Petrozavodsk phenomenon

Petrozavodsk phenomenon

Type	Case (mass sighting)
Also known as	Phenomenon of 20 September 1977; Petrozavodsk incident or miracle
Date	Before dawn, 20 September 1977 (mostly 1:00–1:20 UTC; about 4 a.m. local time at Petrozavodsk)
Area	From Copenhagen and Helsinki to Vladivostok; centred on Karelia and the Leningrad region
Reports	85 collected by Soviet researchers by 30 December 1978
Investigation	USSR Academy of Sciences (Gindilis, Menkov, Petrovskaya); led to the Setka research programme
Main explanation	Launch of the satellite Kosmos-955 from Plesetsk (disputed)

The Petrozavodsk phenomenon was a series of luminous objects reported before dawn on 20 September 1977 across a vast area, from Copenhagen and Helsinki in the west to Vladivostok in the east, but concentrated in northwestern Russia. It is named after the city of Petrozavodsk in Soviet Karelia, where a glowing, jellyfish-like object was widely reported to shower the city with fine rays of light. In early Soviet reports it was called simply the phenomenon of 20 September 1977; in the USSR the term "anomalous phenomenon" was used for research instead of "UFO".^[1][2]

Officials in northern European countries asked the Soviet Academy of Sciences whether it was caused by weapons testing. The Academy's preliminary report concluded that the phenomenon could not be satisfactorily understood from the available data, and the episode helped prompt the creation of Setka, a Soviet research programme on anomalous atmospheric phenomena. Since 1977 it has often, though not universally, been attributed to the launch of the Soviet satellite Kosmos-955.^[1][3]

Sightings

Most sightings occurred between 1:00 and 1:20 UTC, when at least 48 unidentified objects reportedly appeared. Reports came at 1 a.m. local time from Medvezhyegorsk, 2:30 from Loukhi and 3:00 from Kovdor and Palanga in Lithuania. From about 3:00 to 3:25 supervisors at the Leningrad sea port watched a luminous object, and at 3:30 the crew of the fishing vessel Primorsk, leaving harbour, saw a silent flying object with a luminous coat that came from the east and abruptly turned north. Across the European part of the USSR witnesses described "bright, luminous bodies surrounded by extended shells and emitting light rays or jets of quaint shapes"; the shells "transformed and diffused within 10 to 15 minutes", while a longer-lasting glow remained in the northeast.^[1]

In Helsinki the newspapers Ilta-Sanomat and Kansan Uutiset reported a glowing ball seen by many residents, including taxi drivers, police and airport staff, and its appearance reportedly caused heavy radio traffic on the Soviet side. Two men near Turku said they saw a spinning object like a lifebuoy, 10 metres across, at 300 metres; the astronomer Pekka Teerikorpi of Tuorla Observatory replied that the real distance was "many hundreds of kilometres" and that distances of unfamiliar phenomena are hard to judge. Ilta-Sanomat also reported that the crew of a Finnish airliner from Rome saw a glowing object over Copenhagen.^[1]

At Pulkovo Airport in Leningrad, the air traffic controller B. Blagirev and two other night-shift staff saw, at 3:55 a.m., a fireball slightly larger than Venus in the north-northeast, surrounded by a spacious, rhythmically glowing coat with an intricate structure that "had nothing similar to aurora"; it rose, moved south-southwest, then turned north-northwest and disappeared. Members of an IZMIRAN geophysical expedition near Lekhta also saw the phenomenon, and further reports, many with drawings, came from Primorsk, Petrodvorets, Lomonosov, Podporozhye, Kem, Priozersk, Valday, Põltsamaa in Estonia and elsewhere. The crew of a Tu-154 reported a luminous sphere at 12 km, and the Georgian writer Guram Pandzhikidze and other passengers on a flight from Singapore to Moscow watched a bright object for half an hour.^[1]

Detailed accounts

Some witnesses described structured objects. At Kurkijoki the engineer A. Novozhilov said that what he first took for a meteor stopped, approached, and took the well-defined shape of an airship about 100 metres long, faceted like lit windows and tipped with brilliant spots, flying silently at 300–500 metres; it released a bright ball that flew north and came down behind a forest with a glow. He took three unsuccessful photographs at 4:15 a.m. The writer and philosopher Yuri Linnik, watching from his dacha near Namoyevo through an amateur telescope at 80× magnification, described a lens-shaped object the colour of "dark amethyst, intensively lightened from inside", ringed by sixteen spots — "nozzles" — emitting pulsating red rays, which crossed the sky past many identified stars over fifteen minutes.^[1]

The Petrozavodsk object

Petrozavodsk, capital of the Karelian ASSR with about 203,000 people, saw the most famous display. The first published account, by the TASS correspondent Nikolai Milov, described "a huge star" that "flared up in the dark sky" at about 4 a.m., "impulsively sending shafts of light to the Earth". It spread out over the city "in the form of a jellyfish, showering the city with a multitude of very fine rays which created an image of pouring rain", then the rays ceased and the "jellyfish" became a bright semicircle that moved off toward Lake Onega. Milov's report ran in Pravda, Izvestiya and other national papers. Witnesses included paramedics, police officers, seamen and dockers at the port, military personnel, airport staff and an amateur astronomer.^[1]

According to the compiled accounts, the object, with a translucent coat, first appeared in the northeast below Ursa Major, about as bright as Venus, and rose slowly for about three minutes, expanding and pulsating. Before stopping it released a round, bright "cloud" larger than Ursa Major, about 30 degrees across, estimated at 6–7.5 km altitude; its core was estimated at 60–119 metres across. The object was red with a bluish-white glow that lit the area like a full moon — "like in the white night", said one witness. A dark spot then spread around the core as the glow faded. The object hovered over the city for five minutes, then moved away faster; the whole event lasted 10–15 minutes. One witness said its underside resembled a Segner wheel. A psychologist who examined nine witnesses in November 1977 found them completely sane and their testimony truthful.^[1]

Some reports described after-effects. One witness said the air over the lake glowed white after a moon-sized yellow ball disappeared. Linnik reported, while noting it might be unrelated, unusual late blooming of roses and other plants and an algal bloom in a lake, and engineers in the area reported "huge failures" in computing equipment that later recovered.^[1]

Instrumental detection

The objects over the Helsinki, Pulkovo and Peski airports were not detected by airport radar — the Helsinki controller Ari Hämäläinen denied a UPI report that his radar had seen it — and the Soviet air defence system did not detect them either. The Karelian Hydrometeorological Observatory's weather radar reportedly detected glowing objects on later dates, on 30 September, 20 October and 20 November 1977.^[1]

Soviet investigation

Government officials in northern Europe wrote to Anatoly Aleksandrov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, asking whether the phenomenon was caused by Soviet weapons tests and whether it threatened the environment. Lev Gindilis of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute made the first analysis from reports available by 30 September. He noted that for one object to be seen from all the reported places it would need to be at about 100 km or higher, in which case its bright core would be about a kilometre across and its coat tens of kilometres. He listed problems with the Kosmos-955 explanation: the object was seen moving west, while the satellite was launched to the northeast; its angular size; and its long hovering over Leppäsyrjä. A local weather station's report, published in Sortavala on 8 October, confirmed the object moved from northeast to southwest. The researcher Felix Ziegel also objected that rockets are launched eastward.^[1]

Later in 1977 Gindilis, the engineer-physicist D. Menkov and I. Petrovskaya prepared a restricted preliminary report using data to 20 October. It found the eyewitness reports mutually consistent, judged the phenomenon "apparently too big to be explained by technical experiments on satellite orbits", and suggested "a possible influence of some cosmic agent", but reached no firm conclusion; it concluded that "based on the available data, it is unfeasible to satisfactorily understand the observed phenomenon". A meeting on 1 November at the Academy's Institute of Space Studies was also inconclusive. On 2 January 1978 the Academy's vice president, Vladimir Kotelnikov, informed the Karelian branch that an expert group was being sent; Y. Mezentsev of Petrozavodsk University made theodolite measurements based on witness testimony, and a January 1978 appendix stressed that sightings elsewhere had been reported before the Kosmos-955 launch.^[1][3]

A copy of the report reached the French research group GEPAN and was passed to the Center for UFO Studies in Illinois; J. Allen Hynek gave another to the NASA scientist Richard Haines, who translated it. Haines, Hynek and others called it key evidence for UFOs, while the spaceflight writer James Oberg called the Soviet investigation "a ruse". The episode contributed to the creation of Setka AN, the Academy's research programme into anomalous atmospheric phenomena.^[1][3]

Proposed explanations

Kosmos-955

Matti Kivinen of the Nurmijärvi geophysical observatory in Finland suggested in 1977 that the object over Finland could be the remnant of a launch vehicle or satellite. James Oberg attributed the Petrozavodsk object to the launch of Kosmos-955 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome at about 3:58 local time on 20 September: since the rocket flew northeast, people in Petrozavodsk, southwest of Plesetsk, saw the exhaust trail from its engines. The IZMIRAN scientist Yuli Platov supported this in 1984, linking the bright spot to the engine burn, the spreading glow to the rocket leaving the Earth's shadow, and the radiant structure to the exhaust spreading above the turbopause. Similar sights after launches near dawn or dusk have been reported many times since and are known as "space jellyfish". Platov later added that some effects were associated with a failed ballistic missile test in the same region at almost the same time.^[1][2]

The explanation remains contested, given the reported westward motion, hovering and sightings before the launch. The Ukrainian researcher Oleh Pruss, who served 18 years at the Kapustin Yar launch site, said he knew how impressive rocket launches look, "however, there was something completely different over Petrozavodsk".^[1]

Natural explanations

Vladimir Krat, director of the Pulkovo Observatory, first suggested a meteorite fall and later aurorae, a view backed by IZMIRAN's director Vladimir Migulin in 1980; Ziegel replied that aurorae cannot occur below about 100 km and are far too faint. Migulin later suggested a "rare concourse" of the Kosmos-955 launch, a strong magnetic disturbance from a solar flare, and an IZMIRAN experiment influencing the ionosphere with low-frequency radio waves. In 1978 M. Dmitriyev proposed a chemiluminescent area in the atmosphere, which Ziegel rejected as too weak and unable to move against the wind.^[1]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Petrozavodsk phenomenon”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.