During the Soviet years, newspapers sometimes wrote about UFOs, but they did so far less often than they do today. And other cases were completely hushed up, being almost immediately marked with a “secret” stamp
One such incident occurred on October 7, 1977 in the Barents Sea: there was a real UFO attack on the Volga floating base of the Northern Fleet.
Note that this was the second time in the last two weeks when unidentified flying objects visited the earth. For the first time, on September 20 over Petrozavodsk, UFOs behaved quite peacefully and even allowed themselves to be photographed.
But in the Barents Sea, everything was different: there the UFOs seemed to go berserk. Within 18 minutes, 9 helicopter-sized phosphorizing plates subjected to numerous attacks the floating base, led by the captain of the third rank Tarankin. The plates were worn next to the ship at a height of several meters, frightening to death the crew of the Volga. At the same time, the radio communication on the ship was turned off and was restored only after the plates had rushed over the horizon.
The incident was immediately reported to the command of the Northern Fleet, which, in turn, telegraphed this to Moscow.
In the evening of the same day, the directive of the Chief of the General Staff of the Navy P. Navoitsev saw the light, which was sent to the fleets. The directive was called "Methodological guidelines for the organization in the navy of observations of anomalous physical phenomena and their impact on the environment, living organisms and technical means."
The directive specified the characteristic forms of "anomalous phenomena" ("sphere, cylinder, rectangle, discs with one or two convex sides, discs with a dome, the presence of external parts, windows, hatches, division into parts followed by the flight of each part separately and other features) and the characteristics of their movement (“very high speeds and unusual flight paths, hovering, descent, abrupt maneuvers, oscillations, rotation, transition from air to water and vice versa”). The document concluded that "the available information about anomalous phenomena in general suggests that this problem deserves serious research."
OCTOBER 9
That day, at 5.40 am Moscow time, the Soyuz-25 spacecraft with two cosmonauts on board, Vladimir Kovalenko and Valery Ryumin, took off from Earth. They were to reach the new Salyut-6 station and dock with it.
The newspapers, of course, wrote a lot about this, but they kept silent about only one thing - that during this docking the astronauts almost died. Here is how it was.
Promotional video:
The ship came close to the station, touched it, but the pin of the docking mechanism did not hit the receiving cone. The second attempt ended with the same failure. Kovalenok stopped the ship near the station, trying to assess the situation, and at that time from the Earth they discovered that the fuel allocated for the docking had been completely consumed. Moreover, the main fuel system is empty, which is completely unacceptable. The last chance remained - fuel in the reserve system. But then another nuisance surfaced: the ship and the station had not yet separated at the optimum distance. The situation became critical: together they could fly indefinitely, and the ship cannot be in orbit for a long time, since the oxygen reserves on it are limited. The MCC began feverishly to figure out how to get out of the situation. This is how the program manager A. Eliseev recalls this:“The situation is incredible. We could not expect such a perfect hover from either automation or astronauts. For the first time I felt myself trapped, from which there was no way out. It turned out that in any case, you had to risk the life of the crew. I have never experienced this before."
However, the story did not end there. Flight director Alexei Eliseev was painfully looking for a way out of the difficult situation in which the cosmonauts found themselves. Numerous advisers from among his subordinates tried to help him. Some of them offered to instruct the crew to immediately turn on the manual control system and move away from the station using the engines. In their opinion, the probability of a collision through a half-turn was extremely small. However, the ballistas objected to this option: they stated that if the astronauts turn on the engines, there could be a collision! As a result, Eliseev decided to extend the passive flight for another round. At the same time, he reasoned as follows: there was no collision in the previous loop, which means that it should not happen in the next one. Although the odds were fifty-fifty.
Throughout the entire passive flight, the MCC remained tense. When suddenly the joyful voice of Kovalenok was heard on the air: “We are dispersed, dispersed, Zarya, how do you hear? We disperse!"
Some time later, the ship made a safe landing on Earth. It was October 11th on the calendar.
Author: Fedor RAZZAKOV