SUBJECT: OLD UFO SIGHTING IN RUSSIA                          FILE: UFO2623



BY JAMES OBERG for OMNI



Once a UFO case becomes " a classic," no amount of logic can convince some 
people that a prosaic explanation holds sway. Take the sighting made in the 
pre-dawn darkness of Friday, September 7, 1984, when a Soviet Aeroflot 
airliner was flying north from Belorussia toward Estonia. At 4:10 a.m., 
passing Minsk, the co-pilot noticed a bright light ahead and to the right. For 
the next several minutes, the light, or whatever it was, supposedly escorted 
the airliner along its path.

Captain lgor Cherkashin called the local traffic contol, who saw nothing in 
the sky. But after several minutes of searching on radar, ground contollers 
reported a funny "double image," presumed by some to be the airliner and its 
escort from beyond. as the radar was tracking, co-pilot Gennadli Lazurin 
grabbed his logbook and began making sketches of the apparition as it changed 
shape, color, and size. Its scintillating sequences of color were so bright 
the crew could see its refleciton in the ground below.

Years after the original report, pundits started discussing another civil 
airliner, one supposedly heading in the opposite direction, that had observed 
the strange lights as well. According to rumor swirling around the UFO 
community, this second craft had been a military interceptor sent up to chase 
the UFO. Its pilot reportedly died a year later of cancer, and its co-pilot 
suffered heart problems. A stewardess was said to have contracted a mysterious 
skin disease.

To some investigators on the case, the medical puzzle had an obvious 
explanation: the poisonous rays of the UFO. Russian UFO-watcher Antonio 
Huneeus later called it" one of the most serious UFO injury cases ever 
reported."

But despite all the theories, a prosaic explanation exists. It turns out that 
just when the pilots in the first craft glimpsed the mysterious lights, a 
Soviet military missile was being launched from the supersecret Plesetsk 
Cosmodrome. In fact, the sketches by co-pilot Lazurin show a distinct sequence 
of lights - first rays, concentric circles, and expanding rings, then a cloud, 
and finally, a fading amorphous mass; it's not coincidence that the same 
sequence of shapes graces sketches made by other witnesses depicting known 
rocket launchings. What's more, at precisely the same time the Soviet pilots 
were freaking out, amateur observers throughout Finland were observing the 
Soviet missilte launch themselves.

As for the radar sightings and health problems, skeptics dismiss them as 
coincidence and exaggeration. Most people " exposed" to the UFO, after all, 
were not affected, and those who were seem to have been injured in strikingly 
different ways. And Phillip Klass, an electronics expert for Aviation Week 
magazine, noted that given an insistent enough visual sighting, a radar 
operator will almost always find something "funny" on his display.

Speaking for the record, Moscow, of course, did not agree. Soviet officials 
denied the existence of the Cosmodrome itself. And the official army 
newspaper, Red Star, later asserted that the Minsky sighting might have been 
caused by refracted light beams striking floating space garbage.

As for UFO proponents, they admit that the rocket launching occurred, but 
suggest that this was what attracted the real UFO to Russia in the first 
place. "The UFO must have continued its flight toward Plesetsk, probably to 
see what was going on," one expert speculated in the magazine, Science in the 
U.S.S.R.

A starship from beyond or a secret Soviet missile? Decide for yourself. As far 
as I can reckon, the telling evidence is there.



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