Inside the Soviet Union’s Secret UFO Files

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—A trove of classified Russian documents related to so-called UFOs was just released to the public after languishing in a journalist’s records for thirty years.

In 1993, Las Vegas investigative reporter George Knapp stripped the classified cover sheets off a stack of Soviet military documents, stuffed them in his luggage, and walked out of Russia without the KGB noticing. Last September, he testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee; the documents were entered into the congressional record; and in January, he began releasing English translations to the public.

The documents suggest that, for more than a decade, the Kremlin ran a series of secret UFO investigations that included thousands of military reports and multiple classified programs, even as it dismissed the topic as American propaganda in public. The files themselves reach no conclusions, but the encounter reports they contain are astonishingly bizarre. Here are some of the most interesting experiencer testimonies from the document dump:

A City-Sized Jellyfish Over Southern Russia

On the evening of February 13, 1989, hundreds of people in Nalchik, a city in Russia’s southern Caucasus, watched something enormous drift over their rooftops. Military personnel, airport workers, and local astronomers all filed reports describing the same thing: a jellyfish-shaped object, estimated at 450 feet wide, hanging roughly 300 feet above the ground.

Witnesses said a deep red glow descended first, then split into a row of evenly spaced green lights. After about ten minutes, the lights merged, and the whole thing shot upward. Ninety minutes later, the main object reappeared, this time flanked by a smaller, faster craft that zipped around the skyline before both vanished.

What makes this case unusual isn’t just the spectacle, but rather the sheer number of trained observers who independently corroborated the same details.

An Alien Abduction With a Brutal Performance Review

In July 1975, an 18-year-old named Anatoly Malishev claimed he was sketching a sunset in a wooded area near the village of Blagoveshenka when a flaming streak appeared in the sky. Three humanoid figures approached him. He said they took him aboard a craft and transported him to what they described as their home planet—a world three light-years away, somehow illuminated from within despite having no sun.

The beings allegedly examined Malishev and delivered their assessment: very strong nerves, but below-average mental faculties. Soviet investigators who interviewed him over the following years concluded he was of sound mind and not prone to fabrication. They kept the file open.

Ten-Foot Beings With Pink Eyes at a Children’s Camp

On the night of June 27, 1979, a group of young pioneers (basically the Soviet equivalent of Boy Scouts) and their adult chaperones were camping near a hillock outside Derzhavinsk, Kazakhstan. A flash at the edge of the nearby forest drew a group of boys and one adult toward the tree line, where they came face to face with towering black figures, roughly ten feet tall, with glowing pink eyes.

The next morning, a girl and her teacher reported seeing one of the beings seated in what appeared to be a chair near the campsite. Investigators interviewed the children nearly a year later. Their accounts matched almost exactly, with no meaningful deviation.

None of this constitutes proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, and the files themselves draw no such conclusion. What they do reveal is that the Soviet military treated the UFO question with a level of institutional seriousness that involved thousands of cases, multiple research programs, and decades of classified inquiry, all while telling the public there was nothing to see.

Whether these accounts describe alien visitors, atmospheric oddities, Cold War paranoia, or something else entirely remains genuinely unclear. But the paper trail is now public, and it shows that at least one Earth superpower considered the topic worth investigating.