by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
When I mentioned to my Russian co-worker, Sasha (in the construction shop at the Metropolitan Opera), that I was going to write about a 1989 UFO, occupant, and robot report from Voronezh that got the world’s attention thanks to a Tass article he said, “Oh, yeah, there were all kinds of crazy reports in the newspapers back then. We didn’t take them seriously.” He explained that because of glasnost (the opening up of Russia to the West and loosening of restrictions under Gorbachev), news companies felt free to report on UFOs and other paranormal subjects that they knew would sell papers. He said they called papers that carried such stories “yellow papers.” My knowledge of the case came from sensationalized narratives on UFO websites, but after actually taking the time to find the original newspaper reports, it seems that the story is the result of a combination of over-zealous UFO researchers, credulous reporters, and perhaps less than scrupulous editors taking advantage of the new political climate.
On October 9, 1989, the Russian newspaper Tass, carried a story under the headline “A UFO Said to Have Landed in a Park at Voronezh.” According to the article, witnesses reported that “an enormous ball or luminous disc” landed in a park, “two or three extraterrestrial beings” and a “small robot” came out, walked around the craft, and then went back inside. The creatures are described as 3-4 meters tall with “tiny heads.” The craft is said to have then taken off silently and to have “disappeared in a wink.”
V & C 2Because Tass is a respected paper, the story was picked up by Associated Press and even made it into the New York Times where it was treated with mockery. The next day, Tass added additional details. Three school children are named as witnesses, the humanoids are described as having three eyes, and a child is said to have been paralyzed by “a luminous glance” from one of the creatures after crying out in fear. The story evolved over numerous retellings, and in the version (page 2 of the pdf) presented in the Vol. 34, No. 4 (December 1989) Flying Saucer Review, the creatures’ heads are described as shallow domes sitting directly on their shoulders, another boy was hit by a beam from a tube held by a creature and rendered invisible until the craft left, the list of child witnesses has twelve names, and the number of adult witnesses is said to have been “possibly as many as 30 or 40.”
Patrick Gross looked at the case and not only does he put it into the context of glasnost, he looks at its tie to an infamous Spanish case known as “The UMMO Affair.” He presents his research and opinions on his website, UFOs at Close Sight in a section dealing with the UMMO Affair under the headline “On the borders of “UMMO”: The so-called UFO landing in Voronezh, Russia, 1989.”
According to Gross, “The first report of the Voronezh wave appeared in the Soviet newspaper Kommuna.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t include a transcript of that article. The incident was said to have taken place during a soccer game with witnesses that included, in Gross’s words, “many teenagers and over forty adults.” The witnesses reportedly described a pink/red light that turned into a dark sphere that circled the park at a low altitude, flew away, reappeared after a few minutes, and then hovered over the park. A door is said to have opened revealing “a being” that looked out over “an astonished group of witnesses.” The craft is described as landing and coming into contact with a “large poplar tree” which was bent over and remained so. Gross moves onto the Tass article at this point and does include a transcript of it.
The Tass article begins with the news that “experts” had confirmed the UFO landing and gave a statement that they found “traces of the craft and its occupants, who have even made a short walk in the park.” The “chief of the laboratory of the expedition,” Guenrikh Silanov, is quoted saying that they located the landing spot with “the technique of biological magnetism.” He described a 20 meter diameter circle with four depressions that were 4-5 cm deep and 14-16 cm in diameter forming a rhombus. He is also quoted saying that they found what resembled “dark red sandstone,” that was determined, “after mineralogical analysis” to be “a rock without equivalent on Earth.”
V & CAccording to Gross, the story showed up in France in a press release, was picked up by papers there and worldwide, and went out on the Associated Press newswire, all on October 9. The AP article notes: “The report was the latest strange tale in the official Soviet media, which under the policy of glasnost, “or openness,” have recently told of other sightings of unidentified flying objects and alien creatures.” In this version, Silanov is reported to have said he used “biolocation” (without explaining what that was) as opposed to “biological magnetism,” and when The New York Times picked up the story, “bilocation” was the term that showed up in that article by Esther B. Fein published October 10 headlined “A Tass Bulletin: Knobby Aliens Were Here.”
The case is covered extensively in FSR by Gordon Creighton, who takes the story at face value and argues for its validity. As for “biolocation” (“bio-location” here) Creighton explains that this is the Russian term for “dowsing.” Whereas this might not instill confidence in the methodology of Silanov in most people’s minds, Creighton has no problem with it. According to him, the Russians are “second to nobody in the world in their knowledge of all aspects of Parapsychology [sic] and Occultism [sic]” and he claims the KGB has studied these subjects “intensely,” and that the Russians take dowsing “very seriously” as they do “a lot of things at which we profess to snigger.”
Creighton presents a list with the names of ten boys and two girls and quotes the mayor of Voronezh as saying, “I am not very young myself. And I am positive that an adult can always perceive when a child is telling the truth and when he is giving rein to his imagination. I believe what they are saying (italics in the original).”
Putting the credibility of the child witnesses in doubt is an excerpt from a report presented by Gross from the Russian paper Literatournaya Gazéta: “another boy approaches and starts to speak about what he saw with the others. Somebody is indignant: ‘You were not with us!’ The impostor blinks an eye and brings corrections by specifying that he saw the aliens on another time.” Gross quotes “Russian UFOlogist” Boris Shurinov as saying “the case collapsed like a house of cards and the journalists who traveled on the spot found themselves vis-a-vis (with) kids burning with the desire for being interviewed and very ready to declare themselves witnesses.”
According to Gross, one of the child witnesses drew a craft with a symbol on it that got many UFOlogists excited because it looked like what appears on the bottom of a picture of a saucer from the UMMO Affair. The UMMO affair involved a group of people in Spain who claimed to have received letters from creatures on the planet UMMO that told of their visit to Earth, what life was like on UMMO, and included predictions of events to come. A well-known picture came out of this of a saucer with a symbol on the bottom of it that looks sort of like a “w” on top of an “m.” Gross argues that it also looks like the letter of the Cyrillic alphabet transcribed as “zh.”
Gross agrees with the general assessment of the Western press that the story is dubious, but some prominent Western UFOlogists, including Jacques Vallée and Peter Robbins, felt there was something to it. Vallée devoted two chapters to it in his 1992 book UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, and Peter Robbins gave a speech about it at the 2009 Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Vallée was intrigued enough by the case to travel to Russia with Martine Castello (his collaborator for the book) and meet with the investigators. Although he felt there was something to it, he says he and Martine were “confused” by the topic of biolocation” and describes them as having problems with the UMMO aspect of the case (he says Martine did “extensive investigations into the cult of UMMO in the West”).
In his speech, Robbins focuses on what he considers to be the Western media’s unfair dismissal of the case. In his conclusion he says, “I think the events of September 27, 1989, were genuine, though I cannot explain their uniqueness or why we have not seen or heard of their like since.”