Soviet Union

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s aerospace and military rivalry with the United States repeatedly intersected with UAP-related programmes and reporting. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created around six shell companies to buy titanium from the Soviet Union for the construction of the SR-71 Blackbird, an aircraft made largely of titanium and designed to fly over Soviet territory.¹ When the Soviet Union learned that the United States was developing the XB-70 Valkyrie, it responded by developing the MiG-25 as a high-altitude interceptor, building an entire fleet of the aircraft to counter it.² This history was recounted by fighter pilot David Fravor in conversation with podcast host Lex Fridman, who was born in the Soviet Union.³

Soviet pilots were reportedly seeing strange things in the sky, but their reports were being suppressed.⁴ Fravor has recounted a story from within the Soviet Union in which Soviet forces shot at and shot down an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), after which orders were reportedly given never to shoot at or chase such objects again, only to observe them.⁵ Declassified files from the Project Condign study contain testimony attributed to Boris Sokolov, who said Soviet pilots were killed in engagements with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).⁶ Sokolov also reported 40 cases in which Soviet pilots encountered UFOs and were ordered to chase and then fire on them; in these engagements the UFOs would reportedly accelerate, causing the pursuing aircraft to lose control, resulting in three crashes and two pilot deaths.⁷ The Project Condign study itself, produced for the British Ministry of Defence, concluded that the Russians took UAP extremely seriously and regarded them as a clear threat.⁸ As the Soviet Union collapsed and Cold War secrets began to leak out, it emerged that Soviet authorities had frequently observed UAP incursions over sensitive nuclear and other military facilities identical to those reported in the West.⁹ Dual civilian and military Soviet UAP investigation programmes ran for 13 years, collecting thousands of sighting reports.¹⁰ Later analysis found that strange objects were seen across a huge swathe of Scandinavia and the Soviet Union in September 1977, coinciding with the Petrozavodsk sighting.¹¹

Soviet or Russian origin has also featured in theories about several reported crashes and sightings. According to In Plain Sight, it has been suggested that the object that crashed at Kecksburg in 1965 was a Russian or US satellite, though what actually crashed remains an open question.¹² Annie Jacobsen’s book Area 51 asserts that the wreckage recovered at Roswell in 1947 was in fact a Russian craft, built by scientists captured from Nazi Germany.¹³ By contrast, the 1994 US Air Force Roswell report claimed the wreckage was from a then-top-secret balloon project designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests, known as Project Mogul.¹⁴ According to In Plain Sight, another US air intelligence report, released in December 1948, suggested that the numerous strange craft seen in American skies were possibly of Soviet origin.¹⁵ Theories that the 1946 Swedish Ghost Rockets were Soviet rocket tests were dismissed because the objects had no exhaust, were completely silent, and were seen flying horizontally, often very slowly, in formation.¹⁶

Several commentators have linked the Soviet Union to explanations for US government secrecy around UAP. Harry Turner considered that, by erecting a facade of ridicule, the United States hoped to allay public alarm, reduce the possibility of the Soviets exploiting UFO mass sightings for psychological or actual warfare purposes, and cover for a real US programme developing vehicles that emulate UFO performance.¹⁷ Daniel Sheehan has said he believes the US government viewed suppression of UAP-related information as a direct appendage of the war-making in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and China.¹⁸ Robert Fish argued that if the exact electromagnetic signature of a high-mach UFO sought by US sensors were published, the Soviets or Chinese would be able to manufacture a bomber equipped with signals and electronic intelligence (SIGINT/ELINT) countermeasure equipment generating that exact signature.¹⁹ According to Ross Coulthart, Fish has extensive experience working on classified programmes, including President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Trust but Verify’ nuclear missile disarmament treaty with the Soviets.²⁰

The Soviet Union’s military reach featured in several other contexts within the corpus. The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap in Australia’s Northern Territory was originally a ground station for tracking the telemetry of Soviet missile launches.²¹ On another occasion, a panicked White House feared the Soviets were considering deploying troops on the Golan Heights border between Syria and Israel.²² The Soviet Union also exerted heavy influence in Afghanistan from 1954 owing to its substantial military assistance there.²³

The Soviet Union’s early space programme later featured in UAP-disclosure discourse. In his October 2017 launch speech for the 2017 To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences launch event, Christopher K. Mellon pointed out that October 1957 marked precisely 60 years since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human-made Earth satellite.²⁴ Mellon has argued that the launch of Sputnik prompted a massive US government boost in spending on science and engineering to catch up with the Soviets, propelling the country into the space race.²⁵ Robert Hastings has said it is clear that UAP are tampering with nuclear weapons, questioning whether the phenomenon has humanity’s best interests at heart or intends to invade, and adding that he doubts anyone in the Pentagon, the Soviet Union, or the government of Russia has the answers.²⁶