The Alien. Kazakhstan

The fact that an unidentified object was shot down by air defense forces over the Sary-Shagan landfill, journalists learned only in 1999. Its wreckage allowed scientists to make several discoveries and increase the speed of rockets.

The place where the Soviet military training ground Sary-Shagan was located is called the "Hungry Steppe" in Kazakhstan — Betpak-Dala. This is a desert located on the western shore of Lake Balkhash. During Soviet times, missile systems, military aircraft were tested here, and even underground nuclear explosions were carried out. What made the military who served at the training ground in Soviet times tell about this case is unknown. Nevertheless, in 1999, a certain major Alexey Bystrov gave an interview to the newspapers, which was widely distributed on the English-language Internet.

"The Kazakh training ground," the major confided to journalists, "has always aroused the interest of unidentified flying objects. They often appeared near the test site during tests of new weapons systems or hovered over airfields. As if they were conducting surveillance.

But the military has never seen such an emergency as occurred in the fall of 1978. At this time, launchers for the latest interceptor missiles were brought to Sary-Shagan for testing. Together with them, the then famous designer of anti-aircraft missiles, Pyotr Grushin, arrived at the landfill to control his own brainchild.

The launch was carried out on a fine autumn day. Unexpectedly, the tests were interrupted by the appearance of a strange shiny object right above the test site. First, it was detected by air defense radars, and then those present were able to see the object with their own eyes — it was a disk whose dimensions were difficult to assess. Later, the military recalled that, most likely, it was huge, because, according to radar installations, it hung over the landfill at a high altitude, while it was perfectly visible from the ground.

Up to this point, Major Bystrov had seen UFOs, but they were different. Usually, in the Kazakh steppe, one could meet "slow" UFOs - glowing objects that moved low above the ground at wind speed and sometimes blinked. But the "visitor" was very different from them. He hung silently over the polygon at one point.

Since there was already a report on the launch of missiles below, there was almost no time to think. Later it was rumored that when Grushin was informed about a strange object, he got angry and replied: "Shoot down to a vigorous hair dryer!" His instruction was carried out exactly by the calculation of the anti-aircraft missile unit standing guard at the landfill. Of the several S-75 missiles launched from the Desna complex, only one managed to hit a UFO, which then exploded and disappeared from radar screens.

The weapons tests that Grushin brought were successful. Only after that, soldiers were sent to the Kazakh steppe with the task of trying to find at least some traces of a downed UFO among the wreckage of missiles. It is clear that the territory of the landfill is extensive, few soldiers were sent, so the catch was small, but nevertheless it was possible to collect a box of small and medium-sized fragments of clearly extraterrestrial origin.

This box, according to rumors, Grushin took with him to Moscow. Major Bystrov believed that it was on the basis of these fragments that Soviet scientists made several discoveries, which made it possible to improve the missiles. Now they fly at super speeds in the dense layers of the atmosphere. The reason for this is a tricky silicon coating with inclusions of other elements. Moreover, the major claimed that Grushin allegedly handed over the wreckage to another Soviet designer, Leonid Smirnov, who, already in 1986, on the basis of research, managed to create the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system, whose missiles could shoot down targets at a great height. Now the USSR was not afraid of the American Pershing missiles.

Colonel's confession

In general, Major Bystrov's story sounded — both then and now - quite strange. I immediately recall the speeches of American politicians that "the Russians themselves do not know how to do anything" and only "copy alien technologies." It sounds, firstly, insulting. And secondly, there is clearly an attempt to "dehumanize the enemy", to create an image of a savage fighting with a baton given to him by some alien "master". Nevertheless, Bystrov continues to assert that this is so and that "the aliens have reached a level of ship design that we cannot catch up with in a thousand years, they create microcircuits at the atomic level, connecting the smallest particles in a certain order." So maybe the major made it up?

Bystrov's story is confirmed by a certain ladle Andrey Sokolov, who in 1993 confessed to American journalists Brian Gresh and George Knapp that he himself held in his hands a report on the study of the wreckage of the object shot down on Sary-Shagan. These fragments in the USSR were studied in three research institutes, and Soviet scientists allegedly extracted the maximum benefit from them.

The recognition of the Soviet colonel was made public in the United States in the materials of the MUFON-1994 symposium, which was held in Seguin, Texas. The abbreviation MUFON literally translates as "Mutual UFO Network" is an American organization that has been researching UFOs since 1969. An article published in the journal of this organization even mentioned the numbers of Soviet military units and referred to the "dossier" of Colonel Sokolov, who allegedly dragged him out of service (that is, simply stole) in troubled times for the state and handed over the papers to the Americans, obviously not without reason.

UFO Passions

Sokolov admitted to journalists that in Soviet times he supervised a program on the part of the military to study the wreckage of UFOs. The program ran from 1978 to 1996, after which it was closed. On the part of the Academy of Sciences, the program was conducted by the Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, a leading researcher at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation, Yuli Platov.

In an interview with Russian journalists, Platov confirmed the existence of the program, but did not disclose any details and spoke about the results with restraint: he said that 98% of the UFO reports he knew about related to satellites and other quite terrestrial aircraft.

American journalists claimed that in addition to Sokolov's dossier, they had another source of information on the incident in Sary-Shagan — a certain "doctor" Plaksin. It was he who allegedly confirmed Bystrov's information that an alien spacecraft was indeed shot down by a Soviet air defense system in Kazakhstan in 1978.

There really is such a person in Russian science. In 2002, he presented himself to journalists as a scientific expert of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation on the problem of anomalous aerospace phenomena. However, in an interview, he always left a direct answer about the incident over Sary-Shagan, and spoke skeptically about the Americans. According to him, if the plates of aliens fell to the Ground anywhere, it was them, not us. Was it or wasn't it?

The Alien

It turns out that the incident on Sary-Shagan has other witnesses. Their testimony was collected after the collapse of the USSR. In the autumn of 1978, over the Betpak-Dala desert, several men observed a luminous disk of silver color with clearly defined edges. Smoothly and soundlessly, he flew quite low over the horizon to the east. On the same day, the disk was seen from an AN-12 aircraft, which was en route to Semipalatinsk. He accompanied the plane almost to the final point, and then abruptly flew up.

But the most interesting thing was told by the shepherd Abai Akhmetov, who on that day went to the steppe to look for sheep strayed from the flock. He recalled that suddenly there was an explosion over his head. The man looked up into the sky and saw concentric purple circles that diverged in the sky from a fireball that was breaking into pieces. A shepherd saw one of the large fragments fall just a few kilometers away from him, and out of curiosity decided to go see what it was.

However, he was not allowed to the scene of the incident. Akhmetov claimed that when he drove up to a low hill, on the slope of which the fragment fell, there were already military personnel there. A sharp-eyed shepherd from a distance managed to see that they were placing a dark oblong object in a tarpaulin-covered truck. Abai swore that the soldiers were careless and dropped a heavy object while loading. The lid moved towards the end, and a "gray man" almost fell into the hands of one of the soldiers from the inside. According to the shepherd, the creature was very thin and moved weakly. He did not see what happened next, as the soldiers guarding the hill noticed him and drove him away.

Later, he told his son about the incident, and two decades later he told reporters about everything. The fate of the alien can only be guessed. Most likely, he was taken to some top-secret Soviet research institute.