Tajik Air Pilots Report Unidentified Flying Object

The Tajik Air Pilots Report Unidentified Flying Object (94 DUSHANBE 259) is a report dated 1994-01-31 concerning the 1994-01-27 Tajik Air Boeing 747SP UFO sighting over Kazakhstan. According to the source record, Ed Rhodes was Tajik Air’s chief pilot and an American citizen.¹ Rhodes reported that he and two American pilot colleagues encountered a Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) on 1994-01-27 while flying a Boeing 747SP at approximately 12,500 metres.² He placed the encounter over Kazakhstan at latitude 45 north and longitude 55 east.³ Rhodes said the crew first saw an extremely bright light approaching from the east at high speed and at a much higher altitude than their aircraft.⁴ He reported that they watched it for approximately forty minutes while it made circles, corkscrews and 90-degree turns at high speed and under very high g-forces.⁵ He also said that he took several photographs with an Olympus pocket camera.⁶

The report records Rhodes’s account of the object’s departure and the subsequent observation of its trails. He said that it adopted a horizontal high-speed course and disappeared over the horizon.⁷ Because the observation occurred in darkness, the crew were unable to discern its shape.⁸ They described the emitted light as having a bow wave, resembling a high-speed photograph of a bullet in flight.⁹ Approximately forty-five minutes after the initial sighting, as the sun rose, the aircraft flew beneath contrails attributed to the object.¹⁰ Rhodes said the Boeing 747SP was travelling at over approximately 930 kilometres per hour at the time,¹¹ and estimated the contrails’ altitude at approximately 30,000 metres.¹² He argued that there was too little air and moisture at that altitude for ordinary aircraft to produce contrails, while also reporting that the trails followed the object’s circular and corkscrew manoeuvres.¹³¹⁴

The source record says Rhodes intended to send copies of the photographs to the American Embassy Dushanbe and Lowry Taylor at the Tajikistan Desk of the United States Department of State.¹⁵ It identifies Taylor as working on that desk.¹⁶ Rhodes and his crew, who had previously flown passenger aircraft for Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), said the object was unlike meteors or space debris they had seen.¹⁷¹⁸ Rhodes considered it extraterrestrial and under intelligent control, and the source record says the crew appeared to support that opinion.¹⁹²⁰ Escudero said the embassy had no opinion on the sighting and reported it for what it might be worth.²¹ The report therefore preserves both the pilots’ observations and interpretations, alongside the limited official response recorded in the document.