Lake Ladoga is the largest body of fresh water in Europe, located in northwestern Russia but only about twenty-five miles east of St. Petersburg. The lake was formed by a glacier that carved up the earth, creating an average depth of 167 feet. Its shoreline to the north is high and craggy, broken up by inlets that we commonly associate with Norway. About 136 miles in length, the lake’s southern shores are more hospitable to human activity, with lots of sandy beaches. The lake hosts over six hundred islands larger than two acres in area. High concentrations of calcium hydrocarbonate give the water a slight yellow-brown color, but the freshwater is home to dozens of fish species that have supported humans for hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the area. The lake has been integral to trade and transportation routes since the Middle Ages.

While the lake is beautiful, we’re not visiting it today to appreciate its flora and fauna. Instead, it’s home to some unusual stories of UFO observations and abductions…and many stretching back in time, predating the Roswell incident.

For example, in 1898, a young ten-year-old girl named Rita Nukarinen was walking through the forest near Ladoga Lake. The historical record says that she saw a giant sphere rising above the tops of the trees. And within the sphere, she believed she saw humanoids. Today, we attribute this sighting to a hot-air balloon, even though reports of Russia’s first hot-air balloon tests didn’t occur until 1913.  Other UFO sightings may be more difficult to explain. Just about fifty miles from the lake, in 1917, a woman named Anni Lattu lived by herself in her own home. She’d been widowed years before. One day, villagers noted she wasn’t home and seemingly been away for an extended period of time. Friends thought she had left to visit her daughter. Instead, when she returned, she shared an astounding story. She reported that a machine, shaped like a big wash basin, had landed by her home, and creatures, somewhat smaller than a human, had left the machine. Against her will, they took her aboard the machine.  Inside, the machine glistened but made no noise, at least relative to the most complex machine she was aware of at the time—a steam engine.  Once inside, she said that they creatures flew her across the world and even “between the stars.”  After her experience, she was reported to have gained psychic powers.

A third reported event in the area of Lake Ladoga occurred about the same time in the early winter of 1917.  In this case a woman claimed to see a saucer-type object land near her home. A staircase extended from the machine, allowing small creatures to exit from the craft. While she was scared, she agreed to join the human-like creatures on board. They took her on a flight around the area. She claimed that the being who appeared to be the leader communicated with her via telepathy. Upon her return to earth, she shared the story widely.  True or not, her experience became an important factor behind her becoming a famous clairvoyant and healer.

While these are unique stories, they represent an arc of cases that predate the USSR. My visit to Russia last year allowed me to explore different locations where UFOs were studied during the USSR. With the fall of the Soviet empire, many reports of UFOs and abductions became public. While we’ll tell more of those famous stories here in future episodes, the story of the study of UFOs in the USSR is fascinating as it reveals the conflict between the desire for knowledge and the communist objective of strict control over topics the government deemed to be unacceptable.  Today, we’ll talk about two of the most famous UFOlogists and some of the sightings which motivated them to fight against the Soviet control of scientific discourse.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas, and this is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science, and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. Find us on Instagram, visit mydarkpath.com, and see our videos on YouTube. But no matter how you choose to connect with us, I’m grateful for your support.

This episode about Soviet UFOs is only part one—a second episode will be released on Patreon later this month. It’s part of a special miniseries, Secrets of the Soviets, that is only available to subscribers.  Everyone who is a subscriber in October will get a free autographed copy of my latest novel, Like Clockwork. I’m very grateful to each of our Plus subscribers so much as they help the show grow!

Let’s begin with Episode 42 “Overhead & Underground: UFOs in the USSR.”

PART 1

On November 15, 1988, the Buran, a Soviet version of the US space shuttle, completed a three-and-a-half-hour flight. It would be the only flight of the Buran, and the landing was completely automated as the shuttle was crewless. Speculation about the purpose of the Buran is endless, but its origins can be traced back to Soviet competitiveness in the Cold War and fear of US advances in the space race. Its development and demise are fascinating, but I share it here primarily to lend credibility to the voice of one of its designers, Valery Pavlovich Burdakov. In many ways, Burdakov was the father of the Buran. In an interview published before his death in 2014, Burdakov described the development of the program:

Back in 1962, with Sergey Pavlovich’s support, I obtained my first inventor’s certificate for a reusable space vehicle. When the fuss started up over the American shuttle, no decision had yet been taken about whether we should go the same way.

But Energiya’s so-called Service No. 16 was set up in 1974. It had two design departments: mine looking at aircraft and Yefrem Dubinskiy’s taking care of launch vehicles. We dealt with translations, scientific analysis, editing and publication of “primers” on the shuttle. And without any fuss, we developed our own version of the spacecraft and its launch vehicle.

We’ll revisit the Buran more in a future episode, but for today, it’s useful to recognize that Burdakov was a man of deep knowledge, academic achievement and a believer in the scientific method.

Burdakov was born in 1934 and earned a PhD in Engineering Sciences, ultimately applying his engineering skills for thirty-two years in Sergey Korolyov’s aerospace design studio. While he wrote over four hundred publications, one of his most famous was a book he co-authored, Rockets of the Future.

Through his education and career, Burdakov became personally familiar with many of the leading Soviet aerospace engineers. And it was in that context he learned of Stalin’s interest in UFOs. He recounted later in life that he’d originally heard of Stalin’s interest in the phenomenon from Pavel Vladimirovich Tsibin, another scientist.  It’s was Tsibin told Burdakov that Stalin had requested a meeting with him and his boss Sergey Korolyov .

Perhaps Tsibin knew of Burdakov’s nonconformist interest in UFOs and therefore was comfortable disclosing the nature of the meeting.  Burdakov’s UFO research wasn’t entirely a secret.  Even his boss, Korolyov knew of his curiosity about UFO. Instead of reporting him to the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Korolyov quietly permitted Burdakov to present lectures about flying saucers to other employees of the design bureau. In fact, Korolyov went to far as to send Burdakov to the Pulkovskaya Observatory. During his assignment there, Burdakov was given access to UFO sighting reports from the observatory.

In 1992, Burdakov told several associates an odd story that reflected Stalin’s interest in UFOs. In 1947 reports were circulating around the world that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, and had been recovered by the US armed forces. Stalin reportedly wanted to know if UFOs might be real.  And so, Stalin had called Korolyov to the Kremlin.

Once at the Kremlin, Stalin gave Korolyov a staff of two translators and stacks of US newspapers and documents plus records of UFO sightings across the USSR.  And then, Korolyov was given three days to come up with an answer about the existence of UFOs.  While not recorded, it’s unlikely that Stalin made this timeline flexible in any way.

After the three days were up, Korolyov was again called to Stalin’s office and asked for his opinion. Korolyov declared that the UFO phenomenon was real, clarifying that he did not believe they were weapons from the US, nor that they posed a threat to the Soviet Union. Stalin thanked him, only then disclosing that other experts had examined the same evidence and had the same opinion. While their names were not shared at the time, Korolyov later told Burdakov that he believed the others who examined the UFO evidence were Soviet scientific luminaries, such as Kurchatov, Topchiyev, and Keldish.

Another account of Korolyov’s meeting with Stalin was reportedly published in the Russian magazine Terminator in 1992. However, my attempts to validate this have come up empty.  And so, I’ve hired a native Russian speaker to continue to search original Russian texts for more substantiation.  So, this story is hard to substantiate but is at least consistent with what we know of Burdakov. He was a true believer in UFOs but a skeptic as well. He stated that 97% of UFO reports could be explained by natural phenomenon but that 3% were unexplainable and, therefore, might be extraterrestrials.

The absence of Stalin’s UFO files which Korolyov reviewed, is a source of conspiracy theory.  As with many conspiracy theories, some claim the absence of evidence means someone has hidden or disposed the evidence…making the logic a bit circular in some cases.  In this event, Stalin’s UFO files never turned up despite the opening of Soviet files in the ’90s through perestroika. This fact is used by some conspiracy theorists to argue that the US Airforce hid these files to prevent anyone from challenging the official Roswell story.  Again, a fairly circular argument.

But Burdakov had another, perhaps even more famous, brush with Soviet UFO lore, specifically due to the odd events surrounding the loss of the Soviet Phobos 2 probe, which was sent to Mars in 1989.  In this case, the loss of the Phobos 1 and 2 probes were well documented in the international media.

The Soviet Phobos space program involved two unmanned probes launched to study Mars and its moons, Phobos and Deimos. The Phobos 1 and 2 probes were new spacecraft designs, significant upgrades from those used in the Soviet Venera missions to Venus from 1975 to 1985. Phobos 1 was launched on July 7, 1988, and Phobos 2 on July 12, 1988, each aboard a Proton-K rocket.

Phobos 1 operated as expected for the first few months.  Then, on September 2, 1988 while in route to Mars, the probe failed to establish communication with the mission controllers. After days trying to reconnect with the spacecraft, the probe was declared a total loss.  Eventually, the cause was tracked to a problem with software uploaded to the probe on August 29.  Inadvertently, the software had shut down the probe’s thrusters, meaning the spacecraft could not adjust its position to stay locked onto the sun to recharge its batteries.

Phobos 2’s trip from Earth to Mars, though, was seamless, and it entered an orbit around Mars on January 29, 1989. After establishing its orbit, the probe studied Mars and sent thirty-seven images of Phobos, with a resolution down to forty meters.

Then something unusual happened. While uploading these images of Phobos back to earth, the spacecraft stopped communicating with the Soviet controllers. They worked desperately to reconnect with the spacecraft for hours, then days, no doubt fearful of losing the second probe in the family in less than a year.  But what was most shocking was that one photo included an unexplained image of what appears to be a UFO on the surface of Mars.

It’s a story with massive conjecture about what occurred.

First, what do we know?  From the news, here’s what was shared by the Soviet government.

On March 28, 1989, TASS, the official Soviet news agency, stated: “Phobos 2 failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moon, Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact.”

The following day, on March 29, an official of the Soviet Space Agency said, “Phobos 2 is 99% lost for good.” Some think this statement implies the Agency believed the entire satellite was gone, and it wasn’t just a matter of a communication breakdown.

After another two days, on March 31, 1989, the European News Agency blared the headline: “Phobos 2 Captured Strange Photos of Mars Before Losing Contact with Its Base. [It was] revealed yesterday that the space probe, Phobos 2, which was orbiting above Mars when Soviet scientists lost contact with it on Monday, had photographed an UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT on the Martian surface seconds before losing contact.”

Behind the headlines, what was happening?

Reportedly, amid the desperate attempts to re-establish communication with Phobos 2, the probe’s final image was received at the Soviet control center. The image showed a large shadow on the face of Mars, oddly in the shape of a disc. The cover-up of the event failed, and the image and news about the anomaly were finally leaked to the public.  The image was hardly definitive, yet its appearance at the moment of the loss of the spacecraft fueled speculation that the probe had been destroyed by an alien weapon.

It was in this heated environment of truths and half-truths that Burdakov made direct inquiries about the loss of the Phobos 2 probe.  As a revered spacecraft designer, he discussed the matter with the original developers of the project as well as those who had tested the spacecraft. Suspicious of official explanations, he challenged the series of strange events that led to the destruction of Phobos 2. At that time, news of the photograph was still hidden from him. Yet he explored the following hypothesis: If Mars is inhabited, the intelligent beings who exist there would not like the idea of a device placed on the surface of their moonlet for purposes of constant observation. Consequently, in his opinion, they did something about it.

But as much as Burdakov may have been a believer in UFOs and constantly sought more information about them, some in Burdakov’s sphere were even stronger UFO enthusiasts.

PART 2

For all of Burdakov’s zeal for discovering the truth about UFOs, it was one of his protégées, Felix Ziegel, who is recognized as the founder of Soviet ufology.

Felix Ziegel was born on March 20, 1920 in Moscow.  His parents named him in honor of Prince Felix Yusupov, the man behind the assassination of Rasputin. He grew up at the family’s countryside dacha in Tarusa. Even as a child and young man, he had a keen interest in history, philosophy, and the theology of the Russian Orthodox church. Reportedly, even at the age of six, he constructed a primitive telescope and started his first journal of astronomical observations. While he considered a career in the clergy, ultimately his love of astronomy won out.  In 1936, at age sixteen, he joined a team of scientists on their way to Kazakhstan to observe the total solar eclipse. It was on this scientific expedition that he met Donald Howard Menzel, a PhD-trained astrophysicist who later wrote three books about UFOs, albeit from a highly skeptical point of view. Two years later, Felix enrolled in Moscow University. But his time there was short-lived.

In 1939, he was expelled from the university—not for poor grades or ethical failures. Instead, his father had been arrested by the NKVD, denounced by an anonymous letter claiming that Felix’s father, Yuri Ziegel, was planning to destroy a factory in the city of Tambov, southeast of Moscow. Two years later, Yuri was released when it was revealed that the story was fabricated by a man for the sole purpose of getting the family evicted so he could have their apartment.

After graduating from the university in 1945, Ziegel published Eclipses of the Moon, his first step into the growing but still suppressed school of thought that explored the existence of an extraterrestrial presence on earth.

Nineteen fifty-two became a defining year for ufology when Mikhail Pervukhin, a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, gave a speech that mocked “flying saucers” and “green fireballs.” That speech set the precedent that the UFO question was out of bounds if a scientist or researcher wanted to stay in the party’s good graces. Few would dare ignore the party’s instructions. Nevertheless, the UFO movement grew silently underground in the USSR.

In 1961, an article in the official Soviet newspaper, Pravda, reported on some people who personal UFO sightings.  But the article went on, stating that anyone who claimed to have seen a UFO was either confused or a liar.

Ziegel, though, was undeterred by the government hostility against the UFO search. He continued to track reports of UFOs throughout the country.  But then, the Department of General and Applied Physics at the Academy of Sciences issued a formal resolution against UFO research in the USSR. This effectively shut down any official UFO research, at least for the time being.  The criticism from all these government sources halted activities any public research.

Soon thereafter, in 1963, Ziegel landed a job as an astronomy lecturer at the Moscow Aviation Institute, where he first met Professor Valery Burdakov. At the time, Burdakov was conducting research in Korolyov’s space program that eventually would put the first satellite in orbit around the earth and the first man in space.  Their friendship was cemented and Ziegel and Burdakov later co-authored the first Soviet university textbook on cosmonautics and space exploration.  But Ziegel kept his opinions and research quiet amid the continued official skepticism about UFOs.

In 1967, a wave of UFO sightings swept through Ukraine, the Urals, and Central Asia. Dubbed “flaming sickles,” the UFOs were reported by reliable civilian and military pilots. The phenomenon was even reported on Moscow television.

Ziegel, now a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute, researched and reported on these events. He even petitioned for a collaborative study of UFOs by Soviet, American, and other international researchers.

Ziegel published his first pro-UFO article in April of 1967 in the popular magazine Smena.  Additional articles were published in other magazines and newspapers in the following months.

Of this rash of sightings, Ziegel said,

These UFOs have been seen all over the USSR; the craft of every possible shape, small, large, flattened, spherical. They are able to remain stationary in the atmosphere or shoot along at 100,000 kilometers per hour. They move without producing the slightest sound by creating around themselves a pneumatic vacuum that protects them from burning up in our stratosphere. Their craft have the mysterious capacity to vanish and reappear at will. Besides, they are able to affect our power resources, putting to a halt our electricity-generating plants, our radio stations, and our engines without, however, leaving any permanent damage. So refined a technology can only be the fruit of an intelligence that is indeed far superior to ours.

Now I’ve looked for records of these UFOs that were described as flaming sickles to confirm these reports. While I haven’t found any direct correlation, there are two interesting UFO sightings from 1967 that may be a part of the trend that Ziegel observed and researched.

At 10:00 p.m. on May 17, 1967, Volgograd. LT. Major Y.B. Popov of Novosibirsk, together with Junior Lieutenant A.S. Nikitenko and several local residents, saw a cascade of lights rushing across the night sky from the northeast in even rows. The lights were located on the surface of a very large cigar-shaped object. The impression was that an ocean-going vessel was flying across the sky with absolute silence at an altitude of about 0.6 miles. It was observed for two or three minutes. It passed almost overhead and took off into space.

And another….

At 10:05 p.m. on May 17, 1967, at Bakhrushev, Russia, on a warm, quiet evening, several witnesses, including S.V. Ostrovskiy, saw a bright point descending into the western sky. It flew down to an altitude of about one mile when it changed to a horizontal course. At that point, it appeared as a dark body of impressive proportions, with a compact, well-defined light at the rear. It flew off silently at less than 200 mph, with a dark orange tail behind.

Neither of these cases, reported by George Mitrovic in his compendium UFOs, Humanoids and Other Strange Phenomenon of Russia, exactly evokes the idea of a flaming sickle.

When courageous Soviet citizens dared to share their personal observations about UFOs, responses from official sources continued to be dismissive. As an example, the Moscow Planetarium used the following form letter for any public submissions:

“Dear Comrade! The phenomenon you observed was, in all probability, due to an experiment that was conducted to measure the density of the atmosphere on high altitudes with the aid of a sodium cloud.”

Ultimately, Ziegel’s public pressure did little to change the minds of Soviet authorities. In an official statement, a Soviet government body said publicly of Ziegel’s work: “By no means is the erroneous opinion correct.”

The President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Professor Alexandrov, was also quoted in Pravda regarding UFOs. He said that he believed as little in extraterrestrial visits as in an “immaculate conception.” He called all those dealing with the UFO issue “subversive” and influenced by the Western media’s claims of flying saucers.

Pravda followed up with an article published on February 29, 1968.  The commentary said flatly that UFOs didn’t exist and that “All objects flying over the territory of our country are identified either by scientists, or by the people responsible for security of our Motherland.”

And so Ziegel’s work went underground again, and he is reported as saying, “The official point of view . . . closes the UFO problem for the next few years. [One] can work in this field on a small scale. I will, in any case, devote myself to other activities.”

Despite the pressure that prevented him from conducting research and speaking in public, he continued to publish his findings as “samizdats,” which where typewritten publications, circulated in secret as they were often highly critical of the Soviet government. But this was an inefficient method of communication as each copy had to be retyped by hand.   Copying equipment was under strict government supervision and control.  So Ziegel wrote his manuscripts with three carbon copies.

Soviet UFO researchers found other ways to share their findings.  They started to meet privately under the guise of a writers’ group in the conference room of the magazine Tekhnika Molodezhi.

Officially, they maintained their cover as a gathering of science-fiction writers, but in reality, they met exclusively to share their findings and hypotheses about UFOs. While the term UFO was essentially banned, writers did have permission to discuss technical science fiction.

Ziegel, who previously had some contact with the West, was isolated from foreign media outlets. Ziegel was called a “dangerous dreamer” who “constantly performs scientific tightrope acts.”

By the end of the 1960s, it’s estimated that there were only twenty-five to thirty people in the entire Soviet Union who were interested in UFO research and corresponded with one another. The government’s warnings against the study of UFOs had achieved its goal.  No new threats were required.  UFOs were simply not discussed anymore.

Still, Ziegel continued to build relationships with senior Soviet officials, even if they were kept secret. He wrote:

I had to forward letters to our country’s highest quarters. I informed them of how important it was that the UFOs should be studied in the USSR, of how serious and significant this problem was, and of this press campaign’s sheer absurdity. And this time my voice was heard. These higher quarters interfered and made sure no repressive actions would be taken against me.

Ziegel persisted in trying to get his government to acknowledge that the phenomenon might be something more than just misidentified planes and atmospheric phenomenon.  In 1975, he created a state-financed project for UFO studies at Moscow Aviation Institute.  Institute leaders even approved a preliminary report for the project, and discussed a formal collaboration with the Civil Aviation Ministry, the Institute for Space Research and other government organizations. Ziegel wanted to create a Scientific and Technological Council to study UFOs. But when text from one of Ziegel’s lectures appeared in an underground Samizdat publication, the project was promptly shut down.  Ziegel was ousted from the Knowledge Society and Pravda directly criticized him.

After this, the study of UFOs remained underground although a few, very public incidents sparking some renewed interest, including the Petrozavodsk phenomenon which was observed on September 20, 1977.  The was observed at about 4 A.M, just over 100 miles the Soviet border with Finland.  The Soviet news service Tass said,  “The impression was of a torrential rain of light. Sometime later the glow ended. The ‘jellyfish’ became a bright semicircle and resumed its movement in the direction of Lake Onega.” TASS went on to say that “gray clouds then appeared with a “semicircular aperture bright red in the center.”  The entire event lasted about 10 minutes.

The photos of the event are quite spectacular and found on the website.  The event is still subject to controversy, but eventually the event was explained by the launch of a Cosmos 955 satellite from the Plesetsk launch facility.  That might seem to be a convenient excuse but consider the amazing celestial light shows put on by SpaceX.

The Petrozavodsk event opened the door a crack and a broader program was created to study anomalous phenomenon, although words like UFO and flying saucer were still banned.  The program included participants from the Soviet military and civilian worlds.

Still, Soviet censorship remained a suffocating blanket and prevented any pro-UFO research from reaching the public via an approved newspaper or journal.

That was, until an article was published in the Trud magazine about an UFO case that rippled through the Soviet population in 1985.

Part 3

The story wasn’t actually supposed to be published.  The author, V. Vostrukhin, replaced the censor-approved article about the event with a version that didn’t dismiss the event outright as the conjecture of crazy or misinformed observers.  Vostrukhin was immediately fired, but the article was so sensational that it even reached UFO researchers outside the country.  So, here’s the essence of the story.

A Tu-134 aircraft, operating as flight 8352, was flying a multi-city route, starting in Tbilisi, then to Rostov, and finally to Tallin on January 30 of 1985.  The crew was provided by the Estonian branch of the USSR ministry of civil aviation.  The lead pilot was Igor Cherkashin. He had 7,000 hours of flight time.  His copilot was Gennadily Lazurin had accrued 4,500 hours of flight time.  The navigator was Yegor Ognev who had 3,500 hours of flight time.  A flight engineer, Kozlov, had 12,500 of flight time.  This was not an inexperienced crew.

At 4:10 am, they were 120 kilometers from Minsk. The sky was clear…the article describes the clarity of the night sky as “they were alone in clear air, in a block of black glass with little holes made by the stars.”

At this moment, the co-pilot saw a bright light that was not flickering to his upper right.  It was large enough that Igor described it as the size of a 5 kopeck coin – that’s about twice the diameter of a US penny.  At first, Igor dismissed it, thinking it was refracting light from the atmosphere or something else.  Then, something odd happened. 

“A thin beam of light emerged from the speck and fell vertically down to the ground itself.”

Igor then pointed out the phenomenon to Gennadiy, the flight engineer.  Who said “Commander, we must immediately report this to the ground.”

The crew watched the light turn into a brilliant cone, followed by the creation of a second cone of light, then a third.

The commander responded, “What do we report?  We have to see what happens further…what could this be?”

The experienced crew agreed that the object creating the light was not close – but instead was about 40 to 50 kilometers or about 24 miles away.  The copilot began to sketch the event.  The light from the object illuminated the ground so brightly that the crew could see houses and roads visible on the ground.

And then, the beam of light shifted, focusing on the aircraft and seemed to be accelerating toward the Tu-134.  The pilot, Igor, yelled out to the navigator to tell ground control what they were experiencing.

A moment later, the object stopped its approach and seemed to maintain its distance from the plane.

Ground control responded…telling the crew that they could see nothing on their radar that might account for the object.  Even visual observation in the direction of the airplane and the object revealed nothing in the dark night sky.

Lazurin, the co-pilot responded to the controller’s statement: “Well, now they will say that we’re not in our right minds.”

The plane continued in its journey, and the object stayed with them, but shifted its position around the aircraft, flying above and below it, to the right and left, but always staying with the plane as it flew at about 32,000 feet and at 500 miles per hour.

Finally, the controller broke in again on the radio and confirmed that they were seeing the same object that the crew was observing

The navigator confirmed – now the plane and ground controller were at least observing the same object.  But the definition of the object became clearer – with a tail and nose visible to the crew.

At this moment, a flight attendant entered the cockpit.  Passengers aboard the plane were now seeing the object and were asking what was flying alongside the plane?

Cherkashin, the pilot replied, “tell them it’s a cloud of some kind.”  He went on to explain the passengers were seeing lights from both the city below and the northern lights.

At this moment, another Tu-134 flying from Leningrad approached the flight from the opposite direction with only about 100 kilometers separating the planes.  The ground controller asked the pilot to look for the object that was pacing the plane.  The crew of the Leningrad flight initially saw…nothing.  But as the distance rapidly closed to be only 15 kilometers distant, the object became visible.  Later, the crew believed that the light from the object must have been polarized or visible only when looked at from specific angles.

The flight to Tallin continued and flight controllers in the cities of Riga and Vilnius both saw two objects on their screen – the Tu-134 and the mysterious, clouded object.  For the pilots and controllers alike – the second object that shadowed the plane for hundreds of miles – was, in fact, real.

Upon landing, reports were made, and the deputy chairman of the Commission of Aerodynamic Phenomena was asked to comment on the event.  Their commission’s statement included the following:

“The sighting made by the Tallin crew has been investigated by the Estonian section of our commission.  The fact that the object instantly changed its movement to the opposite direction and reached the ground with a beam of light from a very high altitude is unquestionably atypical.  The dimensions of the object which the aviators saw…was really very huge.  It was natural to assume that somewhere distant, many thousands of kilometers away, a global atmospheric or geophysical process of a type still unknown to science is taking place. But in the final analysis, this explanation proved to be untenable. After all, the aviators succeeded in determ1n1ngthe distance to the object.

"For this reason, there is only one conclusion that may be drawn: the Tallin crew dealt with what we call a UFO.”

Part 4

Unfortunately for Ziegel, this event that started to bring the study of UFOs into the public domain, came too late.  Ziegel suffered a stroke in 1985. His second was fatal, and he died on November 20, 1988.

His daughter, Tatyana Konstantinova-Ziegel, said of him:

For my father, Stalinism has never ended. As the War broke out, he, an ethnic German, was deported. After the War, he had difficulties because his second name sounded too Jewish to many. In science, the domination of ‘the one and only correct point of view’ remained a norm….unveiled malice from one group of people and secret jealousy of another—those were the reasons that prevented him from bringing his ideas to the general public’s awareness.

As of 2011, she still has seventeen huge type-written volumes of her father’s unpublished work.

What stories might be in Tatyana’s possession?  Those 17 books of unpublished records of Zeigel’s exploration of Soviet UFO encounters is enticing to anyone who, like everyone here at My Dark Path, wants to believe.  But as interesting as these cases might be, the culture of suppression that was the foundation of the Soviet Union is equally informative.  We can debate the facts, the observations and the data.  But a government or philosophy that declares there is only one correct point of view, that certain types of questions no right to exist.  That approach to government should be even harder to find than the truth about flying saucers.

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show. Creative director is Dom Purdie. Big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science, and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.