In the Soviet Union, most UFO sightings were classified. However, the government did not manage to hide the battle of aliens over the Kola Peninsula - it was observed not only by the domestic air defense system, but also by Finnish air traffic controllers. It happened on September 18, 1965 at about 12:20.
Duel of UFO objects
As the pilots and air defense specialists of the Northern Fleet later said, on this day, in the border airspace of Finland, a network of radars recorded an NRM - an unidentified radar target, which was first mistaken for an aircraft.
The device went at an altitude of 4000 meters from north-west to south-east at a speed of 1200 km / h and behaved unusually. Every now and then he deviated from the course, returned to it and changed the altitude in the “corridor” of 400 meters. He did not respond to air defense requests, and the Finnish dispatchers assured the Soviet military that they also saw the plane and that it was definitely not their plane.
In a matter of seconds, the target crossed the Soviet border and began to deepen into the Kola Peninsula. In the air to intercept from Murmansk, two flights of fighters were raised. However, flying up to the location of the target, the pilots did not see anything, although there was no cloud at an altitude of four kilometers.
At the same second, as if out of nowhere, a second, larger vehicle appeared on the radars, and from an altitude of 22,000 meters it dived onto the first target, while developing a speed of 8,000 km / h.
Promotional video:
At the same time, the fighter pilots did not see either the first or the second apparatus either visually or on the on-board radars. But literally a few moments after the message from the ground about the second "target" at an altitude of about 3500 meters, there was such a bright flash that the pilots had to close their eyes so as not to be blind. Opening their eyes, they saw an explosion, from which red-hot "splashes" flew to the sides and multi-colored concentric circles diverged. According to the flight commander's recollections, the explosion cloud glowed and quickly changed color from bright bluish-white to yellow, and then to orange.
To get away from the wreckage, the flight commander ordered the wingmen to deviate to the left and up, but he did not hear an answer - there was a howl in the headphones, there was no connection.
After completing the maneuver, the flight commander was forced to visually make sure that everything was in order with the wingmen, they followed him. Huge glowing rings spread across the sky.
The connection improved after several long minutes, but was unstable - there was still interference. A blurred spot appeared on the air defense radar screens at the site of the first target, which disappeared after two minutes. The second target quickly went up and disappeared from the field of view in 2.5 minutes.
Having received the order to return, the pilots gained altitude, flew around the explosion zone, not seeing anything, and returned to the airfield.
The military were not the only witnesses to the explosion in the sky. On the ground on the way from Kandalaksha to Kirovsk, the surveyors of the north-western branch of the Dorstroyproekt Institute - technician Tovo Aikinen and seasonal worker Semyon Langusov - were working.
They were blinded by such a bright flash that neither one nor the second had any doubts: this is a nuclear explosion! "Bomb!" - shouted Langusov, and the surveyors lay down among the bumps, covering their heads with their hands, as they had been taught in civil defense classes. The sound of the explosion was dull, and the surveyors did not wait for the shock wave.
When they came to, they saw an orange cloud in the sky, from which debris was falling. Later, concentric circles appeared at the site of the explosion. Aikinen said that his watch got up at 12:24 and went by itself when the surveyors moved seven kilometers away from the explosion site.
Surveyors returned to the parking lot tired, often stopped along the way, Langusov felt sick. In the camp they drank alcohol, went to bed right away and slept for more than 12 hours.
Commission conclusions
The Kremlin immediately became aware of what happened over the Kola Peninsula. To investigate the incident, a government commission was created, the activities of which became known thanks to its participant - the chief navigator of polar aviation, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, Valentin Akkuratov. He spoke about what happened only 25 years later, when the term of the nondisclosure subscription expired.
It was not for nothing that Akkuratov was appointed to the commission: since 1950, he himself repeatedly met in the Arctic with unidentified flying objects, observing them both from the ground and in the air.
All air defense officers were interviewed, pilots of military aircraft wrote reports. The main version of the incident was a nuclear explosion, so a group of civilian specialists from Severodvinsk left for the area of the incident. They measured the radiation level, which did not exceed the natural background. They did not look for the wreckage - by this time snow had fallen in the tundra.
Akkuratov himself, after studying all the evidence, came to the conclusion that the "green men" were really to blame for the explosion. He believed that the second object was the ship that was pursuing the first object. This was supported by the tremendous speed that the second “target” developed, diving down and then going up. This was also indicated by the trajectory of the object's movement, which implied control: approaching the first "target", its undermining and moving away from the debris.
- If it were not for my authority in flight circles, all these officials from aviation and air defense with large shoulder straps would not have listened to me, - the navigator later recalled.
As usual, the conclusion of the commission was far from the version with a UFO: it was considered at the top that the incident was caused by an unsuccessful launch of an anti-aircraft missile. The case was archived and forgotten.
The incident was recalled many years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Enthusiasts from the Polar Star Center tried to find witnesses, surveyors, but did not succeed. They also failed to find the pilots who witnessed the battle. One famous ufologist, Emil Bachurin, made an attempt to find the wreckage of a UFO in the tundra near Kandalaksha and succeeded. According to the conclusion of the Permian firm "Kvant" dated January 21, 2001, the metal fragment found by Bachurin consisted of 99.95% of tungsten with minor impurities of iron, chromium, nickel, molybdenum, hafnium and rhenium. Bachurin himself claimed that the undeniable evidence of the extraterrestrial origin of the fragment is its special structure - the UFO part was obtained from the finest tungsten powder by a method unknown to science. However, pessimists point outthat a similar composition and structure are characteristic of turbine blades. This means that the fragment is of terrestrial origin.
Author: Maya Novik