The Cold War Mystery
Beginning in March 1967, when the space age was less than ten years old, lovers of gazing at the sky from Ukraine to the Caucasus Mountains have repeatedly witnessed a vivid spectacle. Six times in six months, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens have watched the strange crescent glow move across the sky in complete silence.
Everything happened the same every time. The crescent moons moved from west to east with a convex edge forward, accompanied by smaller “sparks”. It seemed to some observers that the sickles were the size of the moon; those to the north reported that they were much larger. They always appeared closer to sunset, when twilight began and day gave way to night. Appearing in the sky six times, the sickles disappeared - as mysteriously as they appeared. Nobody saw them again.
The Soviet press speculated that it was a UFO. Groups of hobbyist enthusiasts sprang up across the country and began to collect and write about eyewitness accounts. The news quickly spread throughout the USSR and around the world, and soon they started talking about this phenomenon at the hearings in the American Congress.
But there was one key to unraveling this mystery, which linked the appearance of crescents with human activity in space. On the days when "crescents" appeared in the sky, Moscow launched "research" satellites "Cosmos" (years later it became known that all the mysterious crescents appeared about 95 minutes after the satellite was launched - this time is just enough to make one turn around the Earth)
In November 1967, the US Department of Defense, without any mention of the crescent moons, issued a startling accusation, stating that the Cosmos launches were being conducted by the Soviets as part of testing a new strike nuclear weapon designed to launch a nuclear warhead into low-earth orbit and then withdraw it from orbits over a target at the other end of the earth.
It was a very delicate moment. The United States and the Soviet Union were finalizing work on the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibited the introduction of nuclear weapons into orbit, and the emergence of a system designed for just such purposes threatened to derail years of diplomatic efforts.
The launches were carried out at a time when the warheads were illuminated by the sun, but the surveillance cameras were obscured. Someone in Moscow finally realized what all these UFO reports were connected with, and media reporting abruptly stopped. And the authorities no longer made official statements about the Kosmos launches. If UFO watchers had known what they were looking at, their messages would probably have included details of the propulsion system that directs mock warheads to targets located at the Kapustin Yar training ground. Later, test launches began to be carried out at different times of the day, and therefore the evening visions disappeared.
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The Soviets named the R-36orb strike missile. It was a variant of an intercontinental ballistic missile, which in the West was called SS-9 Scarp (Soviet index 8K69). Some of these missiles were eventually placed in mines, but in 1983 they were finally banned by the SALT II Treaty.
Why did the descending nuclear charge leave behind a wide crescent-shaped trail? This remained a mystery to the general public for years, although the CIA probably knew the answer.
In September 2015, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. After dropping the second stage, the first stage capsized, turned on its engine and slowly began to descend, landing for the first time on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean. In the infrared images of this night descent, a crescent-shaped glow is clearly visible in front of the descent vehicle. These are particles of combustion products leaving the engine enter the atmosphere and begin to glow. The striking similarity with what was observed in the USSR in 1967 revealed the secret of this phenomenon: it is the exhaust of the brake propulsion system.
After the collapse of the USSR, details about the R-36orb began to gradually leak into the press. Now we know what really happened: people took the top secret space weapon for an alien visit.
James Oberg