In the 1970s, the editorial offices of our newspapers and magazines and the Academy of Sciences accumulated a significant number of messages from various regions of our country describing the flights of unusual objects and other extraordinary phenomena with requests for a reasonable explanation of this phenomenon.
The reason for the beginning of UFO research along the state line in our country was the well-known Petrozavodsk phenomenon in September 1977.
A month after him, the President of the Academy of Sciences A. Alexandrov sent a letter to the Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission L. Smirnov. He wrote that the Academy of Sciences can no longer ignore and cannot explain anomalous phenomena, such as those observed over Petrozavodsk, and suggested organizing comprehensive studies of anomalous phenomena with the involvement of organizations of the Ministry of Defense and the military-industrial complex in the work.
Confirmation that the president of the Academy of Sciences took the UFO problem very seriously is a case about which Andreyev, general designer of the Research Institute of Khimmash, told me in 1986. While at a reception with Aleksandrov on the issue of creating equipment for liquefying gas, Andreev asked Aleksandrov a question: how does he feel about UFOs? He slowly replied: “Yes … UFOs are very, very serious …” he thought for a moment and said: “So where did we stop? Let's continue.
The UFO research program for the Ministry of Defense, adopted in 1978, was called "Grid-MO" and aimed to study anomalous phenomena and, mainly, their influence on the functioning of military equipment and the state of personnel.
The 22nd Central Research and Testing Institute of the Ministry of Defense in Mytishchi (military unit 67947), headed by Lieutenant General V. Balashov, was appointed its lead executor in the Armed Forces. At this institute, then a working group on UFOs was created, consisting of 4 people, headed by Colonel A. Abdulin, which was later transformed into a special laboratory.
All branches of the Armed Forces appointed their own research institutes responsible for this topic. A number of scientific institutions of the military-industrial complex were also involved, the actual participation of which was very limited.
For the Academy of Sciences, the UFO research program was called "Grid-AN" and aimed to study the physical nature and mechanisms of development of anomalous phenomena.
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The Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation (IZMIRRAN), headed by V. Migulin, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, was designated as the head organization within the Academy of Sciences. The institute also created a working group on anomalous phenomena, consisting of four people, headed by Yu. Platov. Some areas of research were assigned to other academic institutions. The coordination of research on anomalous phenomena by the USSR Ministry of Defense and the Academy of Sciences was carried out by Colonel V. Sokolov, who worked in the so-called section of applied problems (a closed division at the junction of the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Defense).
There was no earmarked funding for the UFO research program, everyone worked only for their salary.
In 1979-1980, the Department of General Physics and Astronomy of the Academy of Sciences, the State Committee for Hydromet and the Ministry of Defense of the USSR sent out guidelines for organizing observations of anomalous phenomena. The content of these instructions indicated that the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Defense put different meanings into the concept of "anomalous phenomena".
In the methodological instructions of the Academy of Science of the State Committee for Hydromet, it was generally said about incomprehensible local and global anomalous phenomena, since Migulin considered the UFO problem "far-fetched" and generally denied the existence of any mysterious objects.
The methodological instructions of the Ministry of Defense, on the contrary, dealt with unknown objects in the form of spheres, cylinders, rectangles, discs with domes, windows, hatches and other external details, and it was indicated that these objects move at very high speeds and make sharp maneuvers.
But in all the methodological instructions, it was a question of organizing only observations of anomalous phenomena, therefore all UFO studies in our country were limited only to collecting data on observations of these objects, their shape and size, the presence of light rays, the characteristics of movement and their impact on the environment. At the same time, the guidance documents did not even mention the possibility of UFO crashes and did not provide for the search and research of fallen objects or their parts, although several cases of UFO falls and explosions in a number of countries were already known. Such cases could well have gone unnoticed in the vast deserted expanses of our country.
Even the thought of the possibility of UFO landings was not allowed in these documents (after all, phenomena cannot land and take off), while in a questionnaire published by the French Gendarmerie Directorate back in the early 1970s, specific instructions were already given for the study of not only UFO landing sites, but also the appearance of creatures located near these objects.
At Migulin's insistence, it was forbidden to publish reports on UFO sightings in our media without the permission of the Department of General Physics and Astronomy of the Academy of Sciences.
Although, it would seem, what secret is that an unknown jellyfish object hovered in 1977 over Petrozavodsk, and another object with rays was observed in 1984 by the crews of two passenger aircraft flying over Belarus, because such messages were freely published all over the world.
It was only in 1989 that this senseless ban on the publication of UFO materials was finally lifted.
UFO research in the USSR was closed, according to Platov, allegedly "to reduce public resonance from their legalization" (a very vague and unconvincing explanation), as well as taking into account the possibility of using some properties of UFOs in military interests.
In fact, the secrecy was used to cover up the actual inactivity of the Migulin commission and the ability to manipulate the received messages at their own discretion.
An active member of Migulin's commission, scientist of the Polar Geophysical Institute S. Chernous made a very interesting recognition. He stated that in the course of the work "we sifted out all messages that were not related to either science or technology."
This statement completely exposes the true activities of the Migulin commission, which, instead of an objective analysis of all received messages, weeded out, that is, discarded messages that confirmed the existence of true UFOs, their unusual properties and elements of rationality, and left only those that corresponded to Migulin's dogmatic views.
Hence, it is clear why among the messages received, according to Platov, there were no descriptions of UFO landings, contacts with their crews or abductions of people by these crews. Such reports were apparently simply weeded out as “unrelated to science” (168). And when Migulin said that 95 percent of reports of anomalous phenomena are about observations of balloons, missile launches, aircraft flights, ball lightning or meteorite falls, and the remaining 5 percent are natural phenomena that have not yet received their explanation, he apparently, took this percentage of the number of messages left after dropping out.
But initially, such statements by Migulin were perceived as attempts to hide the interest in UFOs shown by our authorities, and only later it became obvious that all this was only the result of his limited thinking. Migulin also tried in every possible way to hinder UFO research by various public organizations or tried to take them under his control.
In 1981, he sent a letter to the chairman of the section for the study of anomalous phenomena in the environment under the Ukrainian Republican Board of the NTORZS named after A. Popov, academician G. Pisarenko, in which he wrote that “the study of anomalous phenomena in the USSR is carried out on behalf of decision-making bodies and is not intended to involve him to the broad masses of the public. Therefore, it is advisable to carry out such research according to a program agreed with the USSR Academy of Sciences, and not expand it by attracting a significant number of performers."
In the same year, Migulin sent a letter to the President of the Russian Geographical Society, Academician A. Treshnikov, in which he agreed to create a commission in the Geographical Society for the study of anomalous phenomena in the environment, subject to the inclusion of a representative from IZMIRRAN.
The head of the magnetic ionospheric laboratory of the Leningrad branch of IZMIRRAN, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences E. Gorshkov, then became the scientific secretary of this commission.
The very technique of the so-called UFO research in the Migulin commission, according to Platov, essentially boiled down to collecting the messages received and sending typical responses to them, trying to convince eyewitnesses that these were optical effects or technical experiments. Only in very rare cases were specialists sent to places where UFOs were seen - such visits were considered useless by the commission.
In 1989 Platov told the Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent: “There is no need to go to the places if there are no messages except newspaper articles. We cannot run and look for who, where, said or wrote what. Thus, all UFO research was reduced to office paperwork and, of course, brought little benefit. As a result, in the 1980s, a strange situation developed in our country, in which the Ministry of Defense was seriously engaged in the collection of data on UFOs, while the Academy of Sciences, represented by Migulin and Platov, argued that no UFOs exist, and the population did not know who to believe …
True, from 1978 to 1990, the Migulin commission recorded about 3000 reports of observations of unusual phenomena, of which about 300 events were qualified as anomalous.
At the same time, no discoveries were made and no major scientific works on the UFO topic were created - if something were created, then after the proclamation of publicity and the collapse of the USSR, some data would inevitably be leaked to the press.
"There was no exchange of information on UFOs with both the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO," General of the Army I. Tretyak, Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces, said in 1990.
The work of the special laboratory at the 22nd Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense in Mytishchi also boiled down mainly to collecting and analyzing reports of UFO sightings from various sources.
And in 2000, a former employee of this special laboratory, Colonel A. Plaksin, said that over 13 years of work, she received several thousand messages from all over the country about unidentified objects. But after the check, only about a thousand remained, in which it could be reliably asserted that it was about phenomena unknown to science.
But Plaksin surprised all ufologists, stating that, according to this laboratory, 70 percent of anomalous phenomena are allegedly explained by ejections of the solar coronal mass, 20 percent are due to technogenic factors and 10 percent are of unknown nature.
For 13 years of work, the employees of the special laboratory had to leave only a few times to urgently investigate the circumstances associated with the probable interference of UFOs in the activities of military units.
In October 1983, by order of the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel B. Sokolov with a commission had to urgently fly to the 50th Strategic Missile Forces Division to investigate the impact of UFOs on the main control panel of the combat complex.
In the 1980s, military unit 73790 carried out a secret research on UFOs called "Thread-3". Military unit 73790, apparently, is a solid institution, consisting of directorates, and those, in turn, of departments. Perhaps this is a military research institute, which, according to the Commander of the Space Forces, Colonel-General V. Ivanov, was specially created to study UFOs.
The title of this research project sounds very ornate: "Substantiation of concepts and forecast of expected results of experimental and theoretical studies of the processes of functioning of unconventional engines and their interaction with the environment."
One can imagine how much time and effort was spent only on inventing such a pseudo-scientific formulation. After getting acquainted with this name of the research work, it seemed that this case would be necessarily connected with the crashed UFOs. After all, one cannot conduct experimental studies of the functioning of the engines of these objects from scratch, without having anything on hand. And here is what happened in reality.
Judging by the secret report on R&D "Thread-3", compiled in 1993, which American ufologists managed to obtain and a summary of which was published in the proceedings of the MUFON symposium in 1993, the main task of this R&D was to conduct extensive research in order to understand what principles the engines of unidentified flying objects and their accompanying fields operate, which were mentioned in the testimony of eyewitnesses.
It was also necessary to understand how such a technology could be created and how certain technological innovations could be derived from it.
Well, the goal was formulated very correctly, but the content of the research work itself, unfortunately, did not correspond at all to this goal, because in it:
it was said that, along with a large number of explainable UFO sightings, there were many sightings that could not be explained - perhaps these were collisions with aliens from other planets or from parallel worlds;
- a detailed description of the history of UFO research in the USSR was given and it was indicated that the American intelligence agencies were always interested in how we are doing with such research;
- the progress of UFO research in the United States was described in detail and documents were cited, testifying to the classification of this problem in America and, in particular, about Operation Majestic-12;
- descriptions of UFO crashes in 1947 in New Mexico and in 1950 near the Mexican border were given, taken from the report of Admiral R. Hillencotter;
- information about contacts with UFO crews was given, while it was emphasized that enlonauts choose illiterate people with low intelligence for contacts, who are not able to understand what actually happened to them;
- there were references not to the meeting of Russian and American cosmonauts with UFOs in space, confidence was expressed that American astronauts had met with UFOs on the Moon, and it was suggested that flights to the Moon were terminated due to the danger that astronauts may not return;
- the maneuvers of seven UFOs around the Vostok-2 spacecraft were described in detail, filmed by cosmonaut G. Titov;
- with regard to the numerous encounters of aircraft with UFOs, it was said that their descriptions would take several volumes;
- the opinion of some Russian ufologists was cited that Yuri Gagarin allegedly died in 1968 as a result of a collision of a MIG-15 aircraft on which he flew with a UFO, although no such official conclusion was made.
And it's all? And where are the themes proclaimed in the title "Experimental research of the functioning of non-traditional UFO engines?" Not a word about them.
Thus, the research work "Thread-3" did not contain any specific conclusions about the principles of the UFO device or the technology of their creation, but was reduced to a retelling of generally known information borrowed from the open American UFO literature and was of no value.
She absolutely did not deserve the "Secret" stamp, which was actually used to cover up the inability of its authors (two doctors and three candidates of technical sciences, whose positions, degrees and names are indicated on the title page) to delve deeply into the essence of this topic and achieve some tangible concrete results.
It seems that there was no clarity at all about the degree of secrecy of UFO research in the Ministry of Defense itself, and the matter reached the point of absurdity.
Here's a good example. As you know, the guidelines for collecting UFO data sent to all military units were unclassified, and they detailed the procedure for submitting reports.
And in the official response received by St. Petersburg ufologist N. Lebedev from the Ministry of Defense in 1989, it was said: “As for informational materials on UFOs, the Ministry of Defense does not deal with these issues and does not have any materials” (276).
The question is, what to believe?
It turns out that the state security agencies of the USSR were not involved in UFO research at all.
In 1991, the Deputy Chairman of the KGB N. Sham in a letter to the President of the UFO Association P. Popovich said that the KGB was not engaged in systematic collection and analysis of information about UFOs, and sent to the UFO Center copies of the materials on UFOs received by the committee on 124 pages. These were mainly reports from military units and crews of civil aviation aircraft about observations by soldiers, officers, flight pilots and hovering of luminous balls and stars. They were unclassified, had no real value and were published in the Anomaliya newspaper and in the foreign press.
In 1993, Deputy Minister of State Security A. Bykov confirmed that systematic work on the accumulation and study of materials on UFOs in the ministry's divisions was not carried out and is not being carried out, and the UFO problem itself has an "academic character."
After the collapse of the USSR, our most intimate secrets were made public. In 1993, the Izvestia newspaper published the characteristics of all our strategic missiles and listed all areas of the Strategic Missile Forces positions and bases of nuclear submarines with strategic missiles, and indicated the number of missile types in each of them.
In an atmosphere of such indiscriminate declassification, some information about UFOs that crashed on the territory of our country should have leaked out. But they did not leak: either because they simply did not exist, or still as a result of keeping secrets.
The already mentioned retired colonel B. Sokolov, through whose hands thousands of reports of UFO sightings by military units, have passed, said that he had never come across references to the existence of material evidence of the existence of UFOs. But by virtue of the position he held, he only had to answer in this way.
And in the media, nevertheless, sometimes there were reports of allegedly shot down UFOs over our territory.
In the newspaper of the Yaroslavl UFO Center "Fourth Dimension and UFOs" N 1/166 for 2002, Sergei Kovalevsky published a long article in which he claimed that two alien ships, five unmanned probes and fragments of two unmanned spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin were allegedly shot down and captured in the USSR.
One of these ships was allegedly shot down in March 1978 near the settlement of Podgornoye in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan and on it were the bodies of two dead aliens of small stature.
The second ship was allegedly shot down in 1987 near the settlement of Nizhniy Cherek in the north of Kabardino-Balkaria and was captured practically intact. It contained the bodies of three dead little aliens.
According to Kovalevsky, the ship, captured in 1987 in the Caucasus, and three copies of the other alien equipment inherited by the USSR are located in an object codenamed "Glacier", in the adits of the nuclear test site on Novaya Zemlya (GCP No. 6), where they are allegedly being investigated by representatives Central Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense in the city of Yegoryevsk, Moscow Region. And the ship, shot down in Kazakhstan, with the bodies of two aliens and part of other captured extraterrestrial equipment were allegedly sold in 1992-1994 to a private Japanese corporation and the Saudi Arabian secret service.
Unfortunately, the article does not indicate who S. Kovalevsky is and where he got such important information from, so their reliability remains, of course, in great doubt.
In 1981, the UFO research program "Grid" received a new name - "Galaxy", and in 1986 - "Horizon" (each time with the addition of "MO" or "AN").
In 1990, the State Program for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena was completed, that is, terminated, and until 1996, only an expert group for the analysis of incoming messages remained at the Department of General Physics and Astronomy.
After the completion of this program in 1991, Platov and Rubtsov's book "UFOs and Modern Science" was published, and in 2000 - an article by Platov and Sokolov "Study of Unidentified Flying Objects in the USSR", which also did not mention any UFO landings. nor attempts to investigate crashed objects.
But in our Armed Forces, far from everyone agreed with the course of curtailing UFO research, taken by the leadership of the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Defense.
This is confirmed by an interview published in 1990 by the Chief of the General Staff of the Air Defense Forces, Colonel-General I. Maltsev, about repeated flights north of Moscow of unknown objects, which were distinguished by amazing maneuverability that earthly mechanical vehicles do not possess, in other words, of extraterrestrial origin.
Upon learning of this statement by Maltsev, Defense Minister D. Yazov not only became furious, but also declared that "we do not have and cannot have any UFOs!" Now we understand that this did not happen due to the fact that Maltsev allegedly disclosed the manifestation of a serious interest of our leadership in UFOs - there was no such interest. On the contrary, Yazov was angry that Maltsev, who held a high post in the air defense forces, dared then, contrary to the decision already made by the leadership to stop further studies of UFOs, publicly, one might say demonstratively, to confirm both the reality of the existence and the unusual properties of these objects, and hence, the need for their further study.
In June 1991, the General Staff of the Air Defense Forces undertook a check of the message of the Moscow ufologist M. Milhiker that the remnants of an alien civilization were allegedly asking for consent to land their ship in June 1991 north of the Baikonur cosmodrome and instructing the air defense forces not to use attacking means against them.
On behalf of the Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army M. Moiseyev, the Chief of the General Staff of the Air Defense Forces, Colonel General I. Maltsev, wrote to Milkhiker that the Air Defense Forces were ready not to use their fire weapons against the alien ship, and sent a group of officers led by Colonel I. Nazarenko.
But Milhiker's message turned out to be another bluff, and this incident, of course, did not contribute to the recognition of the UFO problem in the eyes of the military leadership.
The generalized results of the work of the commission of Migulin and the military for 13 years and the conclusions they came to, for some reason, have not been published. If the UFO problem was recognized as not worthy of attention, then the results of their research could be painlessly published, and if, nevertheless, its importance was confirmed, then the research had to be continued. Neither was done.
So ingloriously ended the attempts of our government agencies to study the UFO problem, and the archive of reports of UFO sightings received by the Academy of Sciences, according to Platov, has now been destroyed.
The fate of the secret archive of unidentified phenomena of the Ministry of Defense, located in one of the repositories of the Krasny Kut test site in the south of the Saratov region, is still unknown. In 1993, Colonel Sokolov even handed over to American ufologists visiting Moscow descriptions of 400 of the most intriguing cases from his array of UFO reports received from military units, and the rest of the messages allegedly burned.
After the collapse of the USSR, our authorities generally stopped paying attention to this problem, and it faded into the background. In 1997, a former active member of the commission, Migulin Chernous, confirmed that it no longer existed.
The same picture is in the Ministry of Defense
In 1996, the head of the Academy of Air Defense Forces, Colonel-General G. Reshetnikov, said that the Air Defense Forces did not have any special data bank on observations or encounters with UFOs, and all information about the actions of these objects was now not collected anywhere. The Air Defense Forces and the Air Force have no new directives or special tasks for ufological research, although this problem should have dealt with them in the first place.
The special laboratory of the 22nd Research Institute in Mytishchi has long been disbanded.
An employee of the Center for Space Communications, Major General V. Alekseev, also confirmed that the situation with UFO research in our country is now in a much worse state than before, and primarily for economic reasons.
What kind of UFOs are there when the entire budget of our country for 2004 (about $ 80 billion) was 5 times less than the expenditures allocated in the US budget for defense alone ($ 401 billion). And the conclusions once made in relation to UFOs, apparently, now lie somewhere "dead weight".
Of course, it's a shame to hear all this, especially since the amount of material evidence of the existence of UFOs and their crews is steadily increasing.
All UFO research on the state line in our country boiled down to endless disputes about whether these objects exist, and a simple collection of data on UFO sightings. Such studies did not bring any practical benefit to our country.
This was acknowledged by Migulin himself, who, in the preface to the book "UFOs and Modern Science", wrote that all the research carried out on UFOs did not enrich science, because no fundamentally new knowledge was obtained.