UFO. Latvia

From a letter to the Commission on:

What I want to tell you about was a long time ago. More than 40 years have passed since then. It was, if memory serves, in 1942, during the German occupation, in Latvia. The mother, and we, the children, were very afraid of a fire: in those difficult years, losing our shelter would be tantamount to a catastrophe for a peasant family that was barely making ends meet.

So, thanks to the vigilant mother, we were eyewitnesses of a phenomenon we had never seen. We are me and my older sisters. I was 13 years old in 1942. One winter evening, at about 10 o'clock, my mother looked out the window and screamed to recoil from him - "We seem to be on fire!" The sisters and I jumped up, who could grab the clothes that came to hand, threw them on themselves and ran out of the house, I ran out in socks. The mother ran to the bedroom to wake up her father. My father worked in the cold all day, from early morning until late at night, always went to bed before us. So, to run out into the street, the first thing we saw was blood-red snow. We quickly inspected the buildings - they were not burning. Beyond the forest, which bordered our three farms on three sides, the glow of the fire was also not visible. I ran home to look for shoes, as the frost was making itself felt, at the same time reassured my mother that we were not burning and there was no fire in the vicinity either. When I went outside again, the sisters, with their heads thrown back, looked at the sky and said with surprise: "What is this?" I also looked up into the sky and saw an orange-red disk at its zenith. Rays radiated from it in all directions, across the firmament, getting lost in space, not reaching the horizon. The rays were not thin lines and not dotted, but wide at the base (of the disk) and expanded more and more as they moved away from it. The beam got rid of the beam with a clear rectilinear face (line), thanks to the coloring. If one face was light red, then the transition from one face to another ray changed its color from light red to dark red, and so on. The whole spectacle resembled (as I now imagine) a huge open fan unfolded across the firmament, in the center of which was an orange-red disk, through these rays the stars were visible, but not bright, but blood-red. The moon was also blood-red and it seemed that the whole air was saturated with such a redness. The color of the moon was much more intense, darker than the color that we used to see when it rises. At that time, the moon was high above the horizon, so these faithful rays color it.

The disk resembled the sun when it goes below the horizon after a hot summer day, taking on an orange-red color, thanks to which we can look at it with the naked eye for a long time. It should be noted that all this was not expressed as brightly as the real sun, but dimmer.

All this was, as I now imagine, at the height of the highest cirrus clouds visible to us. But there were no clouds in the sky, if there were, then the stars through the clouds and even plus through the red color would not be visible.

We stood for a long time in panic-stricken fear and looked at this wonderful phenomenon. Shivered, went home. After 15-20 minutes she came out again - everything was as before. To stand for as long as I don't remember, they went to warm up again. Then they came out again, a second time. The snow was no longer as red as before. The disk with the rays radiating from it also dimmed, as if they were dissolving into space. And about an hour later, everything was as usual in the sky. As before, a silvery-yellow light emanated from the moon, and with the alienated cold of inaccessibility, the stars looked at the earth covered with a white shroud, reflecting in the crystallized snowflakes.