Giant UFO Over Two Continents

James Oberg

First published in FATE Magazine,
January, 1983

(Web version published with the author's permission.)

Aerial apparition sparks panic in the streets, fears
of nuclear attack


and reports of extraterrestrial landings

ONE of the most spectacular and widely witnessed UFO apparitions of recent
years occurred on the evening of Saturday, June 14, 1980. In its first phase
it was widely seen in central Russia; Soviet ufologist Feliks Zigel was
subsequently able to prepare a report based on detailed interviews with 40
eyewitnesses. In its second phase the UFO appeared one hour later over South
America (at about 7:00 P.M. Argentine time) where it was seen in five
countries and photographed in the western sky near the moon; this event was
widely reported in the United States and was featured in a two-page
International UFO Reporter analysis a few months later, A third unconfirmed
phase occurred near Morocco.

Numerous highly-qualified eyewitnesses to the event exist. They include
airline pilots, newspaper photographers, retired military officers and
experienced UFO investigators. Photographs show the UFO along with measurable
calibration objects such as the moon or identifiable horizon features.
Physiological effects and sightings of occupants of small "scout ships" are
on record in Moscow. Gordon Creighton, a senior consultant to the respected
Flying Saucer Review, called the case "certainly one of the most fascinating
yet produced anywhere in the world." J. Allen Hynek of the Center for UFO
Studies (CUFOS) termed the Argentine phase ''one of the most astonishing in
years." And chief CUFOS investigator Allan Hendry wrote that "the exact
nature of this one remains a mystery,"

The Soviet accounts, which appeared in various Western publications owing to
the efforts of Los Angeles-based free lance Henry Gris, speak of a "huge"
(more than 120-meter-wide) reddish-orange "horseshoe-shaped or
crescent-shaped" object seen sequentially in Kalinin, Moscow, Ryazan, Gorkiy
and Kazan. According to ufologist Aleksey Zolotov, himself an eyewitness,
many Soviet air force planes were scrambled to intercept the UFO. In Moscow
Feliks Zigel observed panic in the streets as old women wailed about the Day
of Judgment and men directed people to airraid shelters in the face of an
apparent American nuclear attack. In Gorkiy, cows bellowed and ducks flapped
frantically on the banks of the Volga.

Another leading Soviet UFO expert, Sergey Bozhich, who saw it from his
apartment in the Moscow suburb of Tushino, recalled that "it was a truly
terrifying sight, I immediately realized that the reddish crescent simply had
to be an extraterrestrial spacecraft, for I have been studying UFOs for many
years now and I have already seen UFOs similar to this one."

Zigel's research uncovered two close encounters of the third kind. One came
from Lt. Col. Oleg Karyakin who saw a flying saucer hovering in the street in
front of his house that night; a neighbor later described "a human figure,
quite small and dressed in a spacesuit, inside the transparent cupola of the
saucer." In the second, television director Aleksandr Koreshkov was awakened
from sleep by a noisy "object" in the street. Next to it he saw "a very small
man." His wife later also awoke to find large red burn marks on her arms;
these vanished by morning. Gordon Creighton later wrote that these reports
indicated "in convincing fashion that a number of small craft released from
the huge UFO did actually land on the streets of the Russian Capital."

The South American reports, while less sensational, were even more
widespread. "So many cities in a five-country area--including Argentina,
Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay-- reported seeing the same type of 'UFO'
, that the initial press treatment spoke of a 'fleet' of UFOs," Hendry's
report for CUFOS noted. "In retrospect a single high-altitude phenomenon appears
to be behind it all."

Pilots and control tower personnel at Newbery Airport in Buenos Aires
reported the object hovering within a kilometer of the airport. At Ezezia
Airport controllers said they could see the UFO as a dot on their radarscope.
In Cordoba the object appeared to take off from the airport runway and shoot
up to 25,000 feet. A "circular flying mass" chased a family driving home from
a visit to Cordoba. They pulled their car off the road and stopped. The UFO
descended toward them "with vertical and circular movements leaving a bright
trail of whitish smoke"-and then disappeared before their eyes.

In Corrientes newsman Omar Vallejos saw the UFO "hovering over the Prana
River--and then, as if [it] had seen us, it started to move north and
disappeared."

Visual descriptions were mostly consistent. "It looked like a full moon but
fainter," one pilot said, "and it was surrounded by a sort of halo." At
Newbery Field a controller called it "a sort of sphere that was dim in the
middle and brighter around the edges." Two photographs, published in the
tabloid "Star" on August 19, 1980, show a tenuous ''doughnut" cloud.

Dr. Willy Smith, a CUFOS researcher specializing in South American reports,
concluded that the UFO-cloud was at an altitude of "200 to 300 kilometers,"
with a speed of "one to two kilometers per second, and that is very
reliable."

These "foggy-halo" descriptions led Hendry to suspect a high-altitude
barium-cloud-release experiment, like those frequently conducted by NASA to
investigate ionospheric conditions and regularly reported as UFOs.
(Fortunately, they are among the easiest for investigators to identify.) But
there were no such ionospheric probes on record for this case. Also, Hendry
wrote, "What makes it unusual are the claims of rapid motion across the sky-
especially rapid given the high altitude."

Although the South American reports were published at the time they took
place, not until May 1981 did Henry Gris obtain information on the Russian
phase of the case. His story, based on a personal trip to the USSR and
meetings with ufologists there, appeared in the National Enquirer on July
7, 1981, and in expanded form in the Italian magazine Gente a few weeks
later; the latter was the source of a feature in January 1982 Flying Saucer
Review. Although Gris knew of the South American phase -- in fact he was the
first known UFO researcher to connect the two phases -- he did not mention it
in his articles then or since.

Intrigued by the global nature of the case, I mailed a query letter to two
dozen specialists on September 30, 1981.

"Note that the two regions are connected by a great circle which is inclined
to the equator by about 65 degrees," I wrote, "If the cloud were associated
with an object in earth orbit, it would have taken it about one hour to
traverse the distance from Russia to Argentina - and oddly enough that is the
approximate time differential . . . . I point out that 63 degrees (give or
take a few degrees) is an orbital inclination associated almost exclusively wi
th Soviet military spacecraft." The apparitions in both countries could have
been sunlit, not necessarily self-luminous, because at high altitudes the
clouds were still in sunlight. It was shortly after sunset in Argentina (by
one hour and 20 minutes) and it was during the season of the "midnight sun"
in northern Russia, when the sun is barely below the northern horizon
throughout the night.

An interesting reply came from Dr. David R. Squires of the Smithsonian
Institution's Scientific Event Alert Network (the successor to the Center for
Short-Lived Phenomena). He wrote, "I observed a similar phenomenon years ago
when I was working at the Smithsonian's satellite tracking station in
Woomera, Australia [in 1967-69]. This particular cloud was associated with a
U.S. satellite that had just been launched into earth orbit from Cape
Kennedy. We had set up our Baker-Nunn camera to photograph the satellite when
not only did it appear but this rather startling cloud accompanied the
payload as if it were attached right behind it. Others at the station
recalled seeing a similar satellite-cloud relationship a couple of years
before this one, and it was even more impressive because the satellite itself
was visible to the naked eye. From their observing point the cloud appeared
to surround the satellite as it traveled across the sky."

Another contribution came from James Cornell, public relations director of
the Center for Astrophysics (formerly the Smithsonian Astrophysics
Laboratory) in Cambridge, Mass. His newsletter Centerline had published a
remarkable series of photographs of the "translunar injection" burn of
Apollo-8 when it left its parking orbit and headed out on mankind's first
voyage to the moon in December 1968. The photos, taken by a Smithsonian
observation station in Hawaii shortly before dawn local time, showed a
remarkable sequence of shapes and clouds as the rocket fired and then shut
down. Another series of photographs showed Saturn third stages far out in
space, venting great clouds of excess propellant, in 1969.

Dr. Patrick S. Osmer, director of the Inter-American Observatory at Cerro
Tololo, Chile, provided an even more valuable lead. He had no data on the
June 14 event but wrote, "We did have a prominent event seen from Tololo on
February 12 at about 2:00 hours UT [Universal Time]. It was a luminous green
cloud of appreciable angular extent that floated across the sky Â…. Such
clouds are seen here from time to time."

So with a satellite hypothesis apparently a promising lead, I made a list of
space shots which occurred within a few days of June 14 (the cloud betokened
a recent, relatively new event) and wrote to the NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md,, for tracking data from which I could extract launch
time and actual path across the face of the earth for the several candidate
objects and their boosters. I hoped one of them would correspond in timing
and direction to the hypothetical Russo-Argentine "cloud satellite."

One did: the Soviet ''Kosmos-1188," launched from Plesetsk at about 11:55 P.M,
on June 14 (eyewitness Bozhich had noted the exact time of disappearance of
his red crescent UFO as "11:58 PM," after several minutes of observation),
had flown across South America one hour later. It was an exhilarating moment
when my computer-driven map plotter drew its ground track line right past the
UFO sighting locales. And the orbital inclination was exactly 62.8 degrees,
very close to my original estimate of 65 degrees.

Willy Smith's estimate, based solely on detailed analysis of eyewitness
accounts, was off by a factor of four too low -- but that's not bad and it
was the most accurate work done up to that point. Since there is a linear
relation between range and absolute speed, scaling up Smith's estimated speed
by a factor of four gives a range of four to eight kilometers per second. The
actual velocity of the satellite was a bit more than seven kilometers per
second-right inside the adjusted range Smith had computed.

Meanwhile a seemingly independent strand of the mystery was about to be woven
into the grand tapestry of the solution. Smith had informed me that yet
another "fuzzy halo" UFO had been seen and photographed on the evening of
Saturday, October 31, 1981. According to the story (which was featured in
two issues of the APRO Bulletin), the UFO was seen in three Argentine
provinces and in Arica, Chile, at 9:00 PM. At the Felix Aguilar Observatory
an official said the UFO (with a "classic" shape of a "flying saucer")
crossed the sky at a great rate of speed, left a luminous, sparkling wake and
disappeared into the northeast. Control tower operators and airline pilots
watched it in awe; at Cordoba observers estimated it to be about 600 feet off
the ground. Seven mountain climbers watched a UFO two or three miles away
which "illuminated the entire area" and unnerved the witnesses as they were
caught in its glow.

Astronomer Dr. Terry Oswalt (who had photographed the Cerro Tololo "green
cloud" UFO and is now on the staff of Ohio State University) sent me
clippings of the local newspapers' reporting of the February, 11, 1980,
sighting. There were the usual accounts of bright lights, shaped like the
letter "A" or a star with rays coming out; also notable was an account of a
terrifying ride down a mountainside occasioned by a bus driver's fear that
the flying saucer was chasing him. A young woman named Ximena Sabay reported
multiple persons witnessed television interference caused by the presence of
the UFO.

Oswalt himself described the UFO from detailed entries in his journal.
Although there was a large, dim cloud associated with the apparition, the
brightest feature was not a cloud but a set of nested V-shaped structures
which moved northward in the direction of the apex of the "V." At the apex of
the outermost "V" was a bright yellowish object.

Struck by the similarities of these apparitions to the one described in the
June 14 case, I again checked space-vehicle launch records. I was amazed to
find that all three cases correlated with satellite launchings in the
Kosmos program -- particularly with the relatively infrequent subclass
consisting of "Early Warning" (EW) vehicles. Each South American sighting
followed by little more than one hour the blast-off of an EW satellite from
Plesetsk. It could not have been coincidental. Kosmos-1164 took off at 00:56
UT on Februarv 12, 1980, and the Cerro Tololo green cloud and yellow star
appeared at 2:00 UT (10:00 P.M. Chilean time); Kosmos-1188 took off at 20:55
UT on June 14, J980, and was seen over South America shortly after 3:00 P.M.
Argentine time (22:00 UT); and Kosmos-1317 took off at 22:48 UT on October
31, 1981, and was seen over Argentina shortly after 9:00 P.M. (midnight UT).

The sequence of this type of space launching goes as follows: The four-stage
"Molniya" booster blasts off from the officially unacknowledged "Northern
Cosmodrome" near Plesetsk, with more than one million pounds of thrust from
its 20 engines (the engines are grouped in quartets on a central core and on
four parallel-staged "strap-on" boosters). After several minutes the four
boosters fall away while the central core continues in flight (this is called
"second stage"). A few minutes later the core exhausts its fuel and falls
away while a smaller third stage carries the eight-ton three-part top section
into a low parking orbit, then drops off. Coasting along, the orbiting
vehicle is steered by a unit called the "launch platform" which aims the
assembly in the right direction. The satellite crosses Mongolia, China, the
Philippines and central Australia, then cuts across the far southern Pacific
before swerving northward off the coast of Chile.

An hour after launch, at an altitude of 400 miles over the southern
hemisphere, a fourth stage fires, Ieaving the "platform" behind and pushing
itself and the actual payload into an even higher orbit which swoops more
than 20,000 miles above the northern hemisphere. There the satellite becomes
part of a network which watches for American missile launchings and relays
real-time tracking data to Soviet military headquarters.

The multiple launch contrails, backlit by the reddish sunlight from the
midnight sun, easily account for what was seen over Russia. In fact, Bozhich
himself described how the June 14 UFO was "extraordinarily similar to the
one that flew over Petrozavodsk on the night of September 20, 1977" -- the
infamous "jellyfish UFO" which has been conclusively proven to have been
caused by the predawn launch of Kosmos-955 out of Plesetsk on the same kind
of booster used by the EW satellites.

The next problem was to identify which piece of the EW launch vehicle is
responsible for the South American cloud: the spent third stage, the launch
platform, the fourth stage, or the payload itself. Significantly, the three
observed clouds were all on EW launches, even though there are far more
launches of the Molniya communications satellite type -- and they follow a
launch sequence almost identical to that of the EW vehicles. The sole
difference is that on the Molniya satellites the fourth stage burn is
performed earlier (i.e., 2000 miles farther west) on the parking orbit. The
difference does not affect the behavior of the already-jettisoned third
stage, so that candidate can be eliminated because its flight path cannot
account for the observed differences between the Molniya and EW missions.
Meanwhile, the launch platform and payload probably do not carry sufficient
excess propellant to form such a visible cloud. So by elimination the only
remaining suspect is the fourth stage.

This makes sense since an EW launch will just be completing its fourth stage
firing when it comes up on the South American coast. The cloud could form
immediately after the firing is completed and it would dissipate soon
afterwards.

A Brazilian sighting of the June 14 event corroborates this interpretation.
Four mathematics professors were camping near Aruana, on the banks of the
Arquaia River, when they spotted the cloud. In contrast to the Argentine
sightings, in which the object transited the sky in minutes (the vehicle was
still in a low, fast orbit), the Brazilians saw the cloud fade away in the
northeast after almost half an hour of observation. Calculations show that
the upper stage in its ascending, slowing orbit would indeed have stayed
above the horizon for that duration when viewed from this, the most northern
of the reported witness locations.

Nonetheless the exact nature of the cloud has not been established
conclusively. The "venting" theory remains only a theory. "Moonwatch" (the
space observation program run by the Smithsonian in 1957-1975) photographs of
moon-bound continuously-venting S4B Apollo boosters show either marked
asymmetrical clouds or uniform spheres which appear brighter at the center;
the Kosmos-1188 cloud was quite symmetrical and was brightest around the
outside edge.

Furthermore, the size of the Kosmos-1188 cloud (known from the photographs as
1 1/2 degrees, at a computed range of 1600-2000 kilometers) was about 30
miles across less than 10 minutes after the stage had ceased burning. This
implies an expansion rate of at least 200 mph and possibly several times as
much, somewhat more than the expansion rates of the S-4B clouds seen by
"Moonwatch." This, along with the evidently thin nature of the edge of the
cloud, suggests a brief explosive type of event whose exact nature remains
indeterminate. The connection of the clouds to the EW launches; however, is
overwhelmingly persuasive.

After the fourth-stage burn the Kosmos-EW payload and spent (and
venting?) fourth stage coasted upwards and northeastward across Amazonia and
over the.North Atlantic, Full-hemisphere weather satellite photos show the
north coast of South America was overcast (as were the populated areas of
Peru and Ecuador), eliminatiing the likelihood of UFO reports from those
locations.

But unverified reports claim a UFO was seen that night in Morocco where
weather was clear. Calculations show that the Kosmos-EW and associated
material would have been sunlit for the entire time interval in question; it
would have risen in the west at 22:16 UT
(Morocco is exactly on Universal Time, so that would have been 10:16 P.M.),
drifted to the northwest and reached halfway to zenith by22:30, then moved
generally horizontally until it was due north at 22:50. By then the range
would have been more than 8000 miles and the cloud may have dispersed fully.

Why the sudden onslaught of this essentially new kind of UFO stimulus over
South America? Writing in early 1982, Soviet space operations expert Nicholas
L. Johnson pointed out, "During the past two years, the Soviet early warning
satellite network has undergone a dynamic transformation from a fledgling,
experimental program to a nearly complete, operational constellation (orbital
networks). Although the program was begun in 1972, not until late 1980 were
there ever more than three satellites operational at the same time."

Launch figures tell the same tale: there were six EW launches in 1981 and six
others in 1980; before that, there had been only two each in 1979, 1978 and
1977.

At an altitude of 400 miles, where the last-stage burn occurs, the vehicles
would have been sunlit a little more than two hours after local sunset or
before local sunrise for observers directly below them. By taking a graph
of sunrise/sunset throughout the year at Buenos Aires, adding in a two hour
twilight allowance (slightly more in summer) and plotting the actual
Kosmos-EW overflights from 1972 to present, we find that only two fall into
this visibility band: Kosmos-l188 on June 14, 1980, and Kosmos-1317 on
October 31, 1981. Both caused UFO reports.

The Kosmos-1164 (February 12, 1980, UT; February 11 in Chile) was near the
boundary- and perhaps should fall within it because of "midnight sun"
effects; but its presence seems connected mainly with the fact that it was a
failure (it apparently did not reach the intended high orbit), probably due
to a late and misdirected rocket burn. The rocket flames caused the UFO
reports in that case, although normal Kosmos-EW burns should occur low in the
western sky as seen from Chile. Significantly, the flame was reported as
yellow, the color the boosters' propellants display when they burn.

The graph of overflights versus twilight shows that only 10 percent of the
Kosmos-EW launchings fell within the visibility band. At a launch rate of six
a year that comes out to roughly one visible cloud every year and a half, on
an average -- and in fact the two major cloud-UFOs were seen 16 months apart.
This also means that new sightings are bound to occur in years to come. But
perhaps this time they won't occasion fear and confusion but will be
appreciated as a beautiftil side effect of humanity's space activities.

Is this Kosmas-EW type of Identifiable Flying Object (IFO) significant
to UFO studies in general?

I think so. First, of course, it is obvious foreign UFO cases often get
published without adequate research and eyewitnesses frequently misreport
motion, timing and appearances.

Another major factor is that there are too many UFO reports to be handled by
the handful of qualified part-time investigators. As a consequence many UFOs
are going to stay unidentified due simply to lack of prompt, dogged,
knowledgeable investigation. The existence of a large variety of prosaic
phenomena that can be mistaken for UFOs requires study by a correspondingly
large number of specialists. (My specialization, for example, happens to be
orbital operations and the Soviet Space program, so I started my research
with a distinct advantage.) These specialists are generally neither available
nor inclined to apply their knowledge (or even realize their knowledge is
needed) to appropriate UFO reports. That the cases I have described were
solved at all is a quirk, almost an accident -- little wonder, the skeptic
might, justifiably argue that so many others go unsolved.

All of the extraneous (and obviously spurious) accounts of Kosmos-EW UFOs
causing bus and aircraft chases, ufonaut encounters, television interference,
radar sightings, attempted jet interceptions, telepathic messages (Bozhich
reported such), zigzag course changes and the like, strengthen the arguments
of skeptics who dismiss similar details connected with less well documented
UFO reports. When a ufologist asks, "How can these aspects of the case be
explained?" the skeptics can reply, "They don't have to be explained. They're
just random noise, coincidences and embellishments and have nothing to do
with the original stimulus."

But I don't mean to end this article on a negative note. After all, most of
the eyewitness accounts were shown to be substantially correct and consistent
with the actual phenonienon. Fortunately in these cases there were enough
reports so that they could be "averaged" and the far off-center ones could be
identified and ignored. Because a thoroughly documented stimulas could be
tied to the reports, it was possible to calibrate them an uncharacteristic
situation in the world of UFO investigations and analysis.

Therefore the great Russo-Argentine UFO of June 14, 1980, certainly
deserves to be recognized as a "classic IFO" and as an instructive case study
in research techniques and testimony analysis.

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