LA PAGE DE PHILIPS MANTLE

Chercheur, écrivain et ufologue anglais - Ancien responsable des enquêtes à la BUFORA - Londres.

Due out February 2010 and available for pre-order. http://www.healingsofatlantis.com/

Throughout the centuries UFOs hovered over Russia, and USOs (Unidentified Undersea Objects) lurked in its waters. This book introduces the phenomena of the most important cases, observations, and sightings. UFO CASE FILES OF RUSSIA endeavours to describe efforts of those dedicated researchers who have stubbornly pursued UFO research in the Russian Empire, the USSR, and modern Russia.

The evidence in this piece of literature is extensive both in scope and detail. In its totality, it comprises a body of evidence written in the style of a Russian, which at the very least supports the general assessment of describing as fully as possible Soviet and Russian UFO cases, research areas, prominent personalities involved in such research (military, intelligence agencies, cosmonauts and civilians), opinions and viewpoints of those who were and are serious in their approach to the study of anomalous phenomena.

Whatever the UFO phenomena is, it is certainly not a modern invention as this unique history clearly demonstrates. The history of UFO sightings and contacts over the lands that later became known as Russia date back thousands of years. UFO CASE FILES OF RUSSIA is not meant to be definitive in any way, but is meant to show that UFO research has been and still is very active in the former USSR, and that a vigorous programme of research and serious diplomatic initiatives is warranted.

Written by Philip Mantle from the UK and Paul Stonehill, originally from the Ukraine,but now a citizen of the USA, east meets west for the first time in this unique publication.

The small country of Scotland is known for many things: its beautiful scenery, whiskey, the Loch Ness Monster, Braveheart, but not UFOs. But this new book: UIFO CASE FILES OF SCOTLAND by Scotland and one of the UK’s leading UFO and Paranormal researchers, Malcolm Robinson, could well alter all that.

Malcolm Robinson has been involved first hand as a UFO and Paranormal researcher since the late 1980’s. A true Scot in every sense of the word Malcolm has been at the forefront of research on UFOs in Scotland and the only thing that truly surprises me about this book is that it is his first one. Having read it from cover to cover I can only hope it is the first of many.

UFO CASE FILES OF SCOTLAND is in no way definitive, it is instead an honest reflection of Malcolm’s own involvement in UFO research in Scotland. It might not be definitive but of the cases that it covers it is certainly in-depth. I have read literally hundreds of UFO books down the years and I can honestly say, in the best possible way that I can, that this book is like no other. Not only does Malcolm go into great detail of the case histories featured, but he also gives a very graphic description of the mood and atmosphere of the time. Details of lectures and conferences are covered, one or two of the more humorous moments also, and Malcolm is also man enough in this book to hold his hand up when he made a mistake or two, all of which of course is to his credit.

The case histories covered are no less fascinating. In the first chapter Malcolm briefly outlines how and why he became involved in this research in the first place. This is followed by the best coverage I have ever read of the Bonnybridge ‘UFO HOT SPOT’. In the early to mid-1990’s, the small town of Bonnybridge was the centre of UFO activity in Britain and some may argue the world. I’ll not spoil it here by highlighting many of the UFO sightings investigated by Malcolm and his colleagues save to say that I thought I knew a good bit about the Bonnybridge sightings but soon realised when reading this chapter that I knew virtually nothing.

Other case histories featured are the Robert Taylor UFO landing account in Livingston of November 1979. With physical traces left on the witness and the location (marks in the ground) this incident was officially investigated by the local police. The A70 Incident is Scotland’s first reported UFO abduction account and it is featured here in full. This particular event is now under consideration for a movie by a UK production company. The Fife Incident took place in September 1996 and involved several witnesses. A controversial case of UFO entities and a whole lot more is again dealt with in-depth by the author. Scotland’s and probably Britain’s best UFO photographic case took place at Craigluscar Reservoir in Scotland on February 19^th 1994. The full story of this daylight UFO photographic case is covered with the photograph in question featured in full. The book is rounded off with Malcolm’s own look at what UFOs may be.

I have purposely not given too much detail of the UFO case histories featured in this book because to offer brief details of them simply would not do them justice.

Like I said at the beginning this is no ordinary UFO book. UFO CASE FILES OF SCOTLAND is a highly significant contribution to the UFO research literature. It is written in a different style to any UFO book I have ever read and all I can say is that if you are only going to buy one UFO book this year then you could go a long way before you find a better one than this. Put it on your shopping list now.

This book is available to order via your local bookshop or online direct from the publisher: www.HealingsOfAtlantis.com and of course via Amazon.

Scotland has seen its fair share of UFO sightings over the years with much of the UFO activity occurring over the skies of Fife and the town of Bonnybridge in Stirlingshire. However, there are two cases involving photographic evidence that are rarely seen in the public domain, two very different but nonetheless quite incredible photographs and experiences.

Good UFO photographs are few and far between; sophisticated computer enhancement rules the roost and blows out the water any potential UFO photographic candidate. Scotland has rarely seen what could be termed a ‘good’ UFO photograph, (apart from the Polmont Reservoir 1991 picture), but all this was soon to change, for on Saturday the 19th of February 1994, Scottish Ufology was presented with what I feel to be ‘the best UFO photograph to have been captured on film in Scotland’. Not only is the photograph clear and sharp, but the witness testimony in regards to the actual incident itself, is I feel, the most honest and lucid testimony that I have ever heard spoken in all my years as a UFO researcher. The actual case itself was passed on to me by Nick Pope of the British Ministry of Defence who at that time was still occupying his seat at the UFO desk in Whitehall, (Air Staff). In fact, Nick was informed about this case in the first instance, by the Scottish Daily Record Newspaper. In a typed statement to the author witness Ian McPherson (44) from a town near Dunfermline had this to say about his UFO encounter.

“On the afternoon of Saturday the 19th of February 1994, I drove to Craigluscar Reservoir just outside of Dunfermline in order to take some photographs of that area. I am an amateur artist, and wanted the photographs to assist me in producing a painting of the reservoir. I am a member of the local angling club who stock and have the fishing rights to the water. Already having taken photographs there in the summer, I wanted to have several of the landscape in the winter. I took a number of photographs as I walked along the bank of the reservoir, and pondering whether I should take some photographs looking east, away from the water, I became aware of what I can only describe as a kind of humming noise, such as that from high voltage power lines. I also felt very uneasy, and turned slowly towards the reservoir.”

“Fairly high in the air, and coming slowly in my direction, was a disc like object which was definitely an ‘aircraft’. I was holding my camera in my hand but somehow felt unable to use it. I have never experienced such a feeling before. I did not think of taking a shot. In retrospect, it seems as if there must have been some kind of compulsion. I was concentrating on the craft, yet not really absorbing what was happening. At that point I was very afraid, but I now realize that the fear passed and was replaced by a sense of ‘relaxed resignation’, (I don’t have better words to describe it). I later realised that I must have been looking at whatever it was for more than fifteen minutes. The craft came close enough for me to see that it was definitely metallic, and had several points of diffused light on it’s underside inside a darker colored ‘rim’. As the craft began to move away, all sense of the feelings that had stayed my hand disappeared. I raised my camera and took two photographs. The craft’s acceleration was phenomenal. By the time I had wound the film on between the two shots, it was a mere dot in the sky to the west. There was no noise at all, apart from the ‘humming’ when it was near to me. I know nothing at all about UFOs, and the subject does not interest me. But nothing of what I saw or experienced was in my ‘imagination’. Of that I am certain. Later that day, I telephoned R.A.F. Pitrevie to enquire as to whether there had been any unusual air activity that day. I was told there had not been. I am an aircraft enthusiast myself, and pride myself in their recognition. I know that what I saw was no conventional aircraft”.

“After speaking with Malcolm Robinson of BUFORA last night, it seems a lot easier to put down my thoughts about what I saw last Saturday without feeling ‘silly’. Because I did! Even when talking to the people from the newspaper”. (Ian knew that he had photographed something quite extraordinary, and that if he developed these photographs himself, he would probably be labeled a hoaxer, and so he felt that by handing them over to the Daily Record Newspaper to develop, this might be more acceptable. But then of course there was the added thought, that what he had photographed, might not come out on film! Still, he had to chance it. Something extraordinary had happened, and he not only needed verification, but he wanted to know what it was). Ian continues the story. “I felt there was only so far I could go. But here was someone who was not only knowledgeable and enthusiastic, but someone who could if not explain it, then at least reassure me on certain points. Not least was Malcolm’s contention that the inability to use the camera at certain times was not unusual. I was glad to hear that. Because all week I have been asking myself “why”? It was not, as a friend suggested, the drama of the situation overwhelming me. Not at all. I didn’t feel that ‘anyone’ was ‘telling me’, I just had ‘NO RIGHT’ or ‘WILL’ to take a photograph. I was asked about the colour of the object/craft/whatever. I now think it was neutral grey, apart from the differences in tone, caused by the direction of normal light falling on it. It was not ‘shiny’, nor chrome, or aluminium like. The simple word I’ve been searching for to best describe it, was ‘dirty’!! It did not look pristine, either in form or finish.”

“Malcolm asked me if I’d seen ‘port holes’ in the top structure, (because he had seen a copy of one of my first sketches in which I ‘did’ depict circular marks there). But, in retrospect, those marks appeared to be more of the surface rather than windows. It has taken me days of pondering and wondering to come to this conclusion. He surprised me too, by asking me if I’d had dreams about what I had experienced. Dreams have never meant much to me, it’s not so much dreams, but more an ‘inability to forget’. All the time, even when I am doing totally unrelated things, the experience comes back. Day and night. Maybe then it ‘does’ come part of ‘dreams’ I don’t know. Points of clarification. When I first saw the object or craft, I seem to be saying that it was both static and moving towards me. What I mean is, it was no longer traveling. I am certain that it did come very slowly nearer, but this came from its size and shape increasing almost imperceptibly, and not from any sight of actual movement, (I hope this makes sense!)”

“And had I not had my camera ready for use, i.e., out of it’s case, lens cap off etc, I ‘know’ I would not have been able to even attempt to capture anything, because from first moving off, when I became able to photograph it, till it disappeared in the distance, was definitely no more than one or two seconds.”

This then was the written statement submitted to SPI by witness Ian McPherson. He also related that he found himself continually trying to draw what he saw, but felt that he just couldn’t get it right. No matter how hard he tried, he was just short of creating the right impression to what he saw that day. Indeed, he tells that on one occasion, he found himself sitting in a chair in his living room not knowing how he got there. He doesn’t remember getting out of bed, or going downstairs to the living room, he just suddenly found himself sitting in a chair in his living room, looking at a painting that he had done of the reservoir. As stated, Ian was troubled by the image in his mind of the ‘craft’ he just had to sketch it correct. Another important point in regards to the photograph that Ian took of the UFO, is when he relates that on the photograph, the object actually looks slim, and resembles a frisbee, in other words it’s ‘thinly structured’. However, when he was actually transfixed and staring at it, he informs me that it had a large squared structure on top which was quite noticeable, and just before the object departed from view, this square structure actually ‘descended’ into the main body of the ‘craft’ it then tilted slightly, then streaked off into the sky at a terrific rate. He only wishes that he had taken his photograph seconds earlier, for if he had, he would have managed to capture the object in all it’s entirety. The SPI Investigation of this impressive case was extensive, and we could find No evidence of any aircraft that were in that area at the time of the sighting. I spoke with the Daily Record’s picture Editor Mr Andrew Allan who has been with the Record for more than 2O years, and he said to me that he was very impressed with the photographs. He had seen others during his time at the Daily Record, but these were certainly the best that he had seen so far. Ian Torrence, the Record’s top photographer, developed the roll of film himself, and he was of the opinion that the negatives had not been ‘touched up’ in any way, and he too, was very impressed. Needless to say, this impressive sighting with accompanying photographs was featured in the Daily Record a few days later, with both comments from Ian McPherson and myself. At this time, copies of both photographs were in the hands of the Ministry of Defence in London for evaluation, and I was told that I would be sent a full written report of their evaluation once it was completed. For the readers information, the make of the camera was a Chinon, model C.5, and its age was about 15 years old, but it was in good condition. The focal length was set at B-1OOO sec, and the F Stop at 2.8. By September of 1994, I still had not received any reply from the Ministry of Defence, and I remember continually phoning them nearly every two weeks. Nick Pope continued to inform me that the MoD had other things to contend with and that it was a case of prioritization but they would get round to it eventually! Copies of these photographs were also submitted for testing to the University of Paisley near Glasgow but they were unable to reach any firm conclusion as to what the object might be, however, what they could tell me, was that the object depicted in the photographs, was most certainly real. With the help of BUFORA’s (then) Director of Investigations Philip Mantle, we enlisted the help of Jeff Sainio of Heartland WI. USA. Jeff is MUFON’S (THE MUTUAL UFO NETWORK) staff photo analyst and was someone who has looked at numerous alleged UFO photographic and video evidence. Jeff conducted computer enhancement tests of the photographs, and the following is an extract from a letter that he sent to Philip Mantle, it reads as follows.

“Two photographs were submitted showing a lake under overcast skies. An aerial flat disc is clearly seen in one photo, the other shows a tiny dot. The second photo’s image is too small for any useful analysis; it could be say, a distant bird or airplane and be indistinguishable. The first photo is plainly not a misidentification. The disc is either an unknown object, or a fraud. The second photo corroborates the witness testimony but adds nothing more. A focus check of the UFO edges shows that the edge sharpness of the UFO versus the horizon is as would be expected for a distant object. The diffuse horizon trees appear noisy, as would be expected, and the apparently rounded edges of the UFO give the appearance of poorer focus than it really is. So the UFO is plainly a ‘distant object’.

“Distance with many lenses can mearly be past 5 or 1O meters easily in range of a thrown model, so this proves little. A thrown model may show evidence of motion streaking during the camera exposure, none was found, nor was any of the horizon appeared to be streaked due to camera motion as the photographer paced the UFO. This also corroborates the witness testimony, although a quick exposure or a thrown model which is moving directly away from the camera would naturally show no evidence of motion streaking. The ring on top of the UFO appears to be evidence of more than mearly a paint ring typical of a frisbee. Since it is not visible on the opposite side of the UFO this is consistent with a raised disc attached to the main disc. This shape is typical with a frisbee, but some hubcap would need to be considered. The disc is slightly reddish green on the central disc, and bluish on the outer disc. After colour correction compared to the sky. A simple chrome hubcap would ‘not’ show this colour variation. The evidence is weak, but argues ‘against’ a hubcap theory”

The findings from Jeff were not conclusive ‘either way’, but at least we had tried to get someone who receives material like this on a daily basis, to have a look at what we had. Further research with flying clubs and model aircraft enthusiasts, drew a blank. We wondered if perhaps any people living locally to the reservoir might have seen something peculiar that day, and I telephoned a nearby farmhouse to ask this question.

I spoke with a local farmer in which after telling him a brief part of what had happened near to his farm; I asked if either he or any members of his family had witnessed anything strange that day. He replied that they had not, but there was one incident which had them perplexed, and it was something which had happened to his daughter and her friend. After speaking with his daughter, I then asked her to type out a statement concerning what had happened, and the following is Shona’s (*) statement. She wrote;

“My friend June picked me up in her Landrover Discovery diesel between 7:45pm and 8: OOpm. We left straight away and I did not notice anything unusual until we were half way down the farm road when I could not get the radio to work. I had been trying to get a tape to work since just after leaving my house, but it wouldn’t play so I took it “Out. I continued to play with the radio until we reached the end of the road when June and I both realised that the head lamps of the Landrover were really dim. I think they had been gradually getting dimmer since we left the house. For some reason, just as we crossed the cross roads at the end of the farm road, June switched the window wipers on, and they went unusually slow.”

“I was still playing with the radio which by this time had no light coming from it, and I told June that it was not working. At around the same time, we noticed that the lights on the car phone had gone off. The headlights were getting dimmer all the time, until they just ‘faded out completely’ about half a mile on from where they had began to fade. We did not know what was happening, and June drove really slowly as we could hardly see. I can remember that the engine was running normally. After passing a bend in the road, the lights slowly came on again, as did the lights on the phone and the radio. I could not be sure about how long everything was completely out, but I don’t think that it could have been longer than 2 minutes, possibly less. We then drove to June’s house about half a mile away where we phoned a friend to come and see what was wrong. He said that he could not see anything wrong with the car at all. June took the car to a garage the next day where it was checked over, but nothing was found to be wrong with it”.

The above account is quite unusual, and came ‘two days’ before the actual observation of the UFO by Ian McPherson. Of course the event described here, may have absolutely nothing to do with what followed two days later, but let us bear in mind the fact that this type of effect has been heard of time and time again within the realms of the UFO phenomena, but Usually however, some form of aerial object is seen during the course of a car stalling or a car’s lights and radio failing. Was a UFO the reason for this vehicle’s strange interference? Nothing was seen by the two girls. I present this incident here purely as a side issue on this important photographic case. It may mean absolutely nothing, but then again it might strike a chord with a Ufologist elsewhere into remembering that they too have had something similar documented. This is why, we Ufologists should present ‘all’ pieces of information, no matter how irrelevant they may seem. We should, as I’ve said before, be very careful that we don’t end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater!! The Craigluscar Incident then is one of those cases which has the added bonus of some photographs, but the witness testimony that we also have from Ian McPherson, is equally impressive. I am of the opinion, that this case is not a hoax, and is not the result of mis-interpretation by Ian, of something that might have been thrown up into the sky. Let us not forget, Ian saw this object for nearly 1O minutes, an incredible amount of time for anyone to have witnessed a UFO. Frisbees and hubcaps don’t stay in the air that long. !

I’ve said many times before, that it is extremely easy to fake a photograph and claim that it represents either a ghost or a UFO. When one is researching the UFO subject, you tend to find that from time to time someone will approach you with what they claim is a photograph of a UFO. Of course having witness testimony backed up with a photograph of a UFO is extremely valuable and one must look very carefully at not Only the claims of the witness, but to ensure that proper analysis of their photograph is undertaken as well. Such a photograph came to my attention during the early years of my Investigation into the Bonnybridge phenomena. Phil Trevis is an aspiring musician who plays guitar in a local Grangemouth rock band but on the night of November 12th 1991 (before the Bonnybridge wave exploded) was taking photographs with a friend for a project about photography. In a written statement to the author, Philip had this to say about his sighting.

“My friend and I were taking photographs of the B.P. Chemicals Plant in Grangemouth from Polmont Reservoir, when we noticed a dim, or rather two small dim flashing lights over by the two flashing pylons at Kincardine Bridge. We watched the object which we thought was a helicopter, fly slowly over the bridge to above the brightly lit Grangemouth Stadium. We watched it hover for about 5 minutes. It was then that we noticed that the ‘craft’ wasn’t making any noise. Normally if it was a helicopter you would hear the rotor blades. It then turned round and faced our direction. It was roughly 2, OOOft above the ground. Then it dipped, and increased dramatically in speed. At the point of the photograph, (See photographic plate section), it was about 2OO to 3OO feet directly above. It was then that we heard the light pulsing ‘hum’ of the object. My friend and I were quite shaken at the time, but afterwards had an overwhelming sense of excitement. Since then I have shown only a handful of people my photograph, and have also destroyed the negative. I have no reason for destroying the negative, but now obviously regret my actions”.

The actual photograph was handed over to me by a friend of the photographer’s at an SPI meeting held in Stirling, it was taken by a Halina 35mm, camera using Kodak 24 exposure on gold film. What one should bear in mind whilst looking at this strange photograph, is that what you are actually looking at, is the underside of the object, because when this strange device was above both of the startled witnesses, Philip had to actually bend over backwards in order to take his photograph. In the photograph you can see that the middle of the object appears to be concave, various bright white lights are seen shining out from this circular object which creates a sort of halo effect in the sky around it. So what did our Investigations uncover, was there a natural explanation to account for this photograph? I firstly contacted the local police to see if any members of the public had contacted their station with a similar sighting, no one had. I then submitted many letters to the various Scottish Airports to see if perhaps some kind of aircraft or helicopter had been flying in this area on the night in question. Prestwick Airport at Atlantic House in Ayrshire replied in June 1995 by stating that, (A) Records for the period in question were no longer held. (B) It was improbable that a Military Aircraft flew over Grangemouth on the night in question. (C) Gas Venting often takes place at this petro-chemical plant, an occurrence which could appear alarming. Both witnesses were well aware what this ‘gas venting’ looked like, and this most certainly was not what they both had witnessed. Aberdeen Airport was not able to offer any explanations as were both Edinburgh and Glasgow. The Ministry of Defence in London replied that because this sighting was of no defence significance, they were unable to assist, (now where have I heard this before)! But what if anything could the B.P. plant offer in terms of information. This plant which is extremely explosive is a beautiful sight when lit up at night, and looking at it from a distance, one could be forgiven for thinking that they were looking at Las Vegas such is the enormity and brightness of this complex. In a letter received by the author from a Mr Bill Moore, press officer for B.P. Chemicals dated 9th June 1995, Bill stated, and I quote, “I can confirm that helicopters carry out pipeline inspection duties on behalf of B.P. Chemicals. These flights occur at fortnightly intervals and only take place during daylight hours at weekends. I should point out that the helicopters do not tend to fly over the site as they are more concerned with following the separate pipeline routes connecting Wilton and Mossmorran to Grangemouth. Micro-lights or controlled kites with cameras do not fly over the complex. I have checked our records, and there is no indication of any aircraft having flown over the Grangemouth complex on the 12th of November 1991”.

In a further letter, this time from a Mr K.W. Smith, Estates & Pipelines Coordinator for B.P. Oil at the Grangemouth Plant, he stated and confirmed that B.P. Oil do not use micro-lights or any other controlled flying devices to inspect pipes, and that air space immediately above the B.P. Petrochemical complex is a ‘restricted area’ to aircraft. He went on to state that according to a limited search by him, he could find no evidence of anything unusual on the night in question.

After these checks and several others, it was plain to see that nothing conventional was to blame for what both witnesses saw. Analysis on the photograph proved very little and did not help to prove the case either way, and as we know, the witness destroyed the negative for reasons which even now, he can’t fully understand. In fact, he was actually going to destroy the photograph as well but was talked out of it by a friend. Having spoken to Philip on a number of occasions now, I still have no reason to doubt his honesty, and I do believe that what he and his friend saw that night, was something totally unexplainable by rational means. Sadly Phil’s friend passed away in a motor accident and so therefore I was unable to obtain any clarification to Phil’s story. The Phil Trevis photograph is clearly unusual, and is most certainly part and parcel of the Bonnybridge phenomena. The area, in which he took his photograph, is only several miles away from Bonnybridge itself. An unusual photograph then and one of the very few photographs that we have which shows UFO activity over Scotland.

Please check out my new book - UFO Case Files of Scotland (Amazing Real Life Alien Encounters) by Malcolm Robinson, shortly available from: http://www.healingsofatlantis.com

The subject of UFOs has been hotly debated. Are UFOs space vehicles from another world? Are they top-secret military aircraft of some kind? Or are they simply a figment of our imagination? If we are totally honest none of us really know for sure, but one thing we can say with complete accuracy is that whatever UFOs are, they do not respect any international boundary or border. UFO sightings have been made on every continent on earth and quite probably in every single country as well.

Malcolm Robinson is a UFO & Paranormal Researcher with over 30 year’s expertise and has had ‘hands on’ experience with each of the cases contained in this book. Malcolm has lectured extensively on UFOs and the Paranormal all over the UK and Ireland and was the first Scot to lecture on American soil in Laughlin Nevada in 2009.

Malcolm has appeared regularly on TV both here in the UK and all over the world and has assisted newspapers and radio stations with information on UFOs and the Paranormal.

The full story regarding the wave of UFO sightings over the town of Bonnybridge is given here, as is the full story of Scotland’s first ‘reported’ UFO abduction. Other close encounter cases are also looked at in great detail.

In the publication of Malcolm Robinson’s first book, he looks to enlighten you with the most fascinating UFO cases that Scotland has to offer. This work is not meant to be definitive; instead it is Malcolm’s own reflection on his research and thoughts on what represents to be Scotland’s most intriguing and unexplained UFO cases.

This is an epic book, a book that clearly shows that Scotland as a country has been touched by the UFO presence. This book will leave you with little doubt that mankind is dealing with a very real and bona fide phenomenon, as the witnesses in this book can clearly testify to.

In this article, we will attempt to find out Pilot-Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov’s true opinion about UFOs; and, regardless of his true UFO reality beliefs, reveal some information previously unavailable in the West information about this distinguished, brave, talented, intelligent, and very complicated human being, one of the first Soviet cosmonauts, one of the last remaining original Russian space explorers.

Our research of Pilot-Cosmonaut Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov and his views about unidentified flying objects begins with a declassified report from the Department of Defense Intelligence of the United States of America. The report number is 2 723 1209 70, the date is August 19, 1970.

The information contained in the report dates back to May 18, 1970. The subject is Soviet Space Development, and the country in question is Japan. There, in Yokogama, in the Tokai University in Kanagawa Prefecture, a distinguished Soviet cosmonaut Leonov was giving a lecture at the Shohan Annex. The cosmonaut talked about Soviet experiences in space; and future plans of the USSR regarding space exploration (including a mammoth space station, which the USSR planned to put into orbit). Leonov also expressed disbelief in UFOs.

Leonov talked about several subjects that day. One had to do with improvement of the Soviet space capsule brake equipment. The other was the confirmation of Soviet Moon data by U.S. astronauts. This confirmation interested American military intelligence, and we think we know the reason: like the CIA, they heard about early (and classified) Soviet attempts to reach the Moon. By the way, it is quite likely that Leonov was instructed to misinform people in the West about UFO sightings in the USSR. Two years before Leonov’s speech in Japan, an organized attempt by Soviet scientists and military researchers to conduct UFO research independently (via television broadcasts and other means) was ruthlessly crushed. UFOs continued to remain a taboo subject in the Soviet Union.

This fascinating episode of Soviet UFO research history (unparalleled elsewhere in the world) is described in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon.

We believe that even back in 1970, Leonov had to know about UFO sightings reported by other cosmonauts. He really does not deny any such reports.

Here is what Leonov revealed to the Japanese about Soviet exploration of the Moon:

The Soviet Union has a well-coordinated program for travel to the Moon and has compiled complete and detailed data concerning conditions on the Moon through its Moon station. It has photographs of the Moon’s dark side and complete data on the make-up and characteristics of its surface, the Moon’s gravity field, etc. “The US astronauts who landed on the Moon only confirmed what we already knew.” he said.

Then, Leonov addressed the Japanese audience on the subject of UFOs. The speaker said he does not believe in the existence of unidentified flying objects. Why, he asked, would the flying saucers, if they do exist, be seen only over the United States, France and Italy? He said there is no record of any of the Soviet observatories, which are manned by highly trained technicians, ever having seen a flying saucer.

The source of the information of the DIA for the report was a Japanese government agency official.

Was this is a crude but intentional misinformation attempt? A well-placed functionary of the Soviet space program, Leonov knew what was really happening at the observatories. Or was he simply following the orders?

Fascinating is the extent to which the Soviets went to hide the facts that the astronomers did see UFOs. Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon (latest book by Mantle & Stonehill) has a chapter that lists UFO reports and observations by Soviet astronomers, scientists that have received top training in their field. Some of their observations had been published in the Soviet media, in the 1960s, well before Leonov embarked to Japan. Yet, the Soviet newspaper PRAVDA stated on February 29, 1968, that astronomers who carefully observe the sky day and night, never see "flying saucers". Both the cosmonaut and the newspaper concealed the true state of affairs; but the history of Soviet UFO phenomenon research proves that UFOs were of interest to astronomers, and UFO observations had been reported by astronomers of the Soviet Union.

On March 23, 2005, fourteen years after the USSR had disintegrated Leonov was interviewed by a Russian publication Drugoye Vremya (RIAN Agency). The press-conference was in honor of the 40^th anniversary of his space walk. He said that all Earthlings very much want that there be someone except us, but alas, in the confines of the Solar System, there is no intelligent life (he really meant other than human beings-PM/PS). And Leonov added: “I declare it with full responsibility”. Leonov went on:

“As a military person, I headed a commission for the research of unusual space phenomena, and I swear to you, not even one occurrence had been established by us”. Leonov said that the unusual objects observed from the Earth, as a rule, had to do either with special meteorological phenomena or rocket launches of spacecraft as their exhausts had taken extremely peculiar shapes in the upper layers of the atmosphere. (Rockets launch spacecraft carrying cosmonauts and astronauts that orbit Earth and travel into space. These rockets, like the ones used to launch probes and satellites, are called by NASA launch vehicles. In Russian, they are called kosmicheskiye raketi-PM/PS). “Crosses with gigantic rings around them, especially in the clear wintry weather, could be observed for an extended period of time in the area of the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (space launch facility PM/PS), in the Saratov region, and over Baikonur after the launch of the Soyuz launch vehicles. Many people saw them, and took the rings to be UFOs; retold to each other, and thus legends were born”, clarified the cosmonaut. Leonov had other arguments, too. “Till now, nowhere in the world has there been taken even one clear photograph, where one could look at, and unambiguously assert that, yes, this is a UFO. Why are there no such photographs now, when almost everyone has a photo camera in their mobile telephone?”

This was, as far as we could establish, the first time that Pilot-Cosmonaut Leonov mentioned the “commission “(also referred to as “committee” elsewhere) he had headed. This commission had investigated UFOs. As far as we can determine, the commission was not with the SETKA program (top secret official Soviet joint military and academic project for the research of UFOs. The program is described in Paul Stonehill and Philip Mantle’s article:

Setka: A Secret Soviet UFO Research Program
DAWN OF THE SECRET PROGRAM

What commission did Leonov head? Where are its findings? What cases have been investigated?

Next, Leonov was interviewed by Russian magazine Biznes (issue 25, June 19, 2006). We will translate Leonov’s statements as closely as possible; every word, we believe, had been carefully chosen. He stated that for a long time he had headed a committee that had followed unidentified objects. Leonov said that he is certain: in the Solar system, there is no intelligent life other than the one on Earth. There may be life at the level of microbes (since water has been discovered on Mars). There is life, undoubtedly, somewhere in the Universe. But it is out of reach. The closest star to our Galaxy is five light years away. Imagine, traveling five years at the speed of light. We are not skilled to do so, for now. But he is certain that the extraterrestrials had visited the Earth. All world religions have testimonials: an Enlightener flew in, left followers, and then ascended, that is, flew away…”

On April 29, 2009, an interview with Leonov interview was published at the Russian Kaleidoskop website.

It is a fascinating piece of information, because Leonov is clearly trying to discredit Marina Popovich Soviet cosmonaut and UFO researchers), and contradicts other Soviet cosmonauts who reported UFOs.

“When I had worked in the Cosmonauts Training Centre (Star City, or Zvyozdny gorodok in Russian, is a military research and training facility near Shchyolkovo in the Moscow region, 32 kilometers northeast of Moscow. Russian cosmonauts have lived and trained in Star City at the Yu.A.Gagarin State Scientific Research-and-Testing Cosmonaut Training Center since the 1960s-PM/PS), I headed the Commission for UFOs, and collected all evidence. Unfortunately, there has not been one fact that would not raise doubts. But when one listens to Marina Popovich, one gets such cheerful notion that around us not only do the flying saucers fly about, but also do humanoids walk with red lanterns and a siren.” We will discuss Marina Popovich in this article, at a later stage.

Then Leonov reiterates that there is no intelligent life within the Solar System. Those are his exact words. Leonov continued:

“There is life that can have lowest forms, but in our understanding, there is no intelligent life. There are various testimonies, but no scientific corroboration for them. At the same time, there are numerous artifacts on Earth that demonstrate that someone had visited our planet. But that happened long ago. Written language on Earth has been in existence no more than four thousand years. Prior to that, everything was conveyed through words, and every person would add something. In my understanding, religion, no matter who worships what, has a common foundation; it is enlightenment, ascension. No matter what one takes, Hinduism of Russian Orthodox Christianity, we see that (someone-PM/PS) “arrived”, “flew in”, “told”, “created students and disciples”, and “ascended with thunder and lightnings”. A solution suggests itself: four to five thousand years ago someone had been here. The writing tradition did not even preserve that. But there remain phenomena and testimonies that force doubts whether or not intelligent beings visited the Earth. Most likely, they did. However, so far we do not see them. There is much talk, that Grechko (famous Soviet cosmonaut-PM/PS) had seen them, that during the flight they were accompanied by UFOs; that, allegedly Volodya Kovalenok (another famous Soviet cosmonaut; see Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon for the fascinating observations attributed to him during the Fifth Expedition; as well as other UFO reports and observations revealed by Soviet and Russian astronauts-PM/PS) had seen them, too, and talked (with them? or about them?-Leonov’s statement is not clear -PM/PS).

“But in fact, when one begins to look in depth, it turns out that these objects are ours, manually made. Pails, cylinders made from polished duralumin that had been thrown away from the station were poorly hermetized, and thus retained their shapes, and from the side they looked like unknown objects. Nothing more and nowhere else had appeared. But people, who go about and talk about this, use their privileges and fame”.

“About ten years ago, Marina Popovich, who today is the president of the Central Asian and Kazakhstan collegium of ufologists, wakes us up at one o’clock at night, and beckons to look at a UFO. We ran to the balcony. Yes, there is a saucer moving over the forest. I tell Marina, we are erecting a building there and are using a big horizontal crane 22 stories tall. Her daughter as well as my daughter, they ran to see; come there (and see-PM/PS) the crane. One month later, there was a ufological congress in (Saint –PM/PS) Petersburg. After the congress, I read in Znaniye magazine: On such and such date, at such coordinates a UFO was observed. All our family had observed, plus we invited the Leonov family, who also observed and confirmed. I meet (later-PM/PS) with Marima, and say: Why? It is not true. She responds to me: Yes, not true, but interesting. But now, when she makes a speech and starts saying about something, I just smile, and think: you go ahead and listen, but everything will be completely different, if they arrive”.

More questions arise after Leonov’s interview. Why does he launch an attack on Marina’s credibility? While Marina is attacked, what of her former husband, Pavel Popovich, one of Russia’s most famous cosmonauts, a former colleague of Leonov’s, a UFO research proponent who headed SOUYZUFOTSENTR and obtained the KGB UFO files from Deputy Chairman of the KGB, N. Sham in 1991 ( see Philip Mantle’s article The Real KGB UFO Files at http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0308/kgb.html); that very Pavel Popovich who himself witnessed a UFO and has helped coordinate Kosmopoisk, an independent civilian field expeditionary and research entity, engaged in the study and research of anomalous phenomena (ufology, cryptophysics), borderline and futuristic scientific breakthroughs? Why is Leonov silent about Pavel Popovich, but outspoken about Marina? Has her research uncovered something that bothers him, and perhaps those from the commission he had headed?

What artifacts does Leonov mention in his interview? He does believe in ancient astronaut visitation possibility (paleocontact, the term Russian ufologists use to describe the hypothesis). What does he know of Kovalyonok’s and Savinikh’s observations in 1981 and what has Leonov heard about the alleged contact described in our book (and based on Cosmonaut Beregovoy’s revelations as reported in the Russian media)?

What about other observations reported by Kovalyonok during his years in space? How does Leonov know that everything will be completely different if “they arrive”, and different in what way?

On May 29, 2009, an interview with Leonov was published in Russian Izvestiya newspaper. He was asked whether UFO enthusiasts tried to communicate with him. Here is how the cosmonaut responded:

“I am fed up with them! Today, there is not even one occurrence, for which one could not find a natural explanation. But people very much want not to be alone. I do not exclude the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrials. Moreover, I think that someone had visited the Earth sometime ago. There are too many signs of the interference of other beings, more developed than human beings. But all the evidence about this (interference or intervention-vmeshatel’stvo in Russian-PM/PS) has to be collected in fragments, because the writing exists several thousand years, and prior to that, everything was recorded by oral tradition”.

On May 30, 2009, another interview was published in Fakty i kommentarii, a Ukrainian newspaper. Leonov was asked whether, while in space, he observed UFOs. He again mentioned the UFO commission he headed, and his duty to collect all evidence. He reiterated that there has not been a single fact that would not raise doubts (but Leonov did not provide the direct answer to the interviewer’s question-PM/PS).

Leonov went on to repeat the story of Marina Popovich and the crane. A few more details were added (“Indeed, we see luminescence that if one really wishes to, could be mistaken a saucer”...”There is a projector (on the crane-PM/PS) that they turn on at night. When clouds are low, the ray rests in the clouds, creating a luminescent circle that resembles a UFO”).

At the end of the story Leonov asks us to forgive Marina Popovich. Then he adds that he is certain that within the Solar System there is no intelligent life, except for the one on Earth. “Man (human being-PM/PS) is the apex of what the Creator has created. And, of course, our planet (is, too-PM/PS)”.

Leonov was interviewed by Russia Today on July 20, 2009. When asked about UFOs, the cosmonaut replied: “Belief in UFOs is just as stupid as the claim that the Americans never landed on the Moon”. But he said that for him, there is still one phenomenon he cannot explain: It’s those circles in the fields. Leonov stated that “it’s not a hoax, and you can’t fake one. What is it? No one has been able to explain”.

This courageous woman is a distinguished test pilot, a scientist with a doctorate degree in flight technology from the University of Leningrad, a Lt. Colonel, and a highly decorated aviator. Today Marina Lavrentyevna Popovich heads a private aviation company. She is a journalist, and a published author of six books. Because of her efforts, Russian ufologists were able to find out many hidden facts of their country’s UFO research and covered-up incidents. She had personally observed UFOs three times in her life, once during an expedition to the Pamir Mountains, to find the Yeti. There were forty people in the expedition, including her daughter, and they all observed a UFO from an altitude of 4000 meters up the mountain. A spherical object over a nearby gorge emitted a ray. Another time she and her husband observed a giant UFO over the Mitino area. It was a giant, elongated object, some 250 meters long. An airplane flying below it was barely seen. She estimated the object to be at the altitude of 20 kilometers. The UFO left behind a vortex trail.

The UFO observation Leonov refers to is this one (our information came from Russia years ago, from her interview with ANOMALIYA newspaper in 1996). The last time (as far as we knew in 2007) Marina Popovich observed a UFO was in June of 1996, at 3:00 a.m. The object made no sounds, but produced complex maneuvers. It also emitted pulse-like bursts of illumination. Marina woke up her spouse and guests, and they also observed the object.

Here, we have obvious inconsistencies with Leonov’s account, but cannot confirm Marina Popovich’s account. Were the “guests” she mentioned, actually Leonov and his family, her neighbors? We have no way to confirm the truthfulness of either account.

Marina Popovich had almost graduated from the cosmonaut training school many years ago. But she was dropped from the program after Pavel Popovich, the general she was married to, convinced high officials that she was not suited for space flights. By doing so he probably saved her health. If anyone is qualified to define what a UFO is, it would be this remarkable woman: she flew all Soviet aircraft, from AN-22 transport planes to MIG-21 supersonic jets. She holds 90 flight records.

Marina Popovich is a very clear-headed person: according to her, 90 percent of sightings are not UFOs but easily explainable phenomena. She mentioned a laboratory in Tver that was assigned the task of interpreting UFO photographs sent to them. Just like her, the researchers there could not explain 10 percent of sightings.

Marina Popovich is firm in her beliefs. She is certain that the inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci, the writings of Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Ray Bradbury were technological transmissions from outer space. The three men have been used as mediums. She considered former Soviet President Gorbachev to be an extraterrestrial “front man“, because he caused profound historical changes.

When Paul Stonehill met her in 1991, she was sure that the secret Soviet files on UFOs would become public. At the time Marina Popovich became something like a spokesperson for Soviet UFO study groups. She estimated that it would be a long while before all such secret files will be open for inspection. Marina Popovich knew of over 14 thousand UFO sightings that took place in the USSR between 1966 and 1991. When she spoke at the Whole Life Expo in Los Angeles in 1991, she broke the news that underground ufologists in the USSR who went public with their beliefs were either fired or placed in psychiatric hospitals. But even Marina Popovich was not aware of many strange UFO sightings and phenomena that took place in the Soviet Union, and came to light after 1991. She was kind enough to share information and photographs with the Russian Ufology Research Center in Los Angeles. Marina Popovich is a concerned ecologist, because she was able to find out the horrible damage inflicted on Russia and other countries that comprised the USSR. She saw rivers drying up, dying lakes and ponds, ozone holes, and toxic spills. Russia's ecology was ravaged even before the Chernobyl incident. Economic plight of Russia in the 1990sand poverty in her native land greatly saddened her.

As for the UFOs that cannot be explained by natural phenomena, being a trained pilot she takes them for what they are: spacecraft of extraterrestrials. Marina Popovich is certain that human beings are not the only intelligent creatures in the Universe and those others are indeed paying us a visit.

In 1991 Marina Popovich showed Paul Stonehill a photograph that Phobos 2 made before its demise. It depicts a gigantic cylindrical object approximately 25 kilometers long. After that last frame was radio-transmitted back to earth, the Soviet probe disappeared.

But Marina Popovich told Paul Stonehill that the Glavkosmos (Soviet Space program), knew all along that whatever it was that destroyed the Soviet probe in 1989, was created by artificial intelligence.

We have done an extensive research of the Phobos 2 spacecraft disaster, and mysterious circumstances surrounding the mission and its aftermath. Our findings are presented Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon. The mysteries of the Martian moonlet are of great interest to at least some people in the world. On August 6, 2009, in an interview to C-SPAN cable television program, American astronaut Buzz Aldrin said: “We should visit the moons of Mars. There's a monolith there - a very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once every seven hours”. The moonlet in question is Phobos. As far as the secrets of the moonlet, well, Marina Popovich tried her best to get the world to pay attention to them, as did others, such as Professor Burdakov. Apparently, Americans know quite a lot, too; and others, hence, the new joint mission Russian-Chinese mission to Phobos is in the works.

There is a person in Ukraine who happened to know both Marina Popovich and Aleksei Leonov quite well.

Valentin Vasilyevich Petukhov had a distinguished Communist Party career in the city of Yevpatoria (today, a major Ukrainian Black Sea port). From 1967 to 1980 he headed the city’s Communist Party Committee, and thus, controlled the city. Before that, he was the deputy secretary, i.e., second in command. The cosmonauts arrived to Yevpatoria because during the Soviet era, the city housed a special secret facility for cosmonaut training, as well as space tracking and flight control center at the Kalamitsky Bay. The cosmonauts had a nickname for Petukhov; they called him Papa Valya.

He has great memories about “Lyosha” Leonov. At the same time, Petukhov’s family befriended Marina Popovich, who was then married to Pavel Popovich. They were really close friends, he revealed in the interview with Ukrainian newspaper Bul’var Gordona on March 27, 2009. Marina is a famous test-pilot, a brave, willful, and valiant woman, stated Petukhov. She came to Yevpatoria as the aircraft commander; the airplane was flown in for repairs in the city’s stationary aviation works of the Black Sea Navy’s air force (SAM-20). She presented Petukhov’s family with her book, and many photographs.

While writing this article, the authors have researched dozens of Russian and Ukrainian sources.

We believe that we have stumbled upon the best explanation for Leonov’s statements about UFOs (and Marina Popovich) in a very interesting post at a Russian UFO discussion forum ( ( http://www.ufolog.ru/forum/

The author (his name is Vlad) of this post, dated April 18, 2008), revealed that he had a scientific and military background, and he stated his opinion because someone else at the forum repeated arguments of scientists and some military officials about UFOs. In particular, the oath of cosmonaut A. Leonov that during the time he had been the chairman of UFO phenomena research, he never encountered anything “amazing”.

Vlad wrote that he had conversations with those who served in the Rocket Forces, the air defense, pilots, the KGB personnel, and even submariners (he had numerous friends). Practically, they all stated (unofficially) that one way or another, they either personally had encountered UFOs, or their departments had received information about UFOs. Vlad does not want to go into details because there are too many, and (he is being honest), it’s too boring for him to discuss them. But he does mention that his acquaintance in the air defense forces asserted that they were instructed to discern UFOs from aircraft on the radar screens. Then Vlad recalled that while he served in the army, he repeatedly and personally observed that the regiment’s officer on duty had “log of the flight of satellites”. But what satellites could be there in an infantry regiment, asked Vlad. The only means of observation they had were binoculars. The log Vlad refers to had entries that had nothing to do with satellites. Then he goes on to discuss Leonov’s oath (he does not think much about its worth), and refers to Marina Popovich. She was wife of a cosmonaut, distinguished test-pilot, Hero of Socialist Labor; she set 101 aviation records. And she mentioned more than once that she had witnessed UFOs on three occasions. Think about it, wrote Vlad, why would she lie to the entire nation? Has she nothing better to do than study a made-up fiction?

Moreover, let us remember our very famous ufologist Ajaja, continues Vlad. He is a former military man, and had begun his UFO research under direct orders of the Russian Navy HQ, as too many reports about UFOs came there from military seamen. His first work was titled Hydrosphere aspects of UFO problem. (More about Soviet USO, unidentified submersible objects, Ajaja and Naval counterintelligence research is detailed in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon-PM/PS). Certainly, the Nay HQ has jokers, or “old women from a village”, right? Vlad adds that he could right much and tediously, but what for…The matter is clear, anyway.

Vlad concludes his post, going back to Leonov. Regardless of all his doubtless merits, he is but an all-Russia story-teller of fairy tales with a kind smile. But a story-teller against his will. Once he said something without thinking it through, and now he has to “save his face”. That is why he swears oaths, although all realize what kind of oaths these are. The most vexing aspect (for Leonov, adds Vlad) is that he would like to take his words back, but it is too late.

Vlad mentioned that he had observed something unusual in the sky, too. Whom should he believe, he asks, his own eyes or Leonov. And, by the way, adds Vlad, Leonov talks very intricately, with cunning, when he states that he personally had not seen anything amazing. But he never talks for everyone.

Vlad concludes his post with a question: “I think I have clarified the situation?” He certainly did for the authors of this article.

Leonov told Russian newspaper Izvestiya on May 29, 2009 that he does not consider himself to be a legendary personality.

Despite his illustrious career and position in the Soviet hierarchy, Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov was not just a Homo Sovieticus. He was born in Siberia, in May of 1934. His father was arrested in 1937, accused of being “an enemy of the people”. Two years later he was acquitted, but those years were very harsh on Aleksei and his family (eight children and his mother); they were “members of the family of the enemy of the people”, lowest of the low, and as he recalled, a number of his neighbors simply came to their home, and took whatever they wanted, including little Aleksei’s clothing.

Later in life, Leonov was expected to become a professional artist. But he loved aviation too, and the young man was then flying jets and studying engineering. In 1959, the 25 year old Leonov was picked as one of the first 20 Cosmonauts.

He was the first person to step out of a spacecraft and walk in space (1965). Leonov was also commander of the Soyuz spacecraft that took part in the first rendezvous between Soviet and United States spacecraft (1975). Hero of the Soviet Union, pilot, cosmonaut, military scientist; writer, artist and talented painter…

Once, during the Soviet era, Leonov purchased an American Ford, but since it was not proper for Soviet cosmonauts to drive in American automobiles, he was forced to sell it.

Once, Leonov helped Russian female cosmonaut Savitskaya sneak out of the confined quarters (before her scheduled flight), and take back streets to get to the stores to buy materials to sew together a blouse. Leonov and Savitskaya sewed lead pieces into the sleeves, so that she could wear (Savitskaya smuggled the blouse into the aircraft) it and surprise her colleagues during the flight’s weightlessness. Did Leonov ever speak with her about the experience she and her colleagues had in 1984, when “angels” entered the Soviet spacecraft (we described the incident in detail, in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon)? He never speaks about it. How many other stories about UFOs and aliens Leonov (who has worked 35 years in the Cosmonauts Training Centre) has heard, but does not reveal?

There is a story that before the Baikonur launches, Leonov had a special tradition: he would gently push the cosmonauts with his knee “under their backsides”, before they would climb the ladder to their spacecraft. He is also superstitious, like most other cosmonauts.

Very few people know that when Sergey Korolyov died, three cosmonauts made a secret pact to bury his ashes on the Moon. Sergey Pavlovich Korolev was a designer of guided missiles, rockets and spacecraft, former prisoner of the Gulag, this victim of Stalin’s purges became the multi-talented chief designer of launch vehicles during the early years of the Soviet Union’s space program.

The cosmonauts knew that the Central Committee of the Communist Party would not let them do it (they would probably want part of Lenin’s ashes to be buried first in lunar soil). The three acquired the ashes; hid them in a special capsule, kept by Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin perished later. So did Komarov, another famous Soviet cosmonaut who died prematurely. Leonov is the only one remaining. The Soviets did not land on the Moon, and the capsule was eventually lost.

Pilot-Cosmonaut Leonov strongly rejects claims that Americans made up their Moon mission. He is adamant that the Americans were on the Moon; Soviet radars monitored everything, and Leonov and his colleagues were able to observe the Americans, and root for them.

Leonov was one of the cosmonauts who were being trained for the Soviet manned Moon mission. He was actually in charge of the training, as the Soviet lunar team commander. Yet, the program was closed (after Korolyov’s death) and Americans became the first humans to walk on the Moon. The training was extremely harsh, and three Soviet cosmonauts lost their lives in the process.

In 1992 Leonov, Major General of the Soviet Air Force was let go from the Armed Forces, five years before his scheduled retirement. He was upset that no one needed him, and decided to dedicate himself to painting. But Leonov was wrong. He was hired to be the president of Alfa-Kapital, an investment fund; they knew of his connections with the military-industrial complex, and his managerial skills. In 1998, the year of the Asian crisis and Russia’s default, Leonov became the Vice President of Alfa-Bank, and significantly expanded the bank. He has traveled to the United States on many occasions, as a businessman.

Leonov lives in the house he has designed himself, near the Star City. His painting studio is on the third floor. Leonov is involved in philanthropy, and helps children with heart diseases (his paintings have been sold for substantial amounts).

He said in one of his interviews that he often dreams of flying, whether in aircraft; or in spacecraft into the deep space…and becomes sad. He is over 75 years old, and has suffered a heart attack before; now he has heart problems. But his spirit is strong.

In April of 2009, during the cosmonauts meeting with Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, Leonov was able to save the Cosmonauts Training Centre training aircraft from being turned over to the Air Force for its transportation needs. Medvedev treated him with great respect.

Leonov considers alien invaders to be a threat. But the invaders he is afraid of are meteorites (in his words, akin to the Tunguska phenomenon). What would happen if a meteorite was to fall on Moscow or London? Yet, virtually no attention is paid to the issue. Leonov calls for a new international prevention system to be created (Izvestiya, May 29, 2009). This is more important than travel to Mars, added Pilot-Cosmonaut. Despite his age he continues to be a pioneer in many fields and his highly respected by all that know him or have worked with him. He is a true hero of Russia in every sense of the word, although we disagree with his opinion of Marina Popovich.

Whether he knows more about the UFO phenomenon that he has publicly stated remains to be seen but his many comments on the possibility of ancient astronauts is a curious one and nothing he says would surprise us.

MYSTERIOUS SKY – Soviet UFO Phenomenon By Philip Mantle & Paul Stonehill is available via Amazon.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into ufology the old subject of the Alien Autopsy Film comes up again. There are those who still hold out some hope that this film is authentic and it really is proof that aliens were recovered at a crash site in New Mexico in l947, however, this is not the case. The Alien Autopsy Film is a hoax and is a complete scam.

I have already covered this in my book ‘ALIEN AUTOPSY INQUEST’ but to prove any scam it can be most useful for someone else to check some of your work and discover for themselves exactly where the Alien Autopsy scam began. Sean Jones is a UFO researcher in the UK and I passed him the contact details of Keith Bateman. Bateman made what is known as the ‘tent footage’ section of the alien autopsy film. Not widely seen on TV this is a largely unknown part of the alien autopsy saga. The ‘tent footage’ is about 6 minute’s long, black and white film. It shows a ‘creature’ on a table covered by a sheet with its head, arms and feet showing. To the far side of it are two men in white coats (doctors) and a man in a dark coat walks in front of the camera every now and then. The two doctors appear to be handling some kind of flesh-like material. There is no sound.

Ray Santilli, the front man for the alien autopsy film, originally said that this tent footage film was a sequence filmed at the crash site in a field tent. It was the first section of film shown to anyone, myself included. Several months later Santilli withdrew this statement stating that his mysterious former military cameraman did not recognise the film and could not be sure about it.

In l998, my colleague Tim Matthews and I were contacted by a gentlemen by the name of Keith Goodyer. Goodyer told us that he knew who had made this ‘tent footage’ and he in turn led us to Keith Bateman. Bateman was at first reluctant to speak to us but slowly but surely he told his story of how he faked this sequence, that the whole alien autopsy film was a scam, the full context of which can be found it my book.

I asked Sean if he would independently like to check this part of the story with Bateman to verify my research. This he did earlier this year. The following is reproduced with the kind permission of Sean Jones.

This conversation lasted slightly over an hour. It was free flowing and several things were discussed and revisited during the conversation. It was a conversation, not an interview as we also discussed numerous items non Alien Autopsy related. I took notes and I am using these to refresh my memory. If I omit anything, it is not to be disingenuous but because we talked about quite a lot and as I said, we revisited several items more than once.

I rang Keith Bateman (KB) on his home number supplied to me by Philip Mantle (PM).

I introduced myself, I told Keith that PM had given me his number and told him why I was calling him.

KB volunteered very early on in the conversation that he was the cameraman for the fake "Tent Footage". (Within the first five minutes in fact.)

I spoke about Spyros Melaris (The man who led the team that faked the actual autopsy footage. See my web site: www.philipmantle.com for full details) coming clean and wanting to publish a book about the making of the Alien Autopsy etc. KB said that he had never met the man and had only heard him mentioned in relation to the Alien Autopsy three times, this conversation being the third time.

KB felt that his tent footage was more realistic as he had given a lot of thought in to the camera mans motives etc, i.e.: being got up late at night to come and film this thing. However Ray Santilli (RS) said that it was "a load of rubbish" and refused to pay for it. KB informed me that he still has the original footage on film, (although this is likely to have degraded by now) and he also has the original BETA footage ("in colour"). He would like to know who is claiming copyright of the footage as RS sold it to Kiviat production for a figure that he believes to be $500K. He also believes that Bob Kiviat told RS that KB should get a third of the money for his work.

KB went on to explain that working with RS was "interesting" at times. He was there (back in the days of AK Music) with RS and Andy Price-Watts (AP-W) when RS came up with the original idea for the Alien Autopsy. It was being done for one reason, and one reason only, to make money. KB said they had tried a number of different things to make money; it was like that in the eighties and nineties. KB said whilst RS never paid him for the tent footage he often gave him work to "shut him up", basically paying him to keep quiet about his involvement.

KB said that the Ant & Dec film (Alien Autopsy movie) was total lies from beginning to end. Full of fabrications and that Gary Shoefield (Santilli’s business partner) was never involved the way he was portrayed in the film.

Photo 2 : Elliot Wills. He played one of the ‘doctors in the tent footage but worked for Keith Bateman at AK Music.

KB said that he edited the tent footage whilst AP-W did the "selling" of the film. Little did they know how RS was "screwing them over". KB said that he had talked to RS about making the AA film himself. Andy Bennett (One of Bateman’s colleagues) was going to be one of the actors in it, the alien, only being disabled he couldn't lie flat on the table for a mould to be made, so in the end, it was his son that was used (Bateman’s).

When I asked how much KB had quoted RS to make the film he told me £25K. I asked him to confirm this as I had been told by Philip Mantle and Spyros Melaris (via email) that KB wanted £45K and that SM wanted just £35K which is why he "got the gig". When I pressed about this figure KB said that he was certain about it as he was quoted £25K to make the body for the autopsy. KB believed that the other company (SM) got the job for £15K. He did say that he felt that SM had done a better job that he thinks he could have done, because of certain effects.

KB said he had also heard that John Humphries (UK sculptor and part of Spyros Melaris’ team) had been credited with making the film, but wasn't sure. When discussing SM & RS having a falling out, KB mentioned about RS falling out with business partners "all the time" and going bankrupt and frequently "winding business's up", and was well known for it.

When I mentioned that perhaps KB should get in touch with SM to perhaps collaborate with case against RS I told KB that SM owned and run Waterfall Studio's and could contact SM through them, then KB told me that he thought RS had shares in Waterfall Studios ( Not correct).

KB mentioned that when PM published his name and address on the internet in relation to the AA he had the Sun newspaper & another daily contacted him for his story, and in the end he did a deal with the Mail on Sunday. He regrets this now as he feels a deal with the Sun would have got him better exposure and perhaps forced RS into coming clean long before now.

KB said that it would be nice to have the recognition for his film, and his input into the whole idea.

I asked him if he had thought about getting his side of the story down on paper and write a book, his reply was he had thought of it, but doesn't really have the time.

Photo 3: Keith Bateman with the head of the ‘alien’. The head was a polystyrene head used for holding wigs with orange peel used to make the eyes.

KB mentioned the name "Barlow" several times during the conversation, I asked Bruce Barlow (BB)? "Yes" he said. BB was involved in the very early days of the AA.

KB and his business partner at the time Andy Price-Watts was invited on the Richard & Judy breakfast show, but Andy didn't want to do it at the time, which KB felt was a bit strange, and he feels that RS was the reason behind this.

I mentioned that KB might be in for some fringe benefits if SM wins his case against RS, "yes, I should imagine Fox would have to pay him huge amounts for using his footage, which in turn would mean that I should get some money for my tent footage".

We ended the conversation with me saying that when I am down his end of the world next I would meet up with him and buy him a pint (or three).

I told KB that I would CC him in the email to online group discussing the SM and the AA and that he was free to make comments and if he wanted to, SM's email would be in the group and that he should perhaps emther things were discussed, and several items revisited a number of times. And errors or omissions are entirely mine. Any comments in speech marks are quotations from Keith Bateman, these might not be verbatim, but are close enough.

Keith Bateman sent an email to Sean Jones just a few days later to clarify a few points:

I'm just dropping you an email to clarify some of the points if you could forward it to everyone that you think would be interested I would appreciate that.

AK Music used to work quite closely with some of the major DVD companies and one of them was Santilli's before the Point Group. We were an idea company. We were the first company to start doing commercial animations on PC which was featured on the Rolf Harris show. We were the first company to make "Chill Out" videos. We were involved in 999 Police Stop video (editing and music) and loads of other products that were quite popular i.e. healthy living series plus specialist programes which were featured on Euro Trash. Sorry to be rambling a bit but I was very proud of what we achieved in AK Music with small budgets but we did have some talented people that have gone on to do other things working for us.

Back to Santilli - we would produce DVD ideas and try to sell them to the general market for distribution and was always pestering companies like Santilli's with our ideas so when he came back from America and sat in our office with a contract with Elvis' name on it for some back catalogue products he was chasing the subject of Roswell was brought up. I found this quite interesting and whilst talking to one of our animators he told me he had a book about it - I read this book and this is what gave me the idea to create the tent footage. The idea being aliens being brought into a tent - camera man being nervous as to what he was filming and the bad lighting with little time to set up. When I spoke to Sean on the phone I did point out that I had it in colour and was on film (film being video). It was shot on umatic and I still have the Sony M3 camera stored somewhere. It was then put to VHS pushed through the computers with a true vision board and animated lines were super imposed. I was quite happy with the finished result and sent it to Santilli for his reaction. "Load of rubbish" was the jist of his opinion. Although he asked us to super impose a restricted sign at the bottom of the video I do not know where that number came from. In those days I dealt totally with production and my partner Andy Price-Watts dealt with the business side.

The Tent Footage was produced from reading a book I did not realize how big this was until I gave this to Bruce Barlow to input into his video and it was going on a breakfast show the following Thursday. Santilli flew back from his holiday in Orlando just to stop us showing it and paid us to withdraw from the show.

As for Ed's (A U.S. researcher) comments about my involvement I believe that if I had not produced the tent footage none of this would have come about. Even though people saw through it and it was supposed to be "tongue in cheek" it gave Santilli a base to build his story.

Kiviat Productions who produced "The World's Greatest Hoaxes" flew my staff to the U.S. to interview them it was strange that they never asked me to fly to America - maybe as they knew that I was the cameraman and it was my copyright and that Santilli had no rights to sell it I was kept out of the loop. It's amazing that as people fall out with Santilli more and more people come out the woodwork. Kiviat reckoned that Fox insisted that Santilli gave them the tent footage and they paid for it and I am entitled to a share but this has only come out since he has had a fall out with Santilli.

My opinion on UFO's is I believe that we are not in this galaxy on our own and we would be naive to think so. There are a lot more stories to be told about all this i.e. when the footage was released we suspected our phones were being tapped and there was a night I was called out to the alarm system at AK Music where it seemed that in the first instance nothing had been touched but later we realised files had been disturbed and tapes had been moved. Also Santilli had told me that he had been asked quite a few questions from certain authorities.

I hope I have answered some of the questions that seem to be floating about but you must understand how I feel forgetting all the key players I produced a piece of footage (good or bad) that started all of this plus programs all over the world and got Ant and Dec to Hollywood - (don't know if that is a good thing or not!). As for Santilli if he has a piece of real footage who knows!! But he definitely did not show me it. As I am writing this the Alien head is still in my office sat behind me.

I think it is fair to say that Keith Bateman has more than adequately described how the whole alien autopsy film scam started. No original 1947 film, no mysterious cameraman. It was all a money-making scam from the beginning.

Sean has done an excellent job in checking this aspect of the story which is one of the most important of all, how the whole scam began. If it were not for Keith Bateman there would probably never have been an alien autopsy film in the first place. So, if the topic of this film ever arises again, and there are those still holding out hope that it is genuine, please just point them in the direction of this article as it should provide them with all they require.

In recent years I have been fortunate enough to learn of UFO sightings by a former RAF wing Commander and an RAF Flight Lieutenant. But in l994 while I was with the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) a sighting landed on my desk from an officer in the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF). It referred to an incident in l974:

H=His name was Anthony Chatfield from Renwick, Marlborough in New Zealand and his account in full appears here for the very first time:

In January 1974 I was an instructor of recruits in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Early in that month I was on duty at night and was in charge of what was then the Airman Cadet School (now known as the General Service Training School). Two new flights of recruits had arrived earlier that day and, as with a large number of young people away from home for the first time, excitement was high and sleep was hard to come by for those young people. As a result a lot of my time that night was spent patrolling the various barrack blocks and dormitories getting these young people into bed and making them stay there. This was akin to one of the seven labours if Hercules.

After about 5 or 6 attempts to maintain some sort of order I decided to get the whole lot of them outside and give them a chance to burn off their excess energy by having them running around the weapon training area. This was simply a patch of grass about 100 meters by 200 meters adjacent to the barrack block the recruits were domiciled in. I had the whole 60 or so running around the outer perimeter on the weapons training area. It was a fine warm night with a stiffish sort of breeze which made it a pleasant night for a gently jog. After about 10 minutes or so one recruit approached me and asked me what it was that was flying along the top of the hills immediately to our north. This is a range of hills called the Richmond Range, and vary in height from about 1,500 feet to 4,500 feet. The distance from RNZAF Woodbourne to the UFO was a bout 6 to 7 kilometres. but even at that range it was pretty big. There was no sound and the object was travelling on a south-westerly direction at, I guess, around 200-250 miles per hour. The best way I can describe the object is that it reminded me of an old fashioned barbell of the type that circus strongmen used in days gone by. There were 2 large globes glowing with the same sort of light one sees from a fluorescent light and they seemed to be joined together by a gold glowing bar. The light seemed to come from within and one globe seemed to be smaller that the other, although this could have been due to the angle it was viewed from.

The weather conditions at the time were as follows, low broken cloud with a large area of clear sky with a light to strong north-westerly breeze. Visibility was excellent. The object was in view for about 3 minutes, and when it passed behind a cloud the light from the object could be seen showing through.

I feel I must mention that I spent a good deal of my life working in and around aircraft having served for 5 years in the RAF as an airframe mechanic. I worked on all kinds of aircraft including Spitfires, Hurricanes and Ansons, and this craft went against all the rules of aerodynamics that I was privy to. It had no lifting surfaces, like mainplanes, that I could see. No rudder or fin, no navigation lights and no flashing strobe light. Friends have suggested that it might have been a ‘lost’ weather balloon, but this is complete nonsense. Weather balloons do not glow and they do not fly against the wind. This thing was also huge. There was a moon and the night was quite bright. The time of the sighting was around 23.30 and although I enjoy a drink I was not allowed to drink whilst on duty and I was stone cold sober.

As I have stated I have spent a lot of time working in and around aircraft and I can find no logical explanation as to what the object was that I and 60 or so cadets saw. I know full well that the RNZAF had nothing even close to the size of the beast that I saw. At that time the biggest aircraft that the RNZAF possessed was the C130 Hercules, and the big ‘Jumbo’s’ of Air New Zealand never came down here as the runway at Woodbourne is too short. In any event a ‘Jumbo’ would not have been flying that low at night without having a lot of hysterical passengers on board without someone hearing about it.

I saw this thing at a distance of some 7 kilometres which is slightly less than four and a half miles, and with the weather conditions prevailing at that time I am cast iron certain as to what I saw.

I contacted Mr. Chatfield and asked him for permission to use his real name if I published the account to which he was more than happy to agree to. This is a truly fascinating account from a very experienced member of the armed forces. There is however an interesting post script to this account. I had another letter from the witness and he provided a rather interesting piece of information:

A brief thought concerning my last letter was that about 3 or 4 months later, when I was discussing the sighting with a colleague, I went and got the ‘Incident Book’ that all duty NCO’s have to fill in on completion of their tour of duty. I was surprised to discover that the page on which I had recoded the sighting had been removed. I asked about this but no one could throw and light on the matter at all. The page had not been ripped out or torn but quite neatly cut. What happened to that page I simply do not know. It was shortly after this that I discovered that the Civil Aviation Authority has a printed form issued to all Air Traffic Control Centers throughout New Zealand specifically for UFO sightings. Food for thought don’t you think?

Food for thought indeed. I think it is fair to say that when someone of this witnesses experience reports such a sighting that it deserves serious attention. Despite the best efforts of the debunkers there are some UFO sightings that simply cannot be explained and this one I feel falls firmly into that category.

During my time as Director of Investigation for the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) I had the pleasure of cooperating with UFO researchers and UFO research organisations in both the UK and around the world. BUFORA had many regional UFO groups affiliated to them and also used to cooperate with others on a regular basis. One such organisation was the Plymouth UFO Research Group (PUFOG) in Devon in the UK. Its chairman was Robert (Bob) Boyd and in February of 1995 Bob passed a very interesting UFO photographic case to me. The sighting in question came from a former Royal Marine and took place while he was still serving with H.M. Forces in Cyprus.

On the 20^th of April 1993, PUFOG were interviewed by their local BBC radio station.. As a result of that broadcast PUFOG were contacted by a former Royal Marine. He had been a Regimental Sergeant Major and he wanted to relate a UFO sighting from 1971. According to Bob Boyd this turned out to be one of the best UFO reports they had ever received.

The witness in question didn’t want any publicity so his name was changed and he was simply referred to as ‘Steve’. What follows is a verbatim reproduction of his UFO sighting. He was interviewed by PUFORG and this interview and photographs are reproduced here with permission of Bob Boyd. The photographs are copyright PUFORG.

“ I used to me a member of the Royal Marines, and we were part of a group called 41 Commando Group that was stationed in Malta. We used to depart from Malta 2 or 3 times a year and go to Cyprus for what’s called field exercises. I don’t know if you know the shape of Cyprus, but it looks something like a rugby ball laid on its side. On this particular night (31^st May, 1971), we were deployed in the field. The unit deployed with Echo company on the left hand side, in other words on the west end of the island. We had 2 companies on the north and my unit which was Command HQ, was due south at a place called Ghoshi Trooli. Altogether there were about 1400 men on the exercise.

At our position, we were doing what is known as a night move and what happens is you move a Command HQ, from one place in the field to another place in the field in darkness. One of my jobs was to control that move. So I would depart, set up a new location and then the unit would have to move to me, and we would have the spaces where they all went. Shortly before 8.00 pm, we drove to a new location. There was a particularly bad piece of track on the way there and I dropped off a young marine, a policeman, and said to him to stay on this track and when the unit comes, make sure you push them towards me in the right direction. There was one place where they could make a bad turn.

Shortly after getting on the ground, I located the various places and cleared them out. About 8 o’clockish a very bright light appeared behind a crest maybe a thousand metres away. What it looked like initially was the headlights of a car on full beam, situated behind the hill. Because this was a night move with no lights, I got on the radio gave my call sign and told them to turn their lights off. The light just got stronger so I transmitted again, negative lights. As I’m talking this light came over the crest about a thousand meters away, and you go ‘it’s not bloody headlights it’s a flare’. I thought at first this was a mortar flare I was looking at. Mortar flares are stationary. You fire it up in the air and the aim is to illuminate the area. They hand by a parachute. The initial reaction was mortar flare and I was pretty concerned because we were in carbon grove, which is dry trees and if a flare lands amongst them you’ve got major problems. Twelve men had been killed in similar circumstances. A flare started in the Troodhos forest and a large number of English troops were killed. This was years before in 1957, which was in my time.

So now when I’m in a senior position in 1971 I think I’ve got a phosphorous flare hanging above a bloody carob grove and I’m not going to be very happy. It appeared from a thousand meters, which as I said was from behind the crest but it could have been quite high in the sky. The impression I got was that initially it was quite low. My initial impression was that this object of light was about 5-10,000 feet. That’s a complete guess.

There was about 20 of us at this place, looking at this light, when we suddenly realise that it isn’t a flare and you say ‘well what else can it be. The more you looked and the more people spoke, you couldn’t relate it to something else you’d seen, it was difficult to pin a label on. This was a massive thing. It appeared to be about the size of a golf ball at arms length. That’s the angle we were looking at (pointing 45 degrees). You had no obvious sign of movement. The main mass of light was almost spherical but it was putting out so much radiance, it looked like nothing you’d ever seen before. All it was like, was a burning ball of light. The light was extremely bright and when I’m talking about extremely bright, I’ve never seen anything as bright in my life.

The brilliance wasn’t burning enough to burn your eyes but it was just…..awesome. The nearest I can get to it is if you lowered the sun. And this is what I mean by a burning ball of light. The thing was that bright you see. It was like a burning orb of light, one orb of brilliance. I could also see other lights amongst it or thought I could. Not obvious lights. They weren’t like porthole lights with little people putting their heads out and waving at you. It was just what I thought indications of other lights, the same colour as the main one. You had this burning ball coming overhead like that and I am seeing something, not actually a cross but other lights roughly that shape within the centre light.

Front and back of it, especially when it was lower in the sky, you had like a vortex of movement as though you had displacement of air. In other words if a thing is moving it would push air backwards and forwards. I could see something like that. You get a lot of dust in Cyprus, especially at that time of year. Very dry dusty conditions and you get a lot of dust in the atmosphere. If you had a burning ball of phosphorous, you would have the central core of phosphorous, then the glare of the diffused light. If you were moving that phosphorous through conditions where there was dust, you would get movement, a push vortex and a vortex behind.

There was a lot of chat among the 20 men. You’re all talking about it. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life. We are now watching this for some minutes. Remember I told you that I’d left a marine corporal guarding at the track. We all of a sudden we hear this (beats hand on table) and this guy came over the hill doing about 600 mph!! This is in full kit. And you know Cyprus is a hot and sticky place. Anyway, he came up and after panting for a bit said ‘Can you see that?’ We said yes and he said ‘Thank Christ for that’. It wasn’t till that happened that you realised that by being in a group of people watching, it wasn’t frightening as it was if you were alone. I mean for a Marine Corporal to disobey my orders and bugger off, then it was something. To a lone individual…..to run away from something is a serious offence, let’s not disguise the fact. He deserted the post that I had given. For a lone individual, what he saw by himself…..meant it was a bit more serious than that.

Everybody on the exercise, about 1400 men, saw the light. During this period the unit you remember, is doing a night move. As I said we had radio sets and we could hear transmissions of other people taking about the light, and at one stage the following dialogue took place between a call sign which is a unit and a commanding officer, Sunray. There was a little bit of chat about the light then Sunray said ‘It must be a flying saucer ha ha’. There were the words he used.

We watched this for 22 minutes. We were all professional observers. I carry powerful binoculars, night glasses, and there was about half a dozen pairs of binoculars there. Now you may think that what I was going to tell you is stupid, but the light went from ground zero and took 22 minutes to disappear out of sight of binoculars to the right of the moon. WE didn’t use the glasses when the light was easily visible because it was so bright it might have damaged your eyes through binoculars. It was when it was at height that we used the binoculars. So using night glasses leaning on a land rover, watching this light, the moon is now hanging over Dekali Garrison and the object ended up to the right of the moon.

A point I want to make is that there was no impression of speed, sound or movement. You were looking at something that seems to drift past you. I’ve been trained for 27 years to judge distances, that’s what I’m paid for. But I couldn’t tell you if that was 1000 meters high, 5000 metres high, 50 mile high. I’m also a professional parachutist, so I knew distances in the air, gut I couldn’t tell you how far away it was or how high. It was just something you’d never seen before. The day we saw the light was the same day that the Americans had launched on of their moon shots. I think it was the second one.

We then moved back to the barracks. When I got back to base, I wrote a complete report of everything we’d seen that night. It covered about 5 pages. I posted it to my wife first and told her to keep the letter because I knew it was something different – and she ditched it !! The next morning, we were all talking in the mess about the light, so I rang Aquitiri and asked to speak to the station Net. Officer and I couldn’t get hold of him. The lines were burning. So I contacted my opposite number there and spoke to him. He said ‘Is it about the light we saw last night, and I said yes. He said ‘the switchboard had been jammed solid’. The he said that ‘it was the Mariner shot (NARAS) that’s all we were watching’.

Later that morning the colonel sent for me and (we were referring to the light in general discussion) he instructed that all sub-units who’d seen it, were requested to write a report on it and anybody who had taken photos to hand them in as part of the research into this Mariner thing. And this was done. I then got to draw ammunition. I used to lodge my ammunition in a compound. Bring it off a ship, put it in the compound and draw from the army barracks. Everyone you saw would say did you see that light and you’d have a chat about it. I goes down there and was talking to the blokes about it. One bloke had come out of the mess, drunk: out of an army mess, drunk. He gets to the car park and goes to start his car and he looks up and sees what we saw and he said in seconds he was stone cold sober. He raced back into the mess goes ga a ga and they all run out to watch the light.

The Turks or the Greeks, I don’t know which but one of them believes a light, a bright light like this means the coming of the new Messiah. When I went for the ammo, locals worked in the ammunition dump, and one of them was telling us that his village had seen this as part of their sort of religion of Christ and that, and they all turned out and were praying in the streets, thinking that the Boss Man had arrived again. It wasn’t just a few people. It was reported in the local press so it could easily be checked I’m not giving you a load of waffle. You could dead easy get a check o it.

I started collating the reports and listening to other people talking about it. Echo Company was on the left of the Island. Now they had observed what we had observed, maybe ten minutes prior. So let’s say at about 7.35 pm, they’d noticed this light coming from West to East, so it was coming straight towards them. This light came from West to East. Halfway across the Island, it then turned from North to South. So Echo Company watch it coming towards them, it then comes inland turns from North to South. We watch it as it came over the mountain and flies south. I didn’t know they had Mariner craft that turn a right angle basically and then disappear. All the reports were handed in, photos and negatives and quite a lot got handed in. If you’ve got 1400 blokes in the field, you’re going to have a hundred of them with cameras, aren’t you ? There was a large quantity of films handed in. I would say over a hundred rolls of film.

Weeks later it was confirmed that this was a UFO. You see what happened the first morning when the colonel asked me to get the reports, he didn’t give me a full brief. I would be responsible for running the unit and he would normally be dead straight with me. Now for some reason he had a top level meeting with his company commanders and would have discussed it with them, but he didn’t tell me the full story.

In the centre of Cyprus is a place called the Troodhos Mountains, on top of which they’ve got the most sophisticated radar in the world. They’re called golf balls because of their appearance and are maybe 3-400 feet in circumference. They used to monitor the U2 flights and long range radar transmissions. There’s a fighter base at Aquitiri and it’s a very sophisticated fighter base. On RAF bases abroad, they always have QRF (quick response) fighters burning internally. So on an operational base you always have the latest aircraft there, ready to go.

About 2 or 3 weeks later we were off the coast of (location deleted) doing a job. I went in for my morning sherry with him and he said 'That UFO’s been confirmed’. So I said what UFO ? “Didn’t I tell you ?’ he said. I said, no but you’re going to tell me now, aren’t you ? And then he explained that this was a UFO and it was an official job from reports, they went off and then it then came back as confirmed as a UFO.

I was told this by him, that is the colonel that during this, those ‘golf balls’ up on Troodhos had traces early on in the game. They put 2 Lightings up (RAF fighter aircraft), which were capable of about 1200 mph. They would obviously have an early interception course on this particular object, whatever it was, and they could be put alongside it. And the way it was said to me was ‘Two Lightings couldn’t touch it’. In service parlance that means that you can up two aircraft and they could not get those planes in contact with the object.

The radar at Troodhos pinged them early, and the Lightning’s went up. You never get a single plane going off QRF, you always get two. You’ve got two fighters depart from Aquitiri to investigate, told them to have a look, so they get a vector course. They pick it up on their radar long before it’s visible, probably 5 to 600 miles away. So the Troodhos radar would have picked it up at distance, the Lightings would be sent up to investigate it and they can’t touch it doing 1200 mph. Yet when you ask me how fast is it going and I’m telling you it is almost stationary. If it looked almost stationary, and the Lightning’s couldn’t touch it, it must have been a fair old height. But none of the facts relate, it doesn’t fit in with anything you’ve seen before.

I would be very interested in seeing what the Lightning’s saw. They would have been put up early enough by radar to get within good seeing distance to it. They all actually carry cameras on board, so they would trigger the cameras if nothing else. These would be cine cameras. These photos I’ve given you were taken by a naval publicity photographer. In the middle of the Island you had the support company, which was firing the weapons. The photographer who took these, was with that company. He was using tripods set up for night firing. It wasn’t just a hit and miss affair with a guy with a camera. This is one of the few occasions that a guy was there with a proper set of equipment, tripods, etc. This guy was photographing what id known as Wombats and Nobats. They’re anti-tank guns and have an open breech called venture and when the round fires, the propellant burns out the back in a big flash, so when you see them they look very dramatic. You know the gun crew, the hooded figures, the round going out, a big flash at the back. That’s what his camera was set up for.

When the light appears the guy put his camera on it and included these on the same reel of negs. And these were handed in as part of what I told you. These I imagine are the only 3 surviving photos of this. He handed the roll in but a couple of days later, he was in the dame mess as me, gave me a set of the prints he had done. And that’s what these are. I had more photos than this but a couple have been nicked. I think I had 5 or 6 originally. When I showed them to people, I loaned them to one or two of them and possibly they kept one or two. I had about half a dozen at first. Luckily I’ve still got these. I’m well aware that it’s taken me 20 years to tell you this. Now if I was trying to do a snow job, I wouldn’t wait 20 years to tell you what I saw. I’m also no idiot. You could probably falsify photos 1, 2 & 3, by a dark room, a neon light and a clever photographer. But there is no way you could do this one (photo 2) which shows the lights of Dekalia Garrison, 6 or 7 miles away.

The photos are time exposures, so don’t show the ball of light as such but its trail across the sky. I don’t know how long he left the shutter open. You can get a good idea of how bright it was. The photos also show the illuminated dust in the atmosphere as it passes through. Lots of people who saw this are still serving. You’ll find that the senior officers like me have gone but lots of the younger ones will still be serving.

It’s taken me 20 years to tell you now, because you don’t like getting ridiculed. I’ve told it to other people because the beauty of it is I can prove what I’m saying. Luckily I’ve still got the photos showing the horizon. There was no cover up or hush up on the base because it fitted in with the Mariner thing, but we all knew it wasn’t that. What was surprising was that it didn’t make the English press. I’ve sometimes read or heard on the radio, that someone has seen a flying saucer. It’s amazing that on a thing like this where you’ve got, in my case, at least a thousand or more trained observers, whether they be junior or senior, all looking at the same object, and I’m talking about at least half an hour or more. Plus from different locations spread over an area of a couple of hundred square miles. You’ve got the whole small isolated community like Cyprus seeing it, and reported on their radio, their own media and yet it never got any massive press coverage over here.

I just heard you by accident on the radio and what clicked in my mind was when you said the MoD had got something on these lines. I thought I’ll tell him about the photos. Otherwise they would have just lain there forever.”

The 3 photos are reproduced here in full. You can see as ‘Steve’ described in photo number 2 the lights of the garrison at the bottom of the photo.

At the time when the photos and interview were conducted PUFORG contacted the Ministry of Defence in the UK to see if they could obtain any further information on this event. After all ‘Steve’ had told them that he collated lots of reports and photos and that later his colonel had confirmed that it was a UFO. The reply from the UK Mod was:

“The files for 1971 would have been sent to the public records office a long time ago and are covered by the terms of the public records act, remaining closed from public viewing, until 30 years after the last action was taken”

Of course those 30 years has now passed and in the last few years the UK Ministry of Defence has begun releasing its UFO files to the National Archives. The main man behind this is DR David Clarke. I recently asked Dr Clarke to check to see if there was any sign of this incident in the released MoD files:

“Nothing. I've gone through the files for that year at Kew with a fine tooth comb and would have a note of it if it was there. But as it was Royal Marines the report might have gone to the Navy and never reached the Air Staff. There are any number of reasons why it doesn’t appear in the UFO files. If they knew it was a military exercise of some description it might never have been treated as a UFO at official level. That's the problem with following up cases like this that rely upon the memories of a single individual decades after the event”.

I don’t agree with Dr Clarke that we are replying purely on the memories of one individual. If the witness is correct then he collected numerous reports as ordered by his commanding officer and photographs as well. The fact that they are not in the released files will only fuel speculation in some quarters that the MoD has not released everything and that there is indeed some kind of cover-up in place. I’m not sure I share such an idea but I can fully understand why some researchers do support such a notion.

And what of the three photographs provided. I asked UFO photographic analyst Winston Keech to comment on them: “

My first pass of the photos and report look good - unless I find finer detail I would consider them genuine print copies of a real illuminated object taken with a standard lens on a tripod on long exposure. I have identified the tracks of stars in the background which should confirm the exposure duration etc. There is one effect from the forward scattered light around the object in one print that I need to explain, that is unusual - but that aside, they appear genuine ... proper report to follow.

There are a few typos in the report, which I suspect are due to phonetic interpretation of an original conversation ... nothing drastic - except that the correct spelling of the RAF base is 'Akrotiri'. I did Ii n fact put in for detachment to that very base when I was a pilot with the RAF in the early 80's ... along with half the RAF, as it is considered a prize detachment ... almost sea and sun holiday in fact!

It has always been a very strategic base for refueling and reach of the middle east/turkey ... and I can confirm that it was the home to the no 56 squadron, who would have just converted to Mk 6 Lightning’s (not quite as quick in climb, but with longer fuel range) from the Mk 3 model, in 1971.

Note also, that the radar referred to with 500 mile range is the hilltop radar, not the lightning's onboard radar - the lightning would have only be good for less than 50 miles targeting radar range depending on model and conditions. The hilltop system would have been similar to the early Fylingdales modified 'sage' system.

ps. for a commissioned officer to desert his post like that would normally be considered an extremely bad/unthinkable thing ... it generally results in dishonorable discharge - so to not be, speaks volumes in my opinion.

I also asked Winston Keech if he thought that the Mariner 9 launch could have been misidentified and be a possible explanation for this sighting and photographs:

“I would say that it would not be possible to see the launch phase of the mariner 9 probe from Cyprus at that time. It was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 22:23 gmt in a direct ascent and separated from it's launch vehicle at 22:36 gmt (a 13 min ascent) then deployed its solar cells at 22:40 gmt. The ground observation visual range to low earth orbit height (about the separation height) would be around 300 miles max. As this was a direct (vertical) ascent this means that the earth could only have rotated Easterly by around 250 miles by that point, so at absolute best it could not be seen in more than an area from 300 miles offshore from Florida to 550 miles inland from Canaveral and +/- 300 miles North South during the entire launch phase. The local launch time in Cyprus would be 23:23 to 23:36 and the probe would not be visible at all until around 20 hours later as Cyprus would be rotating away from the launch site, which is around 1/5 of the Global circumference away to the West. (as it was quoted as vertical ascent therefore controlled to fly directly from the launch point towards its target - mars, so would be flying westerly downrange at around 1000 mph by separation). I think we can pretty much rule out the Mariner probe. Presumably his '8 pm' would be local time, or he would have quoted it as 1900 Zulu (as Cyprus is GMT +1 hr I believe).

And just to be on the safe side I consulted with former RAF Wing Commander Alan Turner just to see if he knew anything about the operations of the base there at the time in Cyprus and to check that the witness’s recollections were indeed accurate:

“Many thanks for your article on what was observed in Cyprus - very convincing stuff. What is impressive is the fact that the sighting was acknowledged formally as a UFO.I was involved with 56 Lightning Squadron when it returned from Cyprus in early 1974, but I don't know if that particular squadron was there at the time of the Royal Marine's sighting. Having said that, a couple of the pilots alluded to "sightings which were weird" although they didn't go into detail”.

Many UFO researchers will tell you that UFO sightings made by trained observers, especially members of the military, are held in high regard. They are less likely to be fooled by misidentifying known natural phenomenon although they are not infallible of course. They are after all only human like the rest of us. This sighting would seem to fall in to that category. It seems highly unlikely that it was not a misidentification of the launch of Mariner 9. If it was, then why ask for all the reports to be collected? Mariner 9 was a mission to Mars and was launched in the full blaze of normal publicity. This case has the potential to be quite unique simply by the amount of military observers involved. One would of course like to speak to more of them and as a researcher I’d like to know where within the Ministry of Defence these reports are stored because so far they have not been released. Are they simply buried in red tape and languishing in a dusty file somewhere, or are the conspiracy theorists correct and there really is a cover- up? I for one don’t have the answers but hopefully one day someone will.

On September 30 of 2009, Pavel Romanovich Popovich passed away at the age of 79. He died in Crimea, Ukraine, after suffering a stroke.

He was the first Ukrainian cosmonaut in history, always proud of his heritage, and deeply loved his native land.

Twice in his life he was given the Hero of the Soviet Union award, the highest distinction in the USSR, awarded personally or collectively for heroic feats in service to the Soviet state and society. He had many other awards. General-Major of Aviation, Pilot-Cosmonaut P. Popovich along with Vladimir Ajaja, at one time was also a MUFON representative in Russia.

Pavel Popovich was respected by those who knew him. He was described as a kind, nice and decent person, always ready to help others. Pavel Popovich had a great sense of humor.

His life was intertwined with the turbulent history of UFO research in the Soviet Union after 1978 and (after the fall of Communist rule and the Union created after the Bolshevik revolution) in Russia.

Pavel’s father was a poor peasant, then a stoker, and had worked all his life in a sugar processing plant. The boy, who had endured harsh realities of famine in the 1930s Ukraine, and terrors of Nazi occupation several years later, probably never dreamed that he would fly spacecraft; never knew that a small planet would be named in his honor. But looking at his life, it is clear the sky beckoned him.

Popovich was born in the Kiev region on October 5, 1929. He was a strong boy, but during the 1933 famine in Ukraine he suffered the rickets. He survived. In 1941, his town of Uzin was occupied by German troops. Pavel learned German language from the Nazi officer who was quartered in the Popovich house: the officer would beat his hand with a belt if Pavel did not answer him in German. The boy paid back by slashing the Nazi officer’s automobile tires, and secretly damaging grenades. But he did learn German, and it later helped him, when he enrolled in a college.

At the age of twenty two he graduated as a construction engineer from a technical school and also received a pilot's degree from an amateur pilot’s club school. Popovich continued education at an aviation college. Upon graduation in 1954 Popovich joined the Soviet Air Force; and in 1960 he was enrolled in a team of Soviet cosmonauts. Pavel Popovich underwent a full course of training for space flights on board "Vostok” spacecraft. Popovich was the Number "Four" Cosmonaut in the history of manned spaceflights. The three predecessors, Gagarin, Titov and Nikolayev have passed away…

Yuri Gagarin and Pavel Popovich lived under the Nazi occupation, and this fact could have rendered them unworthy of the honor of being Soviet cosmonauts (sad was the fate of many who had the misfortune to live in the occupied territories; many were branded as traitors, and sent to the GULAG)…The KGB took several months to study biographies of each of the future cosmonauts; but someone must have had the courage to overlook that the two young men lived under Nazi rule in their childhood, and let them continue their training.

He made his first spaceflight aboard the “Vostok-4"spaceship in August of 1962. Later, Pavel Popovich was trained for a spaceflight under the auspices of the Soviet Moon research program. But after the program was closed, Popovich underwent training for flights aboard “Soyuz” spaceships. As a result, he flew into space a second time as chief pilot of the Soyuz-14 spaceship in July of 1974. Few people knew that this was a special flight: it was part of the Soviet program of military use of space exploration technology, i.e., their Star Wars program. Popovich’s call name was Berkut-1 (Golden Eagle). Having docked with the Salyut 3 orbital station (this was a cover name for the secret battle station Almaz-2), Popovich and his engineer, Colonel Artyukhin, had conducted military intelligence operations. They had infrared and powerful optical equipment, 14 special cameras, and even one thirty millimeter cannon. One of the tasks was to capture the American Skylab station with three astronauts aboard. Another project both cosmonauts engaged in was testing of new food items for spaceflights (they liked the new food). The Americans had a special nickname for Popovich: they called him “Aggressor”. The cosmonauts had sent their reports to Earth in special capsules, thus creating the first parcel dispatch from space. But the program later was shut down.

Popovich continued his education; and between the years 1980 to1989 he served as the Deputy Chief of the Y. Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Center. Then, in 1993 he was promoted to the rank of Air Force Major-General in reserve.

In 1990, the very first official public UFO research organization of the Soviet Union was formed. The name was SOYUZUFOTSENTR (the All-Union Ufological Association). Its director was V. Ajaja, a former naval officer, a submariner, a long-suffering independent UFO researcher and lecturer. Its president, Pavel Popovich clearly stated in interviews that he headed the All-Union UFO association on behest of his friends, UFO researchers. He did not consider himself to be an expert in the field of ufology. But he was instrumental in helping those who tried to research it, albeit independently, or as part of the secret Soviet program. His authority and reputation in the former USSR had greatly helped Ajaja’s efforts to keep his organization viable and afloat in the turbulent and stormy waters of post-1991 Russian reality.

A sharp increase in UFO activity in 1977-1978 (especially, the Petrozavodsk Case) had forced appropriate departments within the USSR Academy of Sciences to agree to a research program for anomalous atmospheric phenomena. The code name for this program was SETKA-AN (Akademii Nauk Set’--Academy of Sciences Net, or AS-NET.)

The Soviet Ministry of Defense embarked on a similar program, dubbed SETKA-MO (Ministerstva Oboroni Set’).

Reportedly, it was the Military-Industrial Commission that had ordered this research. The powerful Military-Industrial Commission decided to create two UFO research centers, one in the USSR Academy of Sciences, the other in the USSR Defense Ministry. Both centers aided each other’s research and exchanged information. But we are not completely certain; there have been reports from Russia that Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, was extremely interested in the UFO phenomenon (specifically, in one case investigated by SETKA researchers). He had enough power to give impetus to the creation of the secret program.

And so, at the end of 1978, anomalous phenomena research in the USSR Academy of Sciences became the subject of a special scientific research program designated as SETKA-AN. Its functions were distributed among different departments, and a number of Soviet research institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences received tasks to research various aspects of the anomalous phenomenon issue.

The first act of the SETKA-AN resulted in official sanction of "anomalous atmospheric phenomena" as a descriptive term instead of the forbidden "UFO." The censorship chains on the UFO subject were removed in 1989.

The well-planned tasks of the SETKAs had a terrifyingly effective impact. The "Academic Commission" did its best to prove there are no UFOs, only errors in observation of rocket launches, or at the very least, ball lightning.

SETKA-AN served as a powerful cover, creating a distraction away from the workings of the Ministry of Defense, whose SETKA-MO is said to have been, more serious in its investigations than the academic group. Despite the SETKA's nonchalance there had been occasions when "anomalous phenomena" had led to the unauthorized launches of mobile missiles, and on other occasions, the appearance of UFOs during military training exercises had resulted in the breakdown of radio communications and equipment malfunctions.

In 1981, the SETKA research program was given another name, GALAKTIKA (MO and AN designations), and in 1986, the name was changed to GORIZONT MO and AN. After the program ended (right after the failed Communist, anti-Gorbachev putsch in 1991, although Colonel Kolchin, a noted Russian UFO researcher, mentioned the year of 1990), a group of experts remained in the Department of General Physics and Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences where they analyzed incoming reports until 1996.

Scientific arguments regarding the nature of UFOs had been the least of the military researchers' concerns; they did, however, pay close attention to the hypothesis that UFOs are manifestations of an ET civilization. Most of all, they have been concerned with UFOs' impact on military technology and on personnel; such impact could be quite unpredictable. They definitely wanted to know how they could use UFO properties for their own pragmatic military needs.

In 1984, Vsevolod Troitsky, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, established a commission to study anomalous phenomena. Earlier, in 1982 he published an article (Issue 10, Nauka i religiya or Science and religion magazine), where he described complex anomalous phenomena (in atmosphere, hydrosphere, and space) that has been observed and verified, but cannot be explained, and need to be researched further, for the sake of science and human society.

According to a respected Russian researcher Yuri Stroganov, the Soviet State attempted to increase the ranks of informants through the creation of so-called "anomalous phenomena commissions."

The commissions, according to Stroganov, proved to be another successful effort to pump out information from different strata of the population. Due to the previous debunking efforts directed against the UFO phenomenon by the Academy of Sciences, eyewitnesses were not too eager to contact representatives of any State organization. The newly born "anomalous phenomena commissions" were seen as "independent action" organizations, however, and that created a certain trust. People largely believed them to be independent, when in actuality such commissions were a cover to conceal an acute interest on the part of the government in the collection of information and research about UFOs.

Stroganov ties these commissions to the SETKA-MO. The commissions first appeared five years prior to the removal of the ban on UFO information in the USSR, and during their existence, the information collected had been, according to their members, input into computers. Where the data went thereafter hasn't been explained.

The Deputy Chairman of the leading Anomalous Phenomena Commission was none other than the distinguished Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Romanovich Popovich. According to Stroganov, Popovich made a strikingly improbable statement at the first conference of the All-Union Ufological Association, of which he was President. Popovich told the gathering that he was a man of little competence concerning issues of ufology. He has also stated that his role would be to act as a buffer between the Association and the State.

However, Popovich had acted according to his words. He was a modest man who had helped so many; and as he stated in his interviews, not an expert in the field of ufology.

According to Popovich, most of the information about anomalous phenomena came from military and pilots, trusted, sane and healthy people. Among the reports many were nonsensical, but some were historically important. UFO data started being reported from the days of W.W.II. During the Kursk Battle, Soviet aviators and witnesses on the ground observed mysterious objects in the sky. Pilots in the United States Air Force had encountered a cigar-shaped object that emitted blinding rays around it, forcing the pilots to catapult, and abandon their aircraft. He revealed this in the April 10, 2009 interview to the Ukrainian web portal DonbassUA. The Kursk episode is described in details in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon.

He wrote in his books (such as Tayni prishel’tsev I NLO, 2006, S, Petersburg, Russia) that in
February of 1984, by the decision of VSNTO (All-Union Council of Scientific Technical Societies), a Central Commission for Anomalous Phenomena in the Environment was created (it functioned within the VSNTO Committee for environmental problems). The Chairman was Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences V. Troitsky , and his deputies were Corresponding Member of the same Academy N. Zheltukhin, G. Pisarenko of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences, and General-Major of Aviation, Pilot-Cosmonaut P. Popovich. There were other notable personalities (A. Mordvin-Shodro, a Soviet ufologist and military officer; scientists I. Lisevich, N. Petrovich, L, Gindilis, and E. Ermilov; they had contributed to the UFO research in the Soviet Union, one way or another).

Soviet newspapers Trud, Sovetskaya Rossiya, Izvestiya, and Sotsisalisticheskaya Industriya published information about the Commission, and interviews with its leaders. The tasks and goals were stated, and the address to send reports was published (101000, Moscow, Post Office, POB 764).

According to Gershtein, the Commission was born because those in charge of the academic research of the SETKA program basically got rid of the true enthusiasts of the UFO research. Only the debunkers together with military specialists from secret military institutes remained in the program. Enthusiasts of ufology were to be controlled, and allowed to work only on the assigned projects, and no leakage of information to be allowed.

The GALAKTIKA program, like a powerful vacuum cleaner, sucked in tons of information, but nothing ever came out. Neither non-military ufologists, nor military ones received any coherent explanation. Even when an unusual phenomenon could have been easily explained as a rocket launch, the answer was not forthcoming, because in those years everything was secret or military classified information.

The debunkers in the SETKA-AN were right to state that most of UFO sightings were easily explained as mankind’s technological activity and that no more than ten percent were truly unidentified, they were mostly wrong to state that the all of the observed objects (within the ten percent) are not hard objects but are some other phenomena. They were also wrong to say that although we do not now know what is flying in the sky over us, whatever it may be is definitely not extraterrestrials.

Then the debunkers usually poured scorn on their competition-the amateur ufologists, i.e., the unofficial, independent researchers who began to unite under the protection of popular magazines and scientific technical societies in those years. But those enthusiasts of ufology did not take this scorn lying down, and basically moved the Academy of Sciences aside, by directly approaching military coordinators of the GALAKTIKA-MO program. The initiative to create the Commission was supported by military researchers, who were tired of fruitless activities of the academic debunkers. Of course, the Commission was to include also those who served the Ministry of Defense research (Lieutenant-General G. S. Legasov and Lieutenant-General V. P. Balashov).

And that is how the Commission came to be. And Pavel Popovich did play a role in its workings, although due to the secrecy and his oath, he had not revealed all he knew.

As for “real anomalies” it was Popovich who did reveal to journalists a few examples. On May 29 1984, Trud newspaper published V. Vostrukhin’s article Chto zhe eto bilo? Popovich told the author about a case that took place on March 27, 1983, in Gorky (and investigated by the Commission’s Gorky section). It was an object that flew in the area of the city’s airport. The airport’s radars registered but could not identify the object. The altitude of the object’s flight was no more than one kilometer, and the speed approximately 180-200 kilometers per hour. The witness (Flight Controller A. Shushkin) who had observed the object said that the object's size was similar to that of the IL-14 aircraft fuselage.

But there were no wings. It was a “cigar”. Its color light gray, steely, and it moved slowly across the sky. The phenomenon lasted around forty minutes. At the distance of 30 to 40 kilometers NE from the airport the radars lost it.

But Shushkin later corrected Pavel Popovich and said the UFO actually appeared over the city on March 28, 1983; flew at an altitude of 400-600 meters, and disappeared ten seconds after it was sighted.

Another, somewhat more dramatic, episode took place in January of 1978, and was reported in Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya newspaper on August 6, 1984 (I. Mosin’s article Zagadki nebesnikh yavleniy).

Popovich told the author that during the flight of YAK-40 over the area between two settlements Medvezhye and Nadim, the crew noticed something round; a very bright foreign body that approached rapidly, and sometime later appeared straight in front of the aircraft. Every minute the size of this body increased. When the crash appeared to be imminent, the object soared right in front of the aircraft’s nose, not causing any harm.

On October 24th, 1991, a file of documents (dubbed the Blue Folder) were provided to former Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, the then President of the All-Union Ufological Association in Russia. Popovich urged the KGB to release the information. It was the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB (Counterintelligence), or rather the Tenth Department within the Directorate (Control of the defense facilities) that had received UFO information from a number of sources, including the informers. These files (124 pages of printed text) contained copies of UFO reports sent to the KGB. An accompanying letter was written by the Deputy Chairman of the Committee for State Security USSR, N.A. Sham. The files consisted of handwritten reports, typed testimonies, and notes from KGB informers, crude drawings and eyewitness reports of UFOs. This cooperation between UFO researchers and the KGB was unprecedented and was a landmark in UFO research in the Soviet Union and possibly the world.

"Committee of State Security of the USSR, 24.10.91, ref. number 1953/III, to comrade Popovich.

Dear Pavel Romanovich:

The Committee of State Security is not engaged in regular gathering and analysis of the information on the anomalous phenomena (the so-called unidentified flying objects). At the same time the information about cases of observation of such phenomena comes to KGB of the USSR from the various organizations and citizens. We direct to you a copy of appropriate materials.

Years later, in an interview, Sham stated that the KGB was not engaged in research of anomalous phenomena (he pointed to the SETKA program as the responsible entity for such research; “it is just that some administration, some special department, if they would get some eyewitnesses of all that was happening in the atmosphere… they would take explanations and mostly hand-written materials that were sent there, describing how they saw (phenomena-P.S.), what they felt during (sightings-P.S.); describing the background of the event, and so on”. For more details, see Philip Mantle’s article The Real KGB UFO Files (http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0308/kgb.html).

Chetvertoye izmereniye i NLO newspaper (Issue 2, 1998, Yaroslavl, Russia) published an interesting article written by Vladimir Ajaja as a response to criticism that he has kept secret UFO data from the public, among other issues. In the article Ajaja mentioned that in 1993 (sic-P.S.) the KGB, based on the request of Pavel Popovich, who was then President of the Ufological Association, gave the organization headed by Ajaja, some 1300 documents related to UFOs. Among them reports of official agencies, commanders of military units, and information sent by private individuals. (Did Ajaja describe the same batch of documents of 124 pages of information given to Pavel Popovich by KGB in 1991? Most likely!-P.S.). According to him, the Lyubyanka (that is, the KGB) was getting rid of an “unnecessary headache”, and Russian ufologists were thus expanding their database of UFO knowledge.

A serious effort to study the UFO phenomenon jointly and to share information was initiated in 1991. The Joint American-Soviet Aerial Anomaly Federation (JASAAF) was formed, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Richard Haines. The cosigners to the document establishing the federation included the Mutual UFO network, J. Allen Hynek center for UFO Studies, and the Fund for UFO research in America. In the USSR the cosigners were the All-Union Inter-branch Scientific and Coordinative UFO Center (SOYUZUFOTSENTR), and the Scientific Research Institute for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena. The co-directors were Vladimir Ajaja in Moscow, and Dr. Vladimir Rubtsov in Kharkov (or Kharkiv, as it is known today) in Ukraine. Haines, a retired NASA scientist, has traveled several times to the former Soviet Union. The Federation was to be a bridge for serious investigators of both nations. Actually, the Federation translated and published some of Felix Zigel's works, and created an awesome file of UFO phenomena-related news clippings and articles from the USSR (some were translated, too).

Inn 1992, on Dr. Haines’ behest, Pavel Popovich, at the time head of the All-Russian Ufological Association, had contacted two Russian Ministries regarding the Roswell documents. Dr. Haines wanted to find out whether the Soviet-era archives contained documents pertaining to the Roswell Crash. The replies that Popovich received were unusually quick by Russian beaurocracy standards. His letter to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation was dated June 8, 1993. The reply from the Ministry was dated September 17, 1993. It said that the officials of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense had conducted search of the materials of interest to Popovich. They did not find any Roswell materials. The second reply came from the Ministry of Security of the Russian federation, and was dated September 14, 1993. No documentary materials about the case of the “flying saucer” crash in the area of Roswell, USA in the year 1947 were discovered.

Soviet intelligence was quite active in the United States in 1940s, and Roswell Crash (whatever did crash there) would attract their attention. In Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon, we have described the alleged interest of Stalin to the event, and the pile of documents and books he had shown to those of his top scientists whose opinions on the subject of UFOs he needed.

Of course, the replies Popovich had received mean nothing. It is quite possible that such Roswell materials are hidden in a more remote archive; that there is a joint endeavor by governments of Russian and the United States to conceal such documents; or an even more mundane explanation: a greedy Russian official simply sold the documents in the murky days of early 1990s Russia. But Popovich did try to find out whether the documents were in the Russian archives.

After every interview Pavel Popovich had to sign a special document stating that he did not reveal any state secrets. He never did tell all he knew, for he was a military person, and loyal to his oath.

In August of 2006, Pavel Popovich gave an interview to Bul’var Gordona, a Ukrainian magazine. (Issue 31[67]). Unlike many other cosmonauts, who avoid the answer, when asked whether the mankind is the only intelligent life in the Universe, Popovich did reply, emphasizing that it was his own opinion. Years ago, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky stated that we are not alone in the Universe.

Also, where did the rock drawings found everywhere, depicting people in spacesuits, come from?

For those who do not know, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a true visionary, philosopher, and pioneer of astronautics who had fascinating UFO sightings. A deeply religious person (this fact was hushed down in the USSR) he theorized many aspects of human space travel and rocket propulsion decades before others, and played an important role in the development of the Soviet and Russian space programs.

Then the cosmonaut told a legend to the interviewer. A very long time ago there existed a gigantic planet next to Earth; it was larger than Saturn. It was inhabited by a very advanced civilization. Some science fiction authors call the planet Phaeton, others call it Moonah. Its inhabitants knew how to use thermonuclear energy, and used Earth as a testing range. Alas, a tragedy took place, an explosion occurred on that planet. The nuclear weapons possessed by leading nations of Earth can destroy our planet at least two hundred times. That is what happened on the other planet. One piece of Moonah fell off, Earth captured it, and it became the Moon. The explosion wave turned our planet 90 degrees, and the Flood ensued. This was confirmed when Antarctica was explored, and the continent was reached, where they discovered remains of palm trees, crocodiles, and so on. Moonah itself embarked to the outer space, but at the very last moment it decelerated, and the civilization there did not perish. Popovich reiterated that what he told was but a legend, but then several years prior to the interview he read about scientific calculations regarding a gigantic planet at the very edge of the Solar system, invisible due to the distance. If the legend was born long before the scientific discovery, does it mean it was based on concrete facts?

Then Popovich reveals interesting information. He said that the inhabitants of Phaeton or Moonah, probably visit Earth from time to time. Their intermediate base is located in the area of Saturn, and they have three bases on Earth. One of them is in the Andes, the other in the Indian Ocean trench, and the third one is located in the Himalayas, the famous Shambala. The base in the Andes they liquidated because human civilization came too close. If you carefully read ships’ logs (those ships that sail over the Indian Ocean trench), you would find there the following entries: “A fiery body entered the waters”, “a fiery body ascended from the waters”…

As we know, the followers of Nicholas Roerich suppose that he was in Shambala, but although many people tried to find it, they could not. An expedition would leave, and then return a month later to the site of the departure. As for the space, one cannot see any anomalies from there.

When asked by the interviewer to elaborate why the intelligent beings in the Universe, similar to humans, would not establish contacts with us, Popovich said that in his opinion, we are not ready for the contact. And “they” are right. The cosmonaut stated that although we have seemingly found a common language with ants, and have domesticated animals, we have not been able to find common agreement among ourselves (mankind-PM/PS). Hence, “they” will communicate with us, when we have “ripened” for the contact.

In the interview, Pavel Popovich recalled the UFO sighting he had in 1978. He was aboard an airplane flying from Washington to Moscow.

The altitude was 10500 meters. He was sitting by the window. Popovich recalled that although he really did not have anything to look at but clouds and the ocean, something urged him to keep looking. He did, and his eyes popped out: about a kilometer and a half from the plane and some ten degrees higher (as he and others estimated), Popovich observed a white, isosceles triangle. The cosmonaut screamed, shouted, ran to the crew. The onboard radar did not register anything, and nothing is registered on the ground.

The crew, however, also observed the object, and they determined that its side was about 100 meters. The object did not resemble any aircraft; there are no such aircraft, added Popovich.
It moved rapidly; the airplane flew at the speed of one thousand kilometers per hour, while the object traveled about time and a half faster. This flying object easily overtook them, and flew forth, but they stayed within the range of vision for a minute. They, the professionals, could not determine what the object was.

We have studied a number of sources for this sighting. We determined that Popovich was a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences delegation, returning from Pittsburgh, where they attended the international Gagarin Readings conference. There were Soviet academicians aboard who had also observed the strange objects. In another interview (to Ukrainian newspaper FAKTY, 2001), Popovich said that the sighting took place in mid 1970s, and the speed of the airplane was approximately 900 kilometers per hour, while the object traveled at the speed of approximately 100 kilometers per hour. The object vanished from the sight after overtaking the aircraft. When interviewed by Ultra, a Finnish magazine, in 1993 (Issue number 5), Popovich said the UFO he sighted was transparent, and the altitude was 12000 meters; the year was 1978. However, this could have been due to inaccurate translation.

He could not state that his sighting was really a secret weapon being tested, although in 90 percent of such observations this is so. Popovich did not want to argue. He repeated that he states his personal opinion. There are many questions for which humans have no answers, and mysteries can be encountered in everyday life. He presented an example: what generates ball lightning? We know it is a blob of plasma, but it does not fall apart, somehow stays intact, and has different sizes, varying from several centimeters to dozens of meters. Ball lightning behaves very strangely: one can fly into the window’s upper pane, pour from the electrical outlet, fly around the room, and then depart or explode. Its colors are varied, and can even be absolutely black. No one knows its nature, but annually about eleven thousand ball lightning’s are generated. There are so many more phenomena we are not able to explain. The level of our science has not reached the stage (of being able to explain such phenomena-PM/PS). Should we wonder that the extraterrestrials evade us?

Mysterious Sky – Soviet UFO Phenomenon by Philip Mantle & Paul Stonehill is available via Amazon.

Pavel Popovich said that he did not believe any of the contactees (persons who claim to have experienced contact with extraterrestrials), not one of them. Most often these are people that somehow want to be part of history, to be on TV screen. They read books, and start uttering nonsense. When one tries to veer off from their established story, they immediately start posing, saying “I will not speak with you anymore!” (In the 2001 FAKTY interview Popovich said that 95 percent of everything written about UFOs should be discarded as nonsense. Also, he mentioned that during his stay in the Star City, a group of scientists from Nizhny Novgorod had visited the cosmonauts, and stated that there exists another, identical Solar system (as ours), and it rotates precisely at the angle of 90 degrees in relationship to the plane of rotation of our Solar system).

In the same interview with Bul’var Gordona Popovich was asked a question whether he, a pilot and cosmonaut who grew up in the atheistic (sometimes, militantly so) society, believed in God.

He replied that firstly, he was baptized. And secondly, in 1974, during a flight with cosmonaut Artyukhin, he understood that there is someone who had created stars outside the spacecraft’s porthole, the Moon, and other planets. When one sees this, one understands how infinite everything is. Popovich recalled a thought that went through him: “someone had created it, and someone directs it all”. Who has created the laws of celestial mechanics? All we did was to use them, to discern them, to explain them. That is why he thought about God. No matter what one calls him, there is the Creator who has created everything.

His marriage to Marina Popovich, a brave and intelligent aviator, test-pilot, writer, UFO researcher and military scientist who dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut, fell apart after thirty years of living together. Their daughters went into the world of international banking, and he has a grandson in London, where one of them lives now. Popovich later married a Ukrainian woman, Alevtina Fyodorovna, and lived with her happily (but he said that ethnicity is not the cause). Proud of his heritage, he served as the president of the Ukrainian society “Slavutich” in Moscow.

Popovich lived his final years in a settlement near Ostankino (Moscow), dubbed Star Village because 36 former cosmonauts reside there. He had a hobby: fishing. Although he had fished throughout the former Soviet Union, he fondly recalls the times he had fished for perches in the waters of the Dnepr River. Popovich liked and promoted boxing; he also liked to relax by playing billiards.

For many years, Popovich had been the chairman of the board of the All-Russia Institute of Agricultural Aero-Photo-Geodesic Studies (they monitor Russian soils and ecology); and he remained in this post until his death.

He had a dream of which he told a number of interviewers: to be able to fly the spacecraft into space again, to look at Earth from above. It is an incredible sight, Popovich said. At night, he would have dreams about space and the events he had experienced there.

The name of Pavel Popovich was given to a mountain ridge in Antarctica and a minor planet.

Setka: A Secret Soviet UFO Research Program DAWN OF THE SECRET PROGRAM

Setka: A Secret Soviet UFO Research Program
DAWN OF THE SECRET PROGRAM