1989 September 27, Voronezh, CE3 444

    “As we review the events that took place in that region, it is important to remember that Voronezh is not a small village but a large city of nearly a million inhabitants. Founded as a fortress in the late sixteenth century, today it is an industrial center for machinery, electrical products, chemicals, cigarettes, and processed foods.

    The first report of the UFO incident in Voronezh appeared in the local newspaper Kommuna. Written by A. Mosolov and entitled “A Soccer Game with Aliens,” the article told about the object seen on September 27, 1989, at about 6:30 in the evening, while schoolchildren Vasya Surin and Genya Blinov played soccer in South Park. But they were not the only witnesses. A girl named Julia Sholokhova and approximately forty adults observed the strange occurrence. That was one of the facts missed by the Western media, who kept talking derisively about “a UFO seen by a bunch of kids.”

    The witnesses related that they first saw a pink or red light in the sky, which turned into a dark red sphere, about thirty feet in diameter. The object was circling forty feet above the ground, and witnesses could see that the grass under it was affected. Soon the sphere flew away.

    A few minutes later the UFO returned and hovered above the park. By then the adults had joined the teenagers. Everyone saw a hatch open in the bottom section of the sphere. A being appeared. It was nearly ten feet tall and was wearing silver-colored overalls and bronze-colored boots. The being seemed to have three eyes and a sort of disk-shaped object on its chest. It appeared to scan the terrain, then closed the hatch. The sphere came lower. As it did, it brushed against a poplar tree, which was bent and stayed in that position.

    The UFO, which measured about forty-five feet by nineteen feet, landed. The being emerged, accompanied by an entity that looked like a robot. The alien uttered something and a luminous rectangle, about two and a half feet by four feet, appeared on the ground. The alien said something else and the luminous rectangle disappeared. The alien adjusted something on the robot’s chest, causing it to walk in a mechanical way.

    It was at this moment that one of the boys cried out in fear. The alien simply looked at him and the boy instantly froze, unable to move. The eyes of the alien seemed to be emitting light. Everyone started shouting. Somehow the sphere and the beings vanished on the spot.

    Five minutes later the sphere and the three-eyed being appeared again, just as strangely as they had disappeared. The being now had at his side a tube about four feet in length. A sixteen-year-old boy was close to the scene. The alien pointed his “rifle” toward the teenager, and the boy instantly disappeared. The alien entered the sphere and the sphere flew away, gradually increasing its speed. At the same instant the vanished teenager reappeared.

    The story, as reported in the article, ended with two statements: (1) that the above was written after interviewing multiple eyewitnesses and (2) that Voronezh residents had observed UFOs not once, but many times over the period of September 23 to 29.

    On October 7, 1989, Kommuna continued a discussion of local observations of UFOs in an article entitled “What Was It?” The story was written by O. Donin, a reporter for the newspaper, who mentioned statements made by two adults: Yuri Vokhrimenko had seen a red sphere in the sky from his balcony on September 27 at approximately the same time as the teenagers in the park; another witness named B. G. Yatsunov, a former pilot, had also seen a UFO on September 29 at 8:10 p.m.

    The rest of the article consisted of an interview with Professor Genrikh Silanov, a physicist from the Spectral Analysis Laboratory of the Voronezh Geophysical Institute and a member of the Section on the Study of Anomalous Phenomena of the Society for Radio-Engineering, Electronics, and Communication. He related that at least three landings of UFOs had taken place in Voronezh. The earliest one had been observed on September 21 at 8:30 p.m. by boys from Mendeleyev Street...

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    ... Eleven-year-old Vasya Surin, who saw the landing on September 27, was in the fifth grade and his friend Genya Blinov, in the sixth. The author related Silanov’s observations of the site and added that, in addition to four depressions, holes in the ground had been found, “as if someone had taken a soil sample.”

    In a local Voronezh newspaper, Molodoy Kommunar, journalist Eugene Buslayev interviewed Alexander Mosolov and Vyacheslav Martynov. They described the field studies that used dowsing. They also related another interesting detail: when they used a magnetometer and attempted to measure the intensity of the magnetic field at the landing site, the intensity turned out to be so high that it was beyond the scale of the device. Their colleague, Dr. Yuri Lozovtsev, calculated the pressure on the ground from the shape and dimensions of the depressions and came up with the figure of eleven tons, assuming it was caused by static pressure, that is, by the actual weight of the apparatus. That site of the encounter, saw a landed craft with a “giant” and a robot companion.

    The third kind of beings seen at Voronezh were small, with grayish-green faces and blue overcoats that looked like loose raincoats. They had two eyes.

    Another Soviet paper, Meditsinskaya Gazeta, sent reporter Valery Milyutin to Voronezh. He interviewed several adult eyewitnesses who saw the UFOs, adding many useful details. Thus Yuri Petrovich Vokhrimenko gave the following statement:

    ”On September 27, between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m., I saw from my balcony a reddish sphere appearing over the horizon. It flew at a relatively low altitude toward the left bank of the river, hovering over the village of Otrozhka, and then it disappeared behind the houses. It was not moving fast. It flew at the speed of a small plane.”

    Valentina Alexeyevna Agibalova, a senior economist at the State Bank Computer Center, and her daughter, Tatiana, a deputy prosecutor of the Zheleznodorozhny District in Voronezh, stated:

    “On September 27, around 7:00 p.m., we saw a red-colored sphere flying from Shilovsky forest toward the Voronezh hydroelectric power station. It hovered over the left riverbank and then vanished. [The Russian word literally describes a light going out.] Then it reappeared and moved back toward the forest.”


    Inna Vladimirovna Nikitina, an employee of Voronezh-Energo, the local power station, said:

    “Around 9:00 p.m., for five to ten minutes, I observed a fairly large flattened sphere, shaped like an orange. This happened in the vicinity of the mining equipment plant. I experienced a feeling of intense fear for which I could not account.”

    Yuli Nikanorovich Sviridov, chief engineer of the Trans-Electro-Project Design Institute stated:

    “Around 8:00 p.m., on September 27, from the fourth floor balcony, I saw a big, bright red sphere move between the houses at an altitude of a thousand feet, with a crimson halo along the edges. Its speed was comparable to that of a small plane. It was moving from the left bank of the river in a westerly direction.”

    What we have here is a case of highly qualified multiple witnesses to a series of physical events for which there is no current scientific explanation.“

    (Vallee asks:)“What was your methodology in the Voronezh case?” “We began with the schoolchildren,” answered Mosolov. “We separated them. We found out that many of them did not know the others. We had them make separate drawings, and we videotaped them while they were being interviewed. We will show you the tape later.”
   
    “What did they actually draw?” asked Martine. I knew that, like me, she was anxious to find out if the symbols reported by the kids were genuine.

    The men from Voronezh had brought some of the original drawings and paintings. They started spread- ing them on the table before us.

    “They drew classical shapes, as you can see. A sphere or a disk, resting on four legs. And indeed we found four imprints in the ground,” pointed out Dr. Yuri Lozovtsev.

    “The humanoids are similar in all the drawings,” added Martynov. “They have no neck, their head rests on their shoulders. They look like a target at a firing range.”

    “What about the eyes? Is it true that the witnesses described three eyes?”

    “Some of them did, but others saw two eyes and something else on the forehead, which could have been a device of some sort.”

    “Tell us more about the physical traces in South Park,” I insisted. The group was eager to comply. Af- ter all, they were all technicians, trained in hard sci- ence. In that respect we were speaking the same language.

    “We measured the intensity of the magnetic field and the parameters of ground magnetism. We found the traces of the craft’s four legs, which were an inch and a half deep. And we took many soil samples for analysis.”

    “Was there any evidence of a rise in temperature?” I asked, thinking of the Trans-en-Provence case where French government scientists had found evidence of heating to 600° Celsius.

    “No,” was the answer. “But the soil had turned to the consistency of stone, and there was an area of flattened grass.”

    “We computed the total weight of the object,” added Lozovtsev. “As we mentioned before, we found eleven tons, which is consistent with some of the estimates you have given in your work from French en- counters. Of course, this is only an approximation. The object may not have rested on the ground with its full weight.”

    Martynov chipped in with more astonishing data. “The background radiation was in the range of ten to fifteen microroentgen per hour, while the measurements taken on the trace itself were between thirty and thirty-seven. Although it doesn’t pose a threat to people’s health, such an increase is clearly significant.”

    “Can you trust the children’s testimony?” I asked.

    Lozovtsev was quick to reply. “It is hard to deny the initial sightings, since there were physical traces and also adult witnesses. But in the following days there were other reports from children and we do not trust those reports. For example, the press stated that a sixteen-year-old boy had suddenly seen an object ap- pear close to a tree . . . that may have been an invention.

    “What about the sightings by adults?”

    “Those are not in doubt. There were simply too many witnesses, and we have their statements on record. For instance, there is a case where the first witness, a mother of ten, was getting everything ready for a family celebration when she saw something flying over adjacent buildings. Soon there was a crowd of five hundred other witnesses. The object was seen for two and a half hours! It was a dark disk with three blinking lights: red, yellow, and green.”

    “Did any of the cases involve a beam of light, other than Polyakov’s experience?”

“Yes. Near a lake called Vor’s Sea several women saw a beam coming from above. It hit the water and continued inside the lake. They were not caught in the beam, but they suffered strong headaches nonetheless.”

    “There were other cases of high strangeness,” continued Mosolov. “One of them involved a lens-shaped discoid object, about twenty feet in diameter, that took off from a platform that seemed to be set on wheels ... I have spoken with the witness myself. The platform simply vanished on the spot. I would have had trouble believing this, except that a round trace was left in the grass, with the vegetation bent in a spiral as if a giant comb had been run through it.”

    Now the conversation became general.

    “There were also some reports of direct contact,” Martynov said. “The most recent one took place less than a week ago, last Wednesday. A forty-year-old woman who was in her house with her son saw a pinkish-colored light behind the window. Next she described three dark silhouettes that had neither eyes nor ears. They seemed to be calling her. We found that this woman was in good mental and physical health. Until that sighting she had always refused to believe in UFOs. The experience lasted an hour, and during all that time she couldn’t move from her bed.”

    Evidently the Voronezh group had been serious, thorough, and diligent in its work. But a number of problems still had no solutions.”