A declassified CIA report on an alleged UFO attack on Soviet soldiers during the last stage of the USSR went viral after being posted on the agency’s website.
The document is a single-page summary of newspaper articles from the Canadian version of the weekly Weekly World News and the Ukrainian newspaper Holos Ukrayiny dated March 1993, describing a hostile encounter between the Russian military and a flying saucer that reportedly took place in 1989 or 1990.
According to the report, titled «Cosmic Vengeance» in the Ukrainian source, and drawn from an extensive 250-page KGB archive that included witness statements and documentary photographs, 25 Soviet soldiers were participating in training exercises when a «saucer-shaped low-flying spacecraft» passed over their base in Siberia.
The sighting prompted the men to react, «for unknown reasons,» by launching a surface-to-air missile at the craft, which they successfully shot down.
«Five short humanoids with ‘large heads and large black eyes'» emerged from the wreckage, according to the report, before merging into a «single object»: a spherical shape that emitted an ominous buzzing sound.
The sphere then exploded in an explosion of bright white light, leaving 23 of the men «turned into stone poles,» while the remaining two, protected from the explosion by being in shadow, escaped unharmed.
The bodies of the victims were apparently recovered by the Red Army and taken to a secret research laboratory outside Moscow, where it was discovered that their molecular structure was now identical to that of limestone, and the light that petrified them was attributed to an «energy source» unknown to humanity.
In response to the story, an anonymous CIA analyst quoted in the report said, «If the KGB file corresponds to reality, this is an extremely threatening case.»
«Aliens possess weapons and technology that are beyond all our assumptions. They can defend themselves if they are attacked,» he adds.
Former CIA agent Mike Baker, on the other hand, has expressed skepticism about the encounter, which reads like a scene from a pulp science fiction novel or a 1950s B-movie. «If there was an incident, regardless of the nature of it, I suspect that the actual report doesn’t look much like what’s come out now, after five or six or seven reinterpretations of what was originally [written],» he told Fox News Digital. «I’m sure there’s something out there. But I don’t think [aliens] landed decades ago, turned Soviet soldiers into limestone and we’re only finding out now. I don’t think that happened,» he said. Nonetheless, UFOs continue to be the subject of enormous fascination in the U.S. and around the world. U.S. President Donald Trump, during an appearance on Logan Paul’s podcast in the middle of his presidential campaign last year, said he didn’t believe in aliens.
However, in the early months of his presidency, he signed an executive order demanding that all federal documents related to them be declassified in order to expose or dispel rumors of any «cover-ups» that may or may not have taken place.
The Pentagon, on the other hand, published a report last year detailing the 757 tips that the institution had received from citizens between May 2023 and June 2024 in relation to unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena, and finally admitted that none had provided evidence that life exists outside our planet.
That said, among the hundreds of misidentified balloons, birds, and satellites in the reports, there were also a number of episodes that lacked an easy explanation, including a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York.
A Joe Sommerlad Story for The Independent and Rocket media news