Voronezh UFO incident
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🛸 Case
Contents 4
| Type | Case |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Voronezh |
The Voronezh UFO incident was a reported landing of an alien craft in a park in Voronezh, in the Soviet Union, on 27 September 1989. The story, based mainly on the accounts of children, was spread worldwide by the official Soviet news agency TASS during the era of glasnost ("openness"), but investigators found no physical evidence.[1][2]
The reports
According to TASS, boys playing football in a city park saw a pink glow in the sky and then a deep red ball about three metres across, which circled, vanished and reappeared. The children said a three-eyed being in bronze-coloured boots, with a disc on its chest, came out of the craft with a robot, and that it made a 16-year-old boy disappear with a ray gun until the craft left.[1] A local police lieutenant said he had seen "a body flying in the sky", though only the children claimed to have seen the beings.[1] On 9 October TASS reported that a correspondent had spoken to ten or twelve young people who said they had seen a flying saucer.[1]
Publicity
The story was the most widely publicised of a series of UFO reports in official Soviet media at the time. The Communist Party paper Sovetskaya Kultura also covered it and insisted it was not a joke. A private company began selling tours of Voronezh as "the land of the aliens".[1][2] Western media, including American television, sent crews.[1]
Investigation
A local geophysicist was quoted by TASS as confirming the landing site using "biolocation", which skeptic Paul Kurtz described as a form of dowsing. The same scientist later said a supposedly alien rock was ordinary haematite and told another paper not to believe everything TASS published.[1][2] A university official said that slightly raised levels of radioactive caesium proved nothing, since such traces were common after the Chernobyl disaster. A French news agency reported that dozens of soil, radiation, microbial and chemical tests found no anomaly.[1][2]
Soviet television journalist Vladimir Pozner sent a crew to Voronezh, which found no witnesses other than the children, and he suggested that children's imaginations might be at work, as in many American cases.[1][2]
References
- Voronezh UFO incident — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Paul Kurtz, "Paranormal Pandemonium in the Soviet Union", Skeptical Inquirer 14 (3), Spring 1990 · skepticalinquirer.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 31 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
No discussion yet.