The activities of the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, created in 1998, unexpectedly attracted the attention of the authorities this year
For 30 years, about 500 UFOs were recorded in the sky over Russia.
Boris Gryzlov hastened to compare the activities of the commission with the Inquisition and accused it of obscurantism. The reason: theoretical disputes have moved into a practical plane, affecting the material interests of high-ranking officials, and many publications of the departmental bulletin "In Defense of Science" are pulling on the initiation of a criminal case. In the last issue, two articles at once are devoted to seemingly long-forgotten unidentified flying objects. Why ufology has again attracted such attention and who is right in this dispute - representatives of the academy, for a long time commissioned by the state to study UFOs, or politicians who release them a "state order", the correspondent of "Nasha Versiya" found out.
For those who believe that the search for UFOs is fun for exalted and mentally unstable people, a revelation awaits: for decades this was done by the Soviet, and then the Russian state. The level of research was the highest; the Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Defense and a whole host of educational institutions and research centers took part in them. They funded research of the highest level, even in the most difficult years. Brezhnev, Andropov and Yeltsin dreamed of establishing contact with alien life forms, and only Gorbachev treated the UFO problem with suspicion - with him, the budgetary costs of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations were cut fourfold. The latest open data on research in the field of anomalous phenomena date back to 1999, but to say that the program has been terminated is at least naive. During transportation, one of the trucks turned over: several transparent capsules fell out of it, in which the military made out strange humanoid creatures.
Until 1977, all obscure things from the generally accepted point of view in the Soviet Union were dealt with exclusively by the KGB. "Office" did not study mysterious phenomena, but only recorded them and reported "upward". Not that there were few such riddles, rather the opposite, just the research required completely different costs, and the KGB already had something to do. Everything changed in the fall of 1977. On September 20, at about 4 am, a huge jellyfish-like object with a diameter of about 100 meters hovered in the air over Petrozavodsk. He first hung over the city, and then began to move along Lenin Street, stopped and increased in size. The glow intensified, and the UFO showered the city with many thin ray red jets that gave the impression of pouring rain. The next morning, thin round holes appeared in the windows of the upper floors of houses,and the melted pieces of glass lay on the windowsills. Such a smooth, crack-free chip could not be achieved with the help of the then technology. Few cars driving around the city at night had their engines stalled. From the city center, the "jellyfish" moved to the port area on Lake Onega and hovered over the ship "Volgo-Balt", covering the dry cargo ship with the same "red rain". After the beam "bombardment", the UFO sharply took up and went into the sky. The director of the Petrozavodsk hydrometeorological observatory Yuri Gromov said then that “the workers of the meteorological service of Karelia did not observe any analogues of what happened in nature”. A strange vision, despite the early morning, saw thousands of people. There were so many witnesses that it was not possible to silence the event. The mysterious phenomenon was reported personally to the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev just recently came to believe in the unknown: after a stroke and subsequent clinical death, psychics, including the notorious Juna, succeeded in his treatment. As a result, the secretary general suddenly woke up a special trust in all kinds of inexplicable things. Brezhnev ordered to discuss the Petrozavodsk phenomenon not just anywhere, but at the USSR Academy of Sciences. Scientists did not want to take seriously UFO flights in the Karelian sky. But how can you tell Brezhnev about your disbelief? Many people knew that Leonid Ilyich had a "fad" on the basis of an unidentified person. As a result, the academicians decided to shift the responsibility to another department. The Academy of Sciences has formed a joint commission with the participation of the USSR Ministry of Higher Education, the Defense Ministry, the KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and several other departments. After some consultation, the representatives of the high authorities decided:once Brezhnev asks, we must do it. The official goal is to understand the nature of incomprehensible phenomena and, if possible, use the obtained data for the development of the domestic military-industrial complex. So it is useful for the defense industry, and distanced ourselves from demonic behavior. You never know, plates, not plates … Unofficial - to reassure the secretary general. And a few months later, an additional item was included in the state plan for research work on defense topics - "Investigation of anomalous atmospheric phenomena, their causes and impact on the operation of military-technical means and the condition of the personnel. " It was 1978 that became the year of the start in the USSR of the state program for the study of UFOs. In America, a similar program was launched in 1947, in Great Britain in 1949 (projects Sign, Grudge, Blue Book). We stayed for some 30 years. Since it was somehow inconvenient to use the abbreviation "UFO" in official documents, the streamlined term "anomalous phenomenon" was used instead. To eliminate the unwanted public outcry, it was decided to make the research closed. In connection with this circumstance, the publication in the media of any information about UFOs was limited, and the editor-in-chief was recommended to send the prepared materials to the USSR Academy of Sciences “for review.” In 1978, two UFO research centers appeared - in the Ministry of Defense and the USSR Academy of Sciences (Grid AN and "Grid MO"). The name of the project has changed several times: on August 22, 1980 by the decision of the military industrial complex No. 255, the topic was extended for 1981-1985 and included in the five-year plan with a new code - "Galaktika-AN", and five years later it was renamed "Horizon-AN". The decision to split the studies was made mainly in order toto avoid funding discrepancies. Researchers received money separately, but the information storage was common: the domestic "Hangar-18" was called NII-22 (or military unit 67947, stationed in Mytishchi near Moscow). There was also a branch of NII-22 in Leningrad - military unit 62728, it was there, according to rumors, that a giant storage facility was equipped for various space artifacts. The Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (IZMIR AS), located in Troitsk, became the head center in the "Setka Academy of Sciences", and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Migulin was appointed the head of the "academic" direction of UFO research. From 1978 to 1980, both " Grids”annually received about 40 million rubles a year. In the next five years, their budgets have grown sixfold - unimaginable money at the time! The increase in funding was due tothat "Grids" were included in the secret plan "Citadel", which was personally supervised by Yuri Andropov, who at that time was the head of the KGB. According to the official version, the Citadel plan was developed to protect the Earth's surface from the impact of asteroids, but in the explanatory note to the plan, an essential reservation was made: "… asteroids and other space objects that may pose a threat." The main task of the "Citadel" is space exploration by means of two or three super-heavy space satellites with nuclear power plants, launched out of the orbit of Pluto, the most distant planet of the solar system. The Energia launch vehicle, which was supposed to launch the Buran into orbit, could lift not one, but two such Buran into space, because it was originally designed specifically for the launch of the Citadel satellites into orbit. In addition to the space program, both "Grids" participated in another program - an educational one. On the basis of Mytishchi NII-22 (military unit 67947), an educational institution was opened in 1981, the purpose of which was to train our Soviet "people in black". The Moscow Institute of Engineers of Geodesy, Aerial Photography and Cartography (MIIGAiK) took part in its creation; Ministry of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education of the RSFSR and the Institute of Space Research. It is not known whether this educational institution operates today, but as of December 1999, it not only had students, but was also included in the official register of educational institutions of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Among the studied disciplines were such exotic subjects as "classification of unidentified objects",“The basics of communication with representatives of unearthly civilizations” and “safety rules for contact with objects of unearthly origin”. Rave? It may have seemed that way to the students, but they still had to take tests in these subjects. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the head of the country. Marveling at the considerable spending on strange government programs in which such high authorities as the Ministry of Defense and the Academy of Sciences were involved, he demanded the curators of both "Grids" to be "on the carpet". The result was another renaming of the program and a fourfold reduction in funding. In fact, only funds remained in the budgets to fine-tune research on the Citadel plan. They say that Mikhail Sergeevich did not even want to inspect "evidence that the money was not wasted" - the wreckage of a UFO and other exhibits of NII-22. Initially, Gorbachev seemed to be going to close the "Grids" altogether, but did not do this, having studied the materials of the so-called Borisoglebsk accidents - two plane crashes involving aircraft based at the Borisoglebsk air hub in the Voronezh region. One of them occurred in April 1984: the crew of the training MiG-21, which was performing a training flight, received a warning that a mark from an unknown object was detected on the radar screen near the flight zone. After a while, the plane seemed to stumble upon something. After a strong blow, the engine stalled, and the MiG began to fall. The crew successfully ejected. Exactly a year later, a similar incident was recorded: shortly before the crash, an unknown object was also observed near the plane at an altitude of 1500 meters. At the same time, while inspecting the crash site of the aircraft in the Povorin area, the search group found a humanoid figure three and a half meters tall in the forest. The giant was dressed in silver. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, under Yeltsin, studies of anomalous phenomena were continued, but were financed entirely from the budget of the Ministry of Defense. Until 1993. And then - it is not known which line they continued to spend money on. But it is known who exactly spent them: all research in the field of paranormal phenomena, as well as the costs of them, were switched to one person - Major General of the KGB Georgy Rogozin, Korzhakov's first deputy in the Presidential Security Service (and in 1996 he also became deputy chief Yeltsin's campaign headquarters) While still a KGB officer,Yeltsin's future deputy security chief oversaw paranormal research, but he is rumored to have earned some contempt among scientists. It was argued that it was this stormy activity that at one time prompted the deputy chairman of the Expert Group of the Academy of Sciences on anomalous phenomena, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, Yuli Platov, and the coordinator of research on anomalous phenomena in the Ministry of Defense and the USSR Academy of Sciences, retired colonel, candidate of technical sciences Boris Sokolov to publish in the Bulletin Russian Academy of Sciences "article" Study of unidentified flying objects in the USSR ". The authors argued that for all the years of research on anomalous phenomena, not a single contact with extraterrestrial civilizations has been established, not a single humanoid has been caught and not a single UFO has been studied. Thus,all the multi-million dollar funding was wasted. Experts, as one, noted that such an article could not appear for any other purpose than to finally close the "UFO project". At the same time, three important facts were recognized in it: for many years, secret UFO research was conducted in the country; scientists were faced with truly unidentified objects that they could not explain; UFOs may have been implicated in aircraft crashes, what are the results of 30 years of research? What was kept in the secret bins of the UFO researchers? When the Institute for High Temperatures and the Institute for Space Research left the "Grid" program in 1980, some of the artifacts under investigation were transferred to NII-22. The transportation of alien goods was carried out by a certain Moscow Region Office of the head of work with a three-digit number - a paramilitary organization,engaged in the rental of all kinds of equipment. During transportation, one of the trucks turned over: several transparent capsules fell out of it, in which the military made out strange humanoid creatures. Numerous drivers of passing cars saw the "alcoholized" aliens - it was already daylight, so there were plenty of witnesses. This story fell into the so-called "Blue Folder" of the KGB - a stack of documentary evidence of the existence of supernatural phenomena, which in 1991 the Deputy Chairman of the KGB Nikolai Sham handed pilot-cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, who then headed the All-Union UFO Association. The folder contained a lot of interesting documents, for example, copies of work journals and military reports of specialists who worked under the AN Grid program. This archive contains some curious passages:“In June 1979, several vehicles of unknown origin landed in the vicinity of the city of Derzhavinsk, Turgai region, Kazakh SSR. Their crews spent more than a day on the ground, engaged in reconnaissance and some kind of research - while they did absolutely no harm to people. The creatures were very tall (over 3 meters) and fragile physique. Their bodies were black, in the hips there was something like a skirt. No noses or mouths were visible on their faces, only two large pink eyes.”And here is another story from the“Blue folder”: at a military training ground in the Nizhny Novgorod region near Dzerzhinsk, unidentified flying objects were repeatedly seen, and the commander of unit 21374, to which the training ground belonged, Major General Viktor Todorakiev, asked the higher authorities to do something. The bosses, making sure thatthat the general, of course, is sober and in his mind, equipped the scientific secretary of the "Grid AN" program Inna Petrovskaya in Dzerzhinsk. And this is what Petrovskaya reported: “65 different UFOs were observed at the test site - shining hemispheres, balls, discs, dumbbells and ellipses, which appeared up to six times a month. Some UFOs even landed on the territory of a military unit. " Petrovskaya, who hitherto was extremely skeptical about UFOs, as they say, believed and for a long time harassed her superiors with demands to establish television surveillance in places where "plates" fly most often. Fantasy? Mass obsession? Or are these stories invented in order to "recapture" multi-million dollar budgets? Over the past 10 years, the governments of France, Great Britain and Germany have abandoned the study of UFOs,but the US still has a fully-fledged government research program. Today we have a secret NII-4 (today the 4th TsNII MO) is engaged in not too secret developments for the Strategic Missile Forces. NII-22 joined FSUE NII Poisk and deals more with burglar alarms than unidentified phenomena. However, three years ago, the "Grid" was renewed on the basis of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems. Now it is called "Attack - a direction for organizing research in the field of anomalous phenomena in earthly nature and space." It is possible that the project involved employees who worked on the study of unusual phenomena back in Soviet times. And if research is being resumed, then there was and is something to research. Today we have a secret NII-4 (today the 4th TsNII MO) is engaged in not too secret developments for the Strategic Missile Forces. NII-22 joined FSUE NII Poisk and deals more with burglar alarms than unidentified phenomena. However, three years ago, the "Grid" was resumed on the basis of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems. Now it is called "Attack - a direction for organizing research in the field of anomalous phenomena in earthly nature and space." It is possible that the project involved employees who worked on the study of unusual phenomena back in Soviet times. And if research is being resumed, then there was and is something to research. Today we have a secret NII-4 (today the 4th Central Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense) is engaged in not too secret developments for the Strategic Missile Forces. NII-22 joined FSUE NII Poisk and deals more with burglar alarms than unidentified phenomena. However, three years ago, the "Grid" was resumed on the basis of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems. Now it is called "Attack - a direction for organizing research in the field of anomalous phenomena in earthly nature and space." It is possible that the project involved employees who worked on the study of unusual phenomena back in Soviet times. And if research is being resumed, then there was and is something to research. However, three years ago, the "Grid" was resumed on the basis of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems. Now it is called "Attack - a direction for organizing research in the field of anomalous phenomena in earthly nature and space." It is possible that the project involved employees who worked on the study of unusual phenomena back in Soviet times. And if research is being resumed, then there was and is something to research. However, three years ago, the "Grid" was resumed on the basis of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems. Now it is called "Attack - a direction for organizing research in the field of anomalous phenomena in earthly nature and space." It is possible that the project involved employees who worked on the study of unusual phenomena back in Soviet times. And if research is being resumed, then there was and is something to research.