The prank with Nikita Bogoslovsky's UFO

It is believed that the first fake UFO photo in the USSR, specially designed to "make fun" of ufologists, was a picture taken in 1978 by the famous composer Nikita Bogoslovsky.

He also came up with a legend that made it difficult to investigate: it turned out that the authors of the picture now live in Paris and it is impossible to contact them.

On the website miger.ru (journalist Mikhail Gerstein) contains a recording of this story:

Dear Felix Yurievich!

After receiving your letter, I wrote to my old friend, who has been living in Bulgaria for about 30 years. She was married to Bulgarian doctor M. Atanasov, who died a year and a half ago in Sofia. It was he who sent me the photo you have. Svetlana has just moved in with her sister in Paris, which she informs me about.

The attached letter to S. Zavoiko (now Atanasova) tells me about the things you are interested in. I have crossed out these places, because the rest is purely personal.

I wish you every success in your exciting business.

Sincerely, N. Bogoslovsky Moscow, 11/12/1980

 

Paris, September 4, 1980

Dear friend Nikita!

...At the end of July 1978, my husband and I were drinking coffee on the balcony of our apartment in Staraya Zagora at about 7 p.m. The sky was covered with dark clouds, sometimes distant lightning flashes flashed, but there was no thunder. Suddenly Milenko, looking at the sky, screamed loudly. Right in front of our eyes, at a distance of about 400-500 meters, against the background of the dome of St. Cyril's Church, some strange object hung motionless in the air: a translucent, slightly curved disk, in the middle of which was a dark, slightly elongated ball, similar to a cocoon. A very faint white light emanated from the disk, which did not illuminate the surrounding space at all.

Mylene quickly ran to get a Polaroid camera, and despite the dusk, we took two frames (there was no more film in the device), one of which Mylene sent to you at the same time through our mutual friend Volodya Afonin, with a request to show the photo to specialists. It's good that you didn't lose it, since the second photo was lost in the depths of our periodical press.

...The disk hung motionless for about ten minutes, after which a thin, bright, emerald-colored ray appeared from the dark mass in the center, directed vertically towards the earth. And a second later the whole apparatus (UFO?) He disappeared instantly, as if he had disappeared into thin air. Or maybe he became invisible?

Unfortunately, almost all the neighbors were at the cottage and no one, with the exception of the old janitor Anna Poycheva, saw this phenomenon, and she began to doubt and refer to "God's sign." Maybe there were witnesses in the city too?

We didn't tell anyone about this case, because friends, knowing Milen's cheerful character, would consider it a hoax, and the picture for a clever photo montage.

As for subjective feelings, my husband and I had tinnitus for about an hour (although no sounds came from the "phenomenon"). But then everything went without a trace. And yet: at the moment of the UFO's disappearance, the light bulb on the balcony blinked sharply.

Your faithful friend: Svetlana Zavoiko-Atanasova.

At the same time, the famous and authoritative Soviet ufologist Felix Siegel found no traces of forgery and stated:

"The photo quality is great. Jets of matter are visible, which emits a solid "core" of the object. These jets form the hat-shaped shell of a UFO, which gives it a resemblance to other comet-like UFOs."

They even write that he was extremely pleased with this picture and even presented N. Bogoslovsky with a copy of the handwritten report with his autograph.

Only in 1989, after Siegel's death, Nikita Vladimirovich told in the magazine "Science and Life" (No. 7) how this photo was taken:

"I rolled a crumb of black bread into a ball, inserted it into the round hole of a transparent glass socket, which is put on a candlestick so that stearin flows into it. I stuck a match into the pulp with the thinnest transparent fishing line tied to it, hung this structure on a balcony stick for drying clothes and took several pictures in the contour, against the background of dark afternoon clouds..."

And then Nikita Vladimirovich confirmed this story on the pages of Komsomolskaya Pravda (Komsomolskaya Pravda, August 16, 2001).