-12 minutes. “After a short time, the ray glow ended. "Medusa" turned into a bright semicircle and resumed its movement towards Lake Onega, the horizon of which was enveloped in gray clouds. In this veil, then a semicircular gully of bright red color to the middle and white on the sides formed,”the Socialist Industry newspaper wrote about the Petrozavodsk phenomenon in September 1977.
Publication in a Karelian newspaper.
A pulsating bright star with diverging rays, in particular, was noticed by the Petrozavodsk ambulance brigade, which arrived on a call to Anokhin Street at house number 37-b. The words of the doctors were reported by the local newspaper Leninskaya Pravda, calling the object a "space alien" right in the headline.
Vladimir Belyaev, ambulance driver:
- Here is how it was. At approximately four o'clock five minutes, a glow appeared over the roof of the opposite house. Then I saw a strange halo and a glowing "star" from which jets were emanating, filling most of the sky. When the fireball approached the "handle" of the Big Dipper, the glow disappeared, and it began to descend vertically downward. This lasted for about ten to fifteen minutes.
Promotional video:
The driver's words were confirmed by the doctor Violetta Menkova, who went to the same call and was amazed at what she saw.
Ambulance workers were among the main eyewitnesses.
“The star shone very brightly,” she assured. “It can be compared to a jellyfish, only even more transparent, surrounded by a hood, in the center of which was something dark. All this was so inexplicable, unreal, fantastic that meteorites, and the northern lights, and much more were immediately recalled.
I was very scared and could not sleep for a long time
However, not all of the details, as the researchers say, were included in that very note in Leninskaya Pravda. When the ambulance car found itself in a beam of light that emanated from a star, everyone was seized by a feeling of fear and doom, according to numerous publications about the Petrozavodsk phenomenon.
The pages of the Karelian newspaper did not even get the words of Tamara Tikhonova, a resident of Petrozavodsk, who came out of a telephone booth and noticed a bright pulsating object in the sky. The woman ran out to the main street of Petrozavodsk and froze with fright.
- I jumped out into the middle of Lenin Avenue and saw, somewhere around the Severnaya Hotel, a strange, large object that did not make noise when moving. I only saw him from behind. It was round, light, either blue or gray. This object moved towards Lake Onega. Of course, I was very scared, I went home, but for a long time I could not sleep.
In the distance - hotel "Severnaya", above which the citizens of Petrozavodsk saw a bright pulsing star.
The mysterious star in the form of a jellyfish was observed that autumn day by many others - workers in the port, students playing around, townspeople who happened to be on the street and eyewitnesses in the districts of Karelia. The space alien was also noticed by the employee of the Institute of Lake Science of the USSR Academy of Sciences A. P. Novozhilov, who missed the train from the Karelian regional center of Lakhdenpohja and decided to get to Priozersk in the Leningrad region by bus.
He saw a shooting star and at first mistook it for a meteorite. However, the "meteorite" did not fall, but, on the contrary, stopped and began to approach, increasing in size and finally took the shape of an airship. Watching him, Novozhilov also felt a sense of anxiety and panic: “It was terrible, I bent down to the ground,” he later described his feelings.
An unusual glow in the sky, as stated in the Preliminary description of the phenomenon, which was compiled by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, was observed from three to six in Moscow over the territory of Finland, the Leningrad region, Karelia and the Baltic states. All eyewitnesses noted "the movement of bright luminous bodies surrounded by extended shells and emitting bizarre light rays … The area of the most intense glow was probably located in the Petrozavodsk region."
Computer crashes and holes in glass
On that Tuesday, September 20, something else extraordinary happened in Petrozavodsk. In the computing centers of the Karelian capital, computers suddenly malfunctioned. Doctor of Chemistry M. Dmitriev spoke about this from the pages of the journal "Aviation and Space" (No. 8 for 1978).
Even the authoritative Soviet magazine did not hide the problems in the work of computers that night.
“Engineers who worked that night in the computing centers located in the observation area noted major malfunctions in the computer, the normal functioning of which was then fully restored,” the journal said. - During the glow in the air there was a sharp smell of ozone. The director of the Petrozavodsk Observatory stated that such a phenomenon had not been observed in the entire history of observations.
Even more intrigue and mystery to the "space alien" was given by unusual holes 5-7 cm in diameter in the window panes, which from the beginning of October and in the winter of 1978 Petrozavodsk residents found in their apartments. Some of the holes were almost round in shape and seemed to have melted edges. In addition to them, in their apartments, residents also found "round pieces" that fell out of the glass.
The holes themselves appeared in both residential and office buildings and were, in particular, found in the apartment of the famous Karelian writer Alexander Linevsky, who lived on the fifth floor - in the windows that overlooked Lake Onega.
From meteorite to aliens
Have scientists and specialists tried to explain all this? Of course they tried - since the fall of 1977. Moreover, many different hypotheses have been put forward about the UFO over Petrozavodsk and the holes in the windows. The very first of them was expressed a few days later in the Karelian newspaper Leninskaya Pravda, which, with reference to unnamed scientists, suggested that a meteorite flew over Petrozavodsk.
The newspaper "Socialist Industry" quoted the director of the Petrozavodsk Hydrometeorological Observatory Yuri Gromov, who excluded the possibility of "technical experiments" and mirages. In 1978, in the journal Aviation and Cosmonautics, Doctor of Chemical Sciences M. Dmitriev suggested that the luminous star over Petrozavodsk appeared as a result of chemiluminescence - the glow of air, which, however, raised doubts among many researchers. Another hypothesis was the launch of a rocket in Plesetsk, which on September 20, 1977, launched the Kosmos-955 satellite into orbit.
However, this version was considered insufficient by Lev Gindilis, a researcher of the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, who traveled to Petrozavodsk with a group of colleagues on the instructions of the USSR Academy of Sciences. To test this hypothesis, Petrozavodsk University conducted a study, whose representatives estimated the height of the object's flight at 6-11 km, and the distance from the city at 11-19 km, which excluded the version with a rocket, but did not explain how an unusual phenomenon could be observed in the Leningrad region and Finland.
The appearance of the holes in the glass was equally contradictory. For example, in the Karelian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, it was suggested that they could have arisen due to ball lightning, while experts from the All-Russian Research Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in early 1978 concluded that the holes appeared as a result of shots from a slingshot, a traumatic pistol or an air gun. Well, a completely fantastic version was put forward by the REN TV channel in 2011 - TV journalists suggested that it was the aliens who "scanned" the city with their rays, leaving holes in the windows.
They say that this is the only photo of the star that appeared over Petrozavodsk on September 20, 1997.
What it really was is still unknown - researchers still cannot come to a consensus. But be that as it may, the appearance of holes and a luminous star over Petrozavodsk spurred interest in a forbidden topic - the study of UFOs. Since that time, more and more publications and publications about unidentified flying objects have appeared in the country, and in fact, its own Russian ufology has been born. At the origins of this movement was the same space alien, which was seen in the early September morning of 1977 not only in Petrozavodsk, but throughout the North-West.
