Russian Roswell
The History Channel’s UFO Files continues with its theme of worldwide
‘Roswells’, after bringing us Britain’s Roswell, Mexico’s Roswell
and Texas’ Roswell. This latest episode tells us all about the Russian
Roswell.
Kapustin Yar was the former Soviet Union’s most sensitive air base, even
exceeding America’s Area 51 for the levels of secrecy that shrouded it. UFO
Files claimed that it was to present never-before-seen footage of the base,
reconnaissance photos and even a virtual tour of its hidden depths.
Kapustin Yar was created as the site for the development of the Soviet Union’s space
program after the end of World War II. It lies over 500 miles south of Moscow
and about 60 miles east of Volgograd, the former Stalingrad. These days it lies
close to the Kazakhstan border, but back in those days, the base was deep
inside Soviet territory. It was here that captured V2 rockets and the German
scientists that created them were set to work with not only the single task of
getting into space before the Americans, but also designing and testing new
aircraft, missiles and other weapons systems. The base was deemed so secret
that the nearby town of Zhitkur was emptied of its population and levelled
because it was too close.
In 1948, less than a year after the famed Roswell Incident, the base’s radar
operators picked up an unidentified object. At the same time, a fighter pilot
flying close to the base had a visual sighting of a silver, cigar-shaped
object. Reporting that he was being blinded by rays from the UFO, the pilot was
ordered to engage with it and, after a three minute dogfight, a missile
successfully brought down the object. It seems that the UFO fired some sort of
energy weapon at the MiG and both craft crashed to the ground.
William J Birnes, publisher of the American UFO Magazine, believed that
the alien craft fired a particle beam weapon at the Soviet fighter, but a lucky
shot with the missile disrupted the UFO’s anti-gravity field, causing it to
fall from the sky. Soviet recovery teams quickly gathered up all the wreckage
and transported it to the underground facility at Kapustin Yar, which was
ironically named Zhitkur, after the former town not far from the base.
Birnes claimed that MiG pilots were ordered to take any measures necessary to
bring down extraterrestrial craft because Moscow was desperate to gain any
advantage over the United States, whom they believed had made their
tremendous advances due to recovered flying saucer reverse-engineering.
Russia has a long history of UFO sightings, dating back thousands of years. Russian
researcher, Paul Stonehill, co-author with Philip Mantle of UFO-USSR,
described how in about 950AD, Ahmed Ibn Fadlan, an Arab chronicler, was
dispatched by the Caliph of Baghdad to engage in diplomacy with the King of the
Bulgars. In the Volga region of Russia, Fadlan described how he and his fellow
travellers witnessed ‘aerial battles’ between ‘shapes’ that moved through the
clouds. Fleets of objects, flying in formations that resembled people and
animals, engaged each other, merging and separating for a long period of time.
Stonehill described it as being like something from a modern movie.
On 15th August, 1663, a great fiery disc came down from the sky and began
shooting beams of light into the Robozero Lake near Belozersk, about 250 miles
east of St. Petersburg. It moved from the south to the west, vanished and later
reappeared for an hour and a half, terrifying the local witnesses. Fisherman
were said to have been scalded by the light and glowing fish leaped from the
water, as if to escape the fireball floating overhead.
In 1892, an object appeared over Moscow and shot a ‘pillar of light’ down to
the ground for 20-25 minutes. It was described as fiery, much like most other
Russian UFO reports through the ages.
One Russian event dwarfs any reported anywhere in the world. On June 30th,
1908, a huge fireball raced across the Siberian taiga and exploded over the
forest close to the town of Tunguska. Six hundred square miles of tundra was
razed to the ground and the shockwave was felt by seismographs around the
world.
At first it was thought that a meteor had impacted with the Earth and when the
first expeditions arrived twenty years later, they expected to find a huge
crater. No crater was found, but the devastation was evident, with trees laid
out like matchsticks in a huge, circular swathe from the centre of the blast.
From the pattern of the destruction, it soon became apparent that the object
had exploded high above the ground, much like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan
in 1945, but much more powerful in terms of magnitude.
Most researchers outside of Russia, including Stanton Friedman, were convinced
that this was a natural event and nothing to do with aliens or UFOs, but
Russian ufologists, such as Nikolai Subbotin of the Russian UFO Research Station,
were not so sure. Subbotin explained how the object apparently changed course
twice before exploding, something a natural object such as a meteorite or comet
cannot do. Then there were unexplained radiation levels in the region and the
fact that plant life appears to have been altered because of this radiation.
Stalin himself seemed convinced that the event was related to some sort of
weapon, possibly from extraterrestrials, and he set Sergei Korolev, the father
of Soviet rocketry, the task of finding answers. Korolev financed a team to
travel to Tunguska in fleets of helicopters. They found radioactive metal
fragments and an area that has become known as ‘The Devil’s Graveyard’, an area
close to the blast site where no plants will grow and animals tend to die.
Although Korolev is believed to have told Stalin that he thought the blast was
caused by an alien spacecraft, his official report put the blame squarely on a
meteorite.
As rumours began to filter back to Washington DC about UFO wreckage from Tunguska,
the 1948 crash and other incidents being taken to Zhitkur, it became obvious to
America’s intelligence agencies that they needed to find out what was going on.
Their spies informed them that the Soviet Union was building huge rockets that
could not only carry large, nuclear payloads, but could also reach space.
Indeed, their progress became so rapid, that the Soviets were ahead of their
own schedules in terms of advancement.
By the time American U2 spy planes photographed the complex at Kapustin Yar,
there were at least four ballistic launch sites, fourteen launch pads, a
highly-sophisticated radar tracking facility, three long runways and numerous
unidentified areas. There were strange, geometric patterns on the ground. Many
UFO researchers believe that these designs are to attract UFOs and are
patterned after ancient monuments and cereal glyphs.
What the reconnaissance aircraft could not reveal was the underground Zhitkur
facility. UFO Files now took us on a virtual guided tour of the base,
recreated from descriptions given from Russian ufologist Anton Anfalov. A
quarter of a mile beneath the surface, we were led down dark, dank corridors
and tunnels, with numerous chambers containing various types of
extraterrestrial craft in various stages of disassembly. There were areas where
autopsies of aliens would take place and other sections where perhaps engines
were being reconstructed. Finally, there are huge hangars containing not
aircraft, but large, cigar- or cylindrical-shaped objects.
The advances at Kapustin Yar enabled the Soviets to leap ahead of America in
the space race. In 1957, Sputnik I was successfully placed into orbit. A month
later, a dog called Laika became the first animal in space. In 1961, Yuri
Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth. In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova
became the first woman to travel into space. In 1965, Alexei Leonov became the
first man to ‘walk’ in space. Russia’s cosmonauts also performed the first
rendezvous and docking in space. Apart from the Apollo moon shots, the Soviet
Union was winning the space race until the space shuttle was first launched in
1981.
One of Russia’s most well-known ufologists is Vladimir Azhazha (sometimes
spelled Ajaja). He took us on a tour of a site close to Kapustin Yar where he claimed
a UFO crashed. Dowsing with copper rods, he found an elliptical area where he
claimed that an alien craft had plummeted to Earth in 1961. He said that
animals avoided the area, no cattle will graze there and strange energies
affect your pulse rate and breathing.
A local resident, Zoya Shubenkina, corroborated Azhazha’s story about the 1961
crash, claiming she had witnessed it for herself. She said a big, fiery, red
sphere flew over her house and crashed in the valley by the river.
Azhazha explained how many Soviet fighter pilots engaged in dogfights with
UFOs. Former Soviet Air Force colonel and cosmonaut, a hero of the state,
Marina Popovich confirmed that she had personally witnessed aerial battles
between Soviet jets and UFOs.
One such event she described occurred in 1964. During a training mission, two
jets came under attack from a UFO and were forced into a spiral dive. In 1980,
Colonel Popovich encountered several unidentified objects while on a top secret
mission. She said they were three fireball-like lights and she watched as they
moved away.
In the evening of the 7th of August, 1967, Colonel
Vyatkin Lev Mikhailovic suddenly encountered an object that was projecting a
beam of light downwards. He tried to wrestle his MiG away from the beam, but
the left wing touched it and he struggled to regain control. The plane shook
and his instruments went haywire. As they flew away, his technician exclaimed
that the wing was glowing and after they landed, it continued to glow for a
whole week afterwards.
As more and more reports came in from across the Soviet Union, the KGB
clamped down, opening up its own file on the phenomenon, known as The Blue
File. The Blue File would become the most comprehensive and largest study of
UFOs ever commissioned anywhere in the world. It ran from the mid-sixties until
the fall of the Soviet Union. One of its latest reports was from 1990, when
witnesses close to Kapustin Yar described UFOs in the sky for over an hour.
The new freedoms in Russia enabled the producers of UFO Files to obtain
‘top secret’ footage of a supposed UFOs at Kapustin Yar. On June 3rd, 1960, two
alien craft allegedly crashed at Kasputin Yar, creating an expanding fireball
that caused explosions in the vicinity for over an hour. Figures are seen running
from the conflagration, smoke pouring from their clothing. One drops to the
ground and lies motionless. One of the UFOs was said to have destroyed three
rockets on their launch pads, while the other took out a fuel depot. Once the
flames had been doused, the remains of the craft were sent to Zhitkur.
To be honest, to suggest that what was shown in the footage was a UFO is
stretching credulity somewhat. All we saw was a big fire. It could have been
anything, but the story persists and Stanton Friedman said that he had heard
those same rumours about UFOs destroying Soviet rockets in an act of
retaliation.
Russia is a land of many mysteries, not just ufological in nature. The
programme ended with a report from a US journalist, Kim Murphy of the LA Times,
talking about her trip to Russia to investigate a lake that had mysteriously
vanished. She wasn’t sure she believed the stories, but when she got there, she
found that it was true. An entire lake had vanished, with eyewitnesses saying
that a huge whirlpool had formed and the water had vanished like water down a
plug hole. What that has to do with UFOs, I don’t know…
Getting back on track, we were told that research is still ongoing at Kapustin
Yar, with UFO wreckage being brought to Zhitkur quite regularly and as recently
as 1997, when a craft was said to have come down in Poland.
Russian Roswell was another interesting look at the UFO phenomenon. The
Soviet Union obviously had a great deal of interest in the subject and, it
seems, was prepared to act in an extremely hostile manner towards unidentified
craft in their airspace. Was Moscow’s leap into space aided by
reverse-engineering alien craft? The evidence would suggest not. Soviet rockets
were powered pretty much the same way as American ones i.e. they didn’t get up
there by using anti-gravity engines from a crashed saucer. Still, it makes you
wonder what secrets might lay in all these underground facilities, not just in
Russia, but all over the world.
The images used are the property of the copyright holders and are only used
here for review purposes.
© Steve Johnson - 2006
No comments:
Post a Comment