What happened
On 9 October 1989 the Soviet news agency TASS told the world that a flying saucer had landed in a park in Voronezh, a city of some 800,000 south-east of Moscow, and that giants with tiny heads had gone for a short walk. According to the reports, boys playing football one evening in late September saw a pink glow and then a deep red ball about three metres across that circled, vanished and returned to hover. A figure three or four metres tall with three eyes, bronze-coloured boots and a disc on its chest, they said, came out with a small robot, and used a kind of ray gun to make a 16-year-old boy vanish until the craft left. TASS said researchers had located the landing spot and traces of the visitors' walk and reported unusual rock, and a police lieutenant said he too saw something flying. Coming from the official agency in the glasnost era, the story ran worldwide, and a firm soon sold tours of the 'land of the aliens'.
The official explanation
Genrikh Silanov of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, cited by TASS, later said the supposed alien rock was a common form of hematite and told a Soviet paper not to believe everything TASS published, as his lab never gave it much of what appeared. A vice-rector of Voronezh University said slightly elevated caesium was unremarkable after Chernobyl. Skeptic Paul Kurtz noted that the 'landing site' had been located by dowsing, and Soviet TV journalist Vladimir Posner's crew found no witnesses other than children, leading Posner to suggest youthful imagination. Commentators also saw the story as part of a glasnost-era boom in sensational paranormal reporting.
The anomalous case
The story did not come from a tabloid but from the Soviet state news agency, and TASS insisted it was not a joke; Sovetskaya Kultura defended its coverage on the principle that readers must know everything. Multiple children told consistent stories and drew the craft and the robot; sketches attributed to the young witnesses were later published by researchers including Jacques Vallée. A police officer, Lieutenant Sergei Matveyev, independently said he saw a body flying in the sky, and the Interior Ministry said troops would be sent if the object returned. TASS's first report said scientists had identified the landing site and found traces of the creatures' walk.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Voronezh UFO incident Wikipedia
- Voronezh, Russia: UFO Landing and Aliens The Black Vault (case file)
- Le Courrier de l'Ouest, 10 October 1989 (TASS report, translated) Patrick Gross, UFOs at Close Sight
Witness reports elsewhere
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