Circles on the field and other formations. Russia

One of the most bizarre accounts of UFO folklore involves an incident that allegedly occurred in Voronezh, Russia. This case was reported in the United States by the St. Louis Dispatch. The story was originally published on October 11, 1989, in America, but its origin was the Russian newspaper TASS.

Sketches of the UFOs and robots/beings drawn by some of the witnesses. The top-left drawing of the UFO and robot is by sixth-grader Roma Torshin; and the top-right drawing by Genya Blinov. (credit: Hesemann / Jacques Vallee)

The report recounts the adventures of several young children who claimed to have seen a three-eyed alien with a robot escort. The alien was said to be about nine foot tall. The craft, according to eyewitness testimony, landed on the outskirts of the city. Shortly thereafter, the tall alien appeared, and upon seeing the young lad, shot a type of weapon at him, causing him to vanish before the eyes of the other people around him.

Artist’s rendition of the Voronezh landing by Elena Penkova.

There are several important elements one must keep in mind regarding this extremely strange case of a close encounter. The original details of the case were brought forward by Genrikh Silanov, head of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, who gave details to the TASS agency. Silanov stated that the media took an enormous amount of creative freedom with his report.

“Don’t believe all you hear from Tass,” he stated.” We never gave them part of what they published.”

I take this statement to mean that only a part of the news agency’s report was based on the facts obtained from Silanov.

The agency had informed the entire world that Russian scientists had confirmed that an alien spaceship carrying giants with tiny heads had landed in Voronezh, a city of over 800,000 people located about 300 miles southeast of Moscow. They stated that as many as three of these giant creatures had emerged from the alien ship. The ship was described as a large, shining ball. These strange creatures were said to have walked in a nearby park, accompanied by a menacing robot. Ironically, TASS was the only media member to print the story in Russia. The newspaper Pravda declined to print, or comment on the strange tale.

In defense of the TASS account, Soviet reporter Skaya Kultura said that the agency was following the ”the golden rule of journalism.” “The reader must know everything.”

The TASS account stated that the UFO landed in Voronezh on September 27, 1989, at 6:30 P.M. Young boys playing soccer witnessed the event, stating that a pinkish glow preceded the descent of the unusual flying craft. The pink glow became a deep red as it touched down. Most witnesses described the object as a flattened, disc shape. A crowd quickly gathered, and peered through a hatch that opened. They saw a ”three-eyed alien” about 10 feet tall, clad in silvery overalls and bronze-colored boots and wearing a disk on his chest. “

Sketch of the object by one of the children who witnessed the object.

The TASS account also stated: “A boy screamed with fear, but when the alien gazed at him, with eyes shining, he fell silent, unable to move. Onlookers screamed, and the UFO and the creatures disappeared.”

According to the report, about five minutes later, they reappeared. The alien had an object similar to a pistol – a tube about 20 inches long, which it pointed at an unidentified 16-year-old boy, making him disappear. The alien went inside the sphere, which then took off. At the same time, the boy reappeared.

“Children and eyewitnesses of the abnormal phenomenon have been questioned by police workers and journalists,” wrote E. Efremov, the Voronezh correspondent for Sovetskaya Kultura.”

“There are no discrepancies in the description of the sphere itself or the actions of the aliens. Moreover, all the children who became witnesses to this event are still afraid, even now.”

Several drawings were made by some of the children who supposedly witnessed the events of Voronezh. A couple of these are included here. One of the drawings showed the Cyrillic alphabet character “zhe” on the side of the UFO.

Some of the children of Voronezh: Lena Sarokina; Vasya Surin; Vova Startsev; Alyosha Nikonov. (credit: Michael Hesemann)

TASS listed three witnesses’ names, all of whom were youngsters. They also stated that a group of international researchers would be investigating the claims of the witnesses.

Voronezh residents interviewed later claimed they had observed this UFO not just during the above incident but also many times on September 21, 23, 26, 29 and October 2, between 6 and 9 PM. Some of these incidents involved a different entity: small, with grayish-green face and blue overcoat resembling a loose raincoat.

This phenomenal account is still in need of more eye witness testimony and research. The Voronezh landing remains an unsolved mystery.

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Date:September 21 1989
Location: Voronezh Russia
Time:  2030
Summary: Several young boys watched a large sphere land on a park; two tall humanoids wearing silvery outfits and large black boots briefly emerged. A smaller robot-like entity accompanied them. Landing tracks were reportedly found.
Source: Jacques Vallee, UFO Chronicles Of The Soviet Union

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Toronto, Ontario, STAR, 15 October 1989, page A26

Soviet kids hushed up about aliens

VORONEZH, Soviet Union (Reuter) - If the huge, three-eyed aliens were out there, nobody's talking.

Children who reported seeing the creatures in Central Russia last week have been silenced by their parents, frustrating investigators who are trying to verify the spaceship landing.

The youngsters enthralled the country earlier with tales of spaceships, robots and gun-toting extra-terrestrials in this industrial city of 900,000 people.

"The parents want their kids to be left alone," said Slava Martinov, a member of the Commission for the Investigation of Abnormal Phenomena.

Commission head Genrykh Silanov, holding a copper rod to try to divine traces of the aliens yesterday, took his team to the bushy glade where several children claimed to have seen the spaceship land.

The children say a spaceship landed on Sept. 27 in a Voronezh park about 500 kilometres (310 miles) southeast of Moscow.

Lurid accounts in newspapers and the official news agency Tass have depicted 3-metre (10-foot) high creatures with three eyes and small knobby heads.

According to the reports, a silver-suited alien accompanied by a robot fired a large gun at a 16-year-old boy, who temporarily vanished. The boy reappeared when the spaceship left.

"I am sure the ship came from Venus," said one resident. "I did not see it myself, but my grandmother's cousin once saw a spaceship attack a train in Siberia.

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Toronto, Ontario, STAR, 10 October 1989, page A3

Soviets report UFO landing, alien encounter

MOSCOW (AP) - It was a close encounter of the Communist kind.

Towering, tiny-headed humanoids from outer space landed their UFO in the Soviet city of Voronezh and emerged for a stroll around the park, speading fear among residents.

At least, that's what the official Tass news agency said yesterday.

The report was the latest strange tale in the official Soviet press, which, under the policy of glasnost (openness), has been venturing into tales beyond belief - the sort found in North America's raunchy supermarket tabloids.

"Scientists have confirmed that an unidentified flying object recently landed in a park in Voronezh," Tass said in a dispatch from the city, 480 kilometres southeast of Moscow. "They have also identified the landing site and found traces of aliens who made a short promenade about the park."

Residents reported that the UFO landed and up to three creatures emerged, accompanied by a small robot, Tass said. "The aliens were three or even four metres tall, but with very small heads," the news agency quoted witnesses as saying.

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Toronto, Ontario, GLOBE AND MAIL, 10 October 1989, pages A1 & A2

Soviets spot giant aliens, Tass reports
Reuter and Associated Press
MOSCOW

Scientists have concluded that giant creatures with tiny heads which recently emerged from an unidentified flying object and went for a midnight stroll in the Soviet city of Voronezh were aliens, Tass news agency said yesterday.

The scientists were called in after frightened residents in the central Russian city reported that on at least three occasions they had seen a large, shining ball hover above a park in the city after dark and then land.

"A hatch opened and one, two or three creatures similar to humans and a small robot came out. The aliens were three or even four metres high but they had very small heads," Tass quoted witnesses as saying after one such alleged visit.

"They walked near the ball and then disappeared inside. Onlookers were overwhelmed with fear which lasted for several days," it added.

Tass said the landings occurred recently but did not say precisely when.

The news agency said scientists had identified the landing site and found traces of aliens "who made a short promenade about the park" and left minerals not usually found on earth.

UFOs are especially fascinating for Russians and the state press regularly carries reports of unusual sightings. Authorities set up a Commission into Abnormal Penomena in February, 1984, after a "flying cigar" was seen near Gorky, east of Moscow.

Asked whether the latest report could possibly be a hoax, a Tass spokesman said, "Tass never jokes. If we start joking, we'll stop existing."

Genrikh Silanov, head of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, told Tass that he had identified the landing site "by means of biolocation" and had managed to trace the aliens' footprints.

Soviet books describe biolocation as an extra-sensory method used to track objects or people whose trail is invisible to the eye.

"We found two mysterious pieces of rock (which) mineralogical analysis has shown . . . cannot be found on earth," Mr. Silanov said. He added that further tests are needed.

A Tass duty officer, reached last night by telephone, refused to identify the reporter who sent the dispatch from Voronezh, but stood by the story. "It is not April Fool's today," he said.

The report was similar to a story last summer in the daily newspaper Socialist Industry, which told of a purported "close encounter" between a milkmaid and an alien in Central Russia's Perm region.

In that report, Lyubov Medvedev was quoted as saying she encountered an alien creature "resembling a man, but taller than average with short legs." The creature, she said, had "only a small knob instead of a head."

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Toronto, Ontario, GLOBE AND MAIL, 11 October 1989, pages A1 & A2

Misquoted on aliens, Soviet says
BY JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG
Associated Press
MOSCOW

A three-eyed alien with a robot sidekick landed by UFO and made a boy vanish by zapping him with a pistol, a Soviet newspaper reported yesterday, the second day of strange tales in state-run news media.

But as the saga of the space invasion of the city of Voronezh unfolded, a scientist whose words were used to buttress the first published report voiced doubts, and said he was in part misquoted.

"Don't believe all you hear from Tass," Genrikh Silanov, head of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, cautioned in a telephone interview from Voronezh. "We never gave them part of what they published."

On Monday, the usually staid official Soviet news agency told the world that scientists had confirmed an alien spaceship carrying giant people with tiny heads had touched down in Voronezh, a city of more than 800,000 people about 500 kilometres southeast of Moscow.

As many as three aliens four metres tall left the spacecraft, described as a large shining ball, and promenaded in the park with a small robot, Tass reported. A Tass duty officer stood by the story.

The purported close encounter in Voronezh was only the latest weird tale to appear in Soviet news media.

Nonetheless, a Communist Party paper whose stated mission is to write about culture was the only major national daily to print anything yesterday about the UFO, indicating that more authoritative newspapers such as Pravda thought the topic too hot to handle.

Sovietskaya Kultura said its coverage was motivated by "the golden rule of journalism: the reader must know everything. Of course, it's hard to believe in what happened in the town. It's even more difficult to explain.

The daily quoted witnesses as saying the UFO flew into Voronezh on Sept 27. At 6:30 p.m., it said, boys playing soccer saw a pink glow in the sky, then saw a deep red ball about three metres in diameter. The ball circled, vanished, then reappeared minutes later and hovered, it said.

A crowd rushed to the site, Sovietskaya Kultura said, and through an open hatch saw a "three-eyed alien" about three metres tall, clad in silvery overalls and bronze-colored boots, and wearing a disk on his chest.

The newspaper, quoting witnesses, gave this account:

The UFO landed. Two creatures, one apparently a robot, exited. A boy screamed with fear, but when the alien gazed at him, with eyes shining, he fell silent, unable to move. Onlookers screamed, and the UFO and the creatures disappeared.

About five minutes later, they reappeared. The alien had a "pistol" - a tube about 50 centimetres long, which it pointed at an unidentified 16-year-old youth, making him disappear. The alien went inside the sphere, which took off. At the same time, the youth reappeared.

"Children and eyewitnesses of the abnormal phenomenon have been questioned by police workers and journalists," wrote Sovietskaya Kultura's Voronezh correspondent, E. Efremov. "There are no discrepancies in the description of the sphere itself, or the actions of the 'aliens.' Moreover, all the children who became witnesses to this event are still afraid, even now."

In Belgrade, the Yogoslav news agency Tanjug said at least four UFOs had been unofficially reported from the Soviet Union in recent days.

"If the Soviet press and Tass news agency are to be trusted, aliens have carried out a real invasion in the Soviet Union over the past few days," Tanjug remarked skeptically.

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Toronto, Ontario, GLOBE AND MAIL, 12 October 1989, page A4

Soviet star can't solve UFO riddle
Canadian Press
MOSCOW

The Soviet Union's top television star said yesterday he can cure incurable diseases, stop people from feeling intense pain, make bushy hair grow again on the shiny pates of the bald and even ease the suffering of AIDS patients.

But alas, admitted Anatoly Kashpirovsky, there's not much even he can do about the three-eyed alien who reportedly landed in the southern city of Voronezh and made a boy disappear after zapping him with some kind of tube-gun.

Mr. Kashpirovsky is a healer who practices his art on people via state-controlled television. It is said he is watched weekly by 200 million people and that he is better known in this vast country than anyone else except President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Even before the changes brought about by glasnost, or openness, there has been periodic excitement in Russia over psychic phenomena or UFOs to leaven the normal dedication to a dour kind of scientific socialism.

Nevertheless, heads were shaking in disbelief yesterday at the latest instalment in a "Soviet silly season" that began Monday with reports of the arrival of mischievous aliens.

For two hours, in the comfort of an ultra-modern hall at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Mr. Kashpirovsky entertained a crowd of journalists and assorted hangers-on by claiming a wide range of successes for what he alternately called his art, method or science.

It was a curious affair. A video of his exploits would not work most of the time. The television star denounced his cameraman and asked if anyone in the room could help him find a Western sponsor. An overhead light blew out in the middle of a lengthy diatribe with a sound like a gunshot.

Through it all, Mr. Kashpirovsky kept a stern expression on his face as he lectured disbelievers and soaked up rounds of applause from supporters who packed the hall.

Mr. Kashpirovsky, wearing a black leather jacket and an open-necked shirt, described himself as a psycho-therapist.

The term "faith healer" was summarily rejected.

Despite repeated questions, he was vague about his training and his methods.

The one thing he wasn't vague about was what he claims to be able to do.

Mr. Kashpirovsky said he had successfully cured people of diabetes, blindness, skin diseases and heart problems. He also claimed to have cured women of sterility, helped the bald grow hair, and eliminated scars after surgery or wounds.

There were only a few things the 50-year-old father of two said he couldn't deal with.

One of them was the story this week about the three-eyed alien landing in the Soviet Union with a robot sidekick.

They are said to have alighted from a spacecraft that looked like a large shining ball or disc, and taken a stroll in a park before playing some practical jokes on startled onlookers.

Mr. Kashpirovsky was slightly annoyed when he was asked to comment on the reports.

"That's not my piece of bread, as we say in Russian," he sniffed.

Meanwhile, Soviet television viewers got something of a glimpse yesterday of the aliens that created a cosmic sensation with their reported landing - but the peek at the extra-terrestrials was provided only by a child's scribbled drawing.

The picture, by a child who claimed to have witnessed the landing, showed a glowing two-legged sphere with a smiling stick figure inside.

Tass made a worldwide splash Monday with its straight-faced report on towering, pin-headed aliens.

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Toronto, Ontario, GLOBE AND MAIL, 30 October 1989, page A15

Soviet team fails to find evidence of UFO landing
Agence France-Presse
MOSCOW

A Soviet scientific commission has concluded that there is no verifiable proof of a landing by aliens last month in the town of Voronezh in southern Russia, the commission chief said Saturday.

Sixteen radiometric analyses, 19 checks of the ground, nine tests of micro-organisms and 20 spectro-chemical measurements failed to uncover "any anomaly either in the earth or surrounding vegetation" that might indicate the landing of an unidentified flying object, the commission reported.

Igor Sarotsev, vice-rector of the University of Voronezh and chairman of the commission, said the presence of a larger than normal quantity of the radioactive isotope cesium in the area of the alleged sighting did not constitute proof.

"After Chernobyl, this kind of phenomenon has been found in many areas," Mr. Sarotsev told Sovietskaya Kultura newspaper on Saturday, referring to the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.

Witnesses said a banana-shaped saucer came down late last month in a park in Voronezh, near a housing block. Only children were on hand for the landing, according to Soviet press reports.

Young boys said they saw two or three aliens three to four metres tall, with tiny heads, descend from their saucer with a robot.

The incident, first disclosed this month, sparked a UFO craze and heralded a spate of other sightings across the country.

The most spectacular one was on Oct. 17 in Omsk, western Siberia, where several hundred people said they had spotted a luminous balloon-shaped object. An army officer, Major Vladimir Loginov, said the UFO seemed one and a half times larger than the moon.

The Omsk airport said the object failed to appear on radar screens there, but other officers, according to Major Loginov, reported seeing the balloon a few minutes later about 600 kilometres to the east.

The official commission report was bad news for Stalker, a new private, co-operative business, which opened after the Voronezh sightings.

The company has set up tours of Voronezh, which it calls the "land of the aliens."

But the fledgling enterprise warns clients: "We cannot guarantee a meeting with aliens, for that is a matter of chance."

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New York, New York, TIMES, 10 October 1989, pages A1 & A10

A Tass Bulletin: Knobby Aliens Were Here
By ESTHER B. FEIN
Special to The New York Times

MOSCOW, Oct. 9 - Everyone seems to be coming to the Soviet Union these days: entrepreneurs in search of joint ventures, actors looking for stage sets, heavy metal musicians, arm wrestlers, even aliens.

The official press agency Tass says towering extraterrestrial creatures with little knobby heads have landed in the Russian city of Voronezh, joining the flood of foreigners who have invaded the Soviet Union in these days of glasnost and perestroika.

"Scientists have confirmed that an unidentified flying object recently landed in a park in the Russian city of Voronezh," Tass said in a straight-faced news report. "They have also identified the landing site and found traces of aliens who made a short promenade around the park."

But while Soviet citizens usually embrace foreign visitors with enthusiasm, Tass reported that the people in Voronezh who saw the aliens "were overwhelmed with a fear which lasted for several days."

The authorities in Voronezh, some 300 miles southeast of Moscow, could not be reached tonight for comment. A spokesman for Tass, reached by telephone tonight, said the report was neither a hoax or a joke. "It is a serious dispatch," the night duty officer at the agency said.

The press agency has seemed to undergo a bizarre metamorphosis in the last year or so. In addition to its traditional role of dutifully reporting the comings and goings of Soviet leaders, and often condemning those of American officials, Tass has taken to writing supermarket-tabloid sensationalism with all the seriousness due a superpower summit meeting.

Along with a steady flow of U.F.O. sightings, Tass in recent months has carried reports on a man who, while sitting in a bathtub, can create a huge soap bubble, get inside it and remain there for 10 seconds; a "flamboyant" six-legged bull whose two extra appendages grow upward off its back (coincidentally, also from the Voronezh region); the elusive, mysterious creature called the yeti, and a Tibetan doctor's sex tips, advising that winter is the best time for amorous activity and summer is the worst.

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The visitors are said to take a stroll in the park

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People in the Soviet Union have long been attracted by the mysterious and the occult, and lately the authorities seem to be feeding this interest. Two of the hottest programs on state-run television these days are psychic healers who promise to cure everything from obesity to leukemia, in person or via the airwaves.

There seems to be a particular fascination here with outer space - quite apart from the Soviet obsession with the American "Star Wars" program - and in February 1984 the authorities here set up a Commission Into Abnormal Phenomena after a "flying cigar" was spotted near the city of Gorky, east of Moscow.

A much talked about report last summer in the newspaper Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya told of a milkmaid's encounter with a stubby-legged alien in the Perm region of Central Russia.

One Report Is Debunked

This summer Tass reported on a U.F.O. hovering over a hill in the Soviet Far East, showering the area with over 30 pounds of debris that included mysterious, tiny golden hairs.

The agency also debunked a report in Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya this summer that asserted that a spaceship landed near southern Moscow, leaving behind a huge scorched patch. Tass reported that firefighters believe that a haystack caught fire and singed the ground.

All of the sightings, and even the "re-evaluations," are earnestly reported.

Indeed, tonight's report was presented with a straight face and with technical descriptions worthy of a major scientific discovery. Genrikh Silanov, head of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, said in an interview with Tass that the landing site was identified "by means of bilocation."

According to Soviet reference books, bilocation is an extrasensory method of tracking objects or people invisible to the human eye.

'Mysterious Pieces of Rock'

Mr. Silanov described the landing spot as being about 20 yards in diameter, with four small prominent dents "situated in the four points of a rhomb." He said scientists also found "two mysterious pieces of rock" that resembled deep-red sandstone, but "mineralogical analysis" determined that the substance "cannot be found on earth."

Tass said Voronezh residents reported that the aliens visited the place after dark at least three times. They arrived in a large shining ball or disk, and emerged through a hatch, accompanied by "a small robot," and went for a "short promenade about the park."

Tass also reported that witnesses claimed to have seen "a banana-shaped object in the sky and a characteristic illuminated sign." It said such descriptions had been reported in the American magazine Saga, a regular in barbershops and bowling alleys.

And to dispel any notion that the Voronezh witnesses had been influenced by reports in Saga, Tass said "it is unlikely residents of Voronezh could have read the magazine."

The Tass report does not indicate what brought the alien visitors here. Perhaps they had seen advertisements, which are now displayed on the outside of Soviet spaceships.

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New York, New York, TIMES, 11 October 1989, page A6

U.F.O. Landing Is Fact, Not Fantasy, the Russians Insist
By ESTHER B. FEIN
Special to The New York Times

MOSCOW, Oct. 10 - It is not a joke, nor a hoax, nor a sign of mental instability, nor an attempt to drum up local tourism by drawing the curious, the Soviet press agency Tass insisted today in discussions of what it called an extraterrestrial visit to southern Russia.

Residents of the city of Voronezh insisted today that lanky, three-eyed extraterrestrial creatures had indeed landed in a local park and gone for a stroll and that a seemingly fantastic report about the event carried Monday by the official press agency Tass was absolutely true.

"It was not an optical illusion," said Lieut. Sergei A. Matveyev of the Voronezh district police station, who said in a telephone interview that he saw the landing of the U.F.O. on Sept. 27.

Lieutenant Matveyev confessed that he had not actually seen the aliens, but said he saw the spaceship and "it was certainly a body flying in the sky," moving noiselessly at a very high speed and very low altitude.

'Anything Is Possible'

To be honest, Lieutenant Matveyev said, he was a little skeptical himself when he first saw the object. "I thought I must be really tired," he said, "but I rubbed my eyes and it didn't go away. Then I figured, in this day and age, anything is possible."

Using the sensationalist tone that has lately infected the once-staid Tass, the press agency today provided more details of the U.F.O. landing in Voronezh, a city some 300 miles southeast of Moscow.

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'In this day and age, anything is possible.'

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According to Tass, and a report today in the newspaper Sovetskaya Kultura, two boys and a girl from a local school - Vasya Surin, Zhenya Blinov and Yuliya Sholokhova - were playing in a park on the warm evening of Sept. 27 when suddenly, at half past six, "they saw a pink shining in the sky and then spotted a ball of deep red color" about 10 yards in diameter. A crowd gathered, "and they could clearly see a hatch opening in the lower part of the ball and a humanoid in the opening."

A Stare Silences Boy

The three-eyed creature, about nine feet tall and fashionably dressed in silvery overalls and bronze boots and with a disk on its chest, disappeared, then landed and came out for a promenade with a companion and a robot.

The aliens seemed to communicate with each other, producing the mysterious appearance of a shining triangle, and activated the robot with a touch.

Terrified, a boy began to scream, but with a stare of the alien's shining eyes, Tass said, the boy was silenced and paralyzed.

After a brief disappearance, the three returned, but this time one of the "humanoids" had "what looked like a gun" by his side - a tube about two feet long that it directed at a 16-year-old boy. The boy, whose name was not given in the report, promptly vanished, but reappeared after the alien embarked in the ball.

Vladimir A. Moiseyev, director of the regional health department, said in a telephone interview that despite reports of widespread fear in the city, none of the witnesses had applied for medical help. But he said that "certainly we are planning to examine the children." There was no explanation why, with the passing of two weeks, such an examination had not yet taken place.

Mr. Moiseyev, like other authorities in Voronezh, the editors of Tass, and indeed many of its readers, treated the report as a serious scientific phenomenon. No extra men are assigned to patrol the area because the department is short-handed, said the duty officer at the local Interior Ministry department, who identified himself only by his last name, Larin, but he said troops would be dispatched "if they appear again."

The Tass corespondent covering the case of the mysterious visitors to Voronezh, Vladimir V. Lebedev, seemed insulted that anyone would treat the story with anything but the full seriousness that it was given by the agency.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lebedev described conversations with dozens of witnesses and with experts who had examined the evidence and spoken to the children. He said there were about three landings of the U.F.O. between Sept. 23 and Sept. 29.

In the latest development, not yet reported by Tass, Mr. Lebedev said that Genrikh M. Silanov, head of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, today asked the children to draw what they had seen.

Drawings Said to Be Similar

Though isolated from one another, he said, the children all drew a banana-shaped object that left behind in the sky the sign of the letter X. Such descriptions, Mr. Silanov said, were reported as typical of U.F.O.'s in a 1976 article in the now defunct American magazine Saga. Mr. Silanov said today that a rock that was reportedly found at the site and described as being not something found on earth was actually a form of hematite, which is found in various parts of the Soviet Union.

While not a witness himself, Mr. Lebedev said he had visited the site. "The traces were still seen," he said. "I could see holes of a clear shape that resembled the footprints of an elephant."

He said his reports from Voronezh would continue.

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New York, New York, TIMES, 12 October 1989, page A18

Rare Thrill for Tass: Joshing Over Its U.F.O. Report
By ELEANOR BLAU

The report by the Soviet press agency Tass that lanky, three-eyed creatures took a stroll through a Soviet park last month has caused such reverberations in the United States that they have bounced back to Tass itself.

The agency reported Tuesday that major American television networks and newspapers, which it said typically avoid stories about unidentified flying objects, "played up the space adventure, frequently poking fun and suggesting that the beings from outer space might be a result of overzealous glasnost."

The Tass report, written by an American working for the agency, did not sound resentful. It quoted Edwin Diamond, a New York Magazine media critic, who criticized what he called the story's shallowness, saying, "What did the Academy of Science think?" and "Where are the pictures?"

And it quoted Yervant Turzian of the Cornell University Astronomy Department, who said fellow academics regarded the story as a joke.

Drawing of Creature Is Broadcast

"Given the physical parameters of the universe, the possibility of life on other planets is high," he told Tass. "But the vast majority of these reports can be explained by such logical phenomena as unconventional aircraft in the sky or artificial satellites."

On the other hand, Tass found that "A Current Affair," the syndicated news and entertainment show, was taking the report seriously enough to plan on sending a film crew to Voronezh. That is where Tass originally reported that three children had said they saw aliens emerge from a ball, wearing silvery overalls.

Last night, Soviet television viewers saw a picture of one of the creatures on the main nightly news program "Vremya," in the form of a scribbled drawing by one of the children. It showed a smiling stick figure inside a glowing two-legged sphere.

Vremya sounded more skeptical than the original Tass report, but it offered without comment an interview with Vasya Surin, one of the purported witnesses.

'He Didn't Have a Head'

"We were scared," said Vasya, who appeared to be about 11. "It hovered over this tree. Then the door opened and a tall person of about three meters looked out. He didn't have a head, or shoulders either. He just had a kind of hump. There he had three eyes, two on each side and one in the middle."

Vasya said the alien had two holes instead of a nose, and could not turn its head, so it had to swivel its middle eye.

But "Vremya" cast some doubt on the reports of the sighting, noting, for instance, that there were no adult witnesses, even though a large apartment house overlooked the site.

Since the first U.F.O. sightings in the 1940's, spaceships have been described as sausages, cigars, balls, bananas, crescents, round straw hats, eggs, mushrooms, disks and, especially saucers. But, in the 1980's "Saucers are out; boomerangs are in," said Jim Speiser, a computer expert in Scottsdale, Ariz. He founded a national U.F.O. computer network in 1986 because he thought there should be an exchange of information instead of disputes among people who reacted variously to U.F.O. stories, "from skeptics to wild-eyed gee-whiz believers."

In a telephone interview, Mr. Speiser said of the reported Soviet sighting: "I think Tass is exploring its new freedom and is not used to self-censorship. I don't disbelieve, but we have much better stories in this country."

Also surprised - but only because he thinks the media ignores U.F.O. reports - is Tim Beckley of Inner Light Publications. He edits U.F.O. Universe, a glossy magazine that prints 100,000 copies six times a year and distributes them internationally.

Mr. Beckley said that he is a journalist, not a scientist, and that he is almost as puzzled about U.F.O.'s now as he was when he saw his first in 1957, as a 10-year-old in New Brunswick, N.J. "It's kind of a cosmic game those entities seem to be playing with us," he said.

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New York, New York, TIMES, 14 October 1989, page 24

The Voronezh Visitors

Tass, the Soviet press agency. has reported the landing of an extraterrestrial vehicle in the Russian city of Voronezh. The creatures who emerged were nine feet tall, with little knobby heads and three eyes. They had a small robot in tow and went for a "short promenade about the park," Tass reports.

While some Americans have harbored reservations about Tass reports in past years, this is one they can embrace with more enthusiasm. The United States has its own share of U.F.O. watchers, but the extraterrestrials they describe have been decidedly uncouth. The aliens who visit America tend to kidnap their hosts, in some cases erasing from memory many salient details of an otherwise unforgettable experience.

The Voronezh visitors, in welcome contrast, were peaceable. They didn't interfere in current political arrangements. They didn't lecture, proselytize, or find fault with local mores. One can overlook their failure to seek an introduction to the Mayor. Behaving in a perfectly normal manner for sightseers on strange planets, they just walked around the park, leaving behind two pieces of deep-red rock of a kind that, according to a geologist quoted by Tass, "cannot be found on earth."

There are any number of solemn explanations for for Tass's remarkable report. Some argue that the long suppression of religion in the Soviet Union has given Russians a particular fondness for the supernatural.

Others suggest that Soviet reporters and editors have only recently begun to develop the skeptical armor that Western journalists acquire after being fooled a few dozen times. That may also explain why even the hard-boiled Government officials who oversee Tass found the Voronezh report sufficiently plausible to print.

These explanations miss the point. If extraterrestrial visitors have to land somewhere, why not in Voronezh? Skepticism can be taken too far. These very columns, in 1920, poured scorn on the idea of a certain Robert Goddard that rockets could fly in the vacuum of space. Mr. Goddard, the editorial regretted, " only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

As surely as rockets can never fly in space, Tass has broken the story of the century.

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New York, New York, TIMES, 15 October 1989, page E7

All (3) Eyes Were On Him

Vasya Surin saw the aliens. In a park in Voronezh, 300 miles southeast of Moscow. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said so, in a straight-faced report that conveniently, and perhaps not coincidentally, provided the Soviet public last week with plenty to ponder besides bare food shelves and chaotic politics. Tass said the landing had been confirmed "scientifically" and through "biolocation." "one, two or three creatures similar to humans and a small robot came out" of the ball-shaped spacecraft, Tass said. Vasya, one of several witnesses to the encounter, told another Soviet publication the aliens were nine feet tall, had a hump where their heads should have been and had three eyes apiece. With psychic and paranormals garnering high ratings on Soviet television, it was just a matter of time, perhaps, before the press would get into the act.