Edward Crabtree: When UFO witness and enthusiast Robbie Williams opened the World Cup in June of this year, it is doubtful whether he expected a UFO to show up over Russian skies so soon.
On June 17th a serpentine wake materialised above one of the stadiums in Nizhny Novgorod, a river city in central Russia, causing consternation on social media. It looked like an enormous luminous tadpole in the dark blue Nizhny summer sky.
An official explanation soon got issued, however. This was an example of our own technology. The launch of a Soyuz 2.9lb rocket carrying a navigation satellite from Mirny in Arkhangelsk had created the spectacle (The Independent, June 19th 2018).
Should you delve in to Russia’s encounters with Neopoznani Letayooshi Obyekti – their term for Unidentified Flying Objects – then you will hear much of the Tunguska fireball of 1908, of the ‘M-triangle’ in the Ural Mountains and of the mass Close Encounter of the Third Kind that was reported in the town of Voronezh in central Russia in 1989. These are the Roswells and Rendlesham forests of Russian Ufology, but all of them occurred in remote or provincial areas.
What of Russia’s capital, the biggest city in Europe though? This is a city that boasts plenty of air traffic with four international airports and military helicopters and surveillance drones up above. When it comes to saucers, though, we hear less news.
This is to be expected if you study the patterns in UFO sightings. The emergence of anomalous objects above densely populated urban areas seems a rarity. (The exceptions include the Washington DC flap in 1952 and the spate of sightings, continuing to this day, that have occurred over Mexico City beginning with the solar eclipse visible there in 1991). Nevertheless, Moscow has indeed produced it own saucer legends. Some of these are bogus and others which are yet to be explained.
False alarms.
2009 was a busy year for Muscovite UFO rumours. In that year a sensational You tube video went viral. This showed a fuzzy grey pyramidal structure (which some compared to a Star Wars Phantom fighter) making its way over the Kremlin in broad daylight. (Pravda.ru, 19th December 2009).
Whilst police have indeed reported odd lights over the Kremlin’s Spasskaya tower before (see ufo.evidence.org), the idea that such a vast craft could remain above one of the most monitored airspaces in the world without a major incident can be dismissed. (Perhaps we were less blasé about Computer Generated Images, the obvious candidate for this, even in those days).
Earlier in that same year, however, a sight, which was just as dramatic, drew people’s attention over the city of Moscow – and this time it was not the product of graphic manipulation. A massive circular cloud formation formed over the city looking like… well, like the residue of a flying saucer visitation!
In fact what this constituted was a meteorological phenomenon known as a punch hole cloud (Meterologynews.com). The preconditions for a punch hole cloud are rare and complex. In brief, wispy clouds surround a patch of sky because water droplets freeze quickly and start to drop leaving a hole. This process is indeed begun by the passage of an aircraft, but known ones (Mail online, 26/10/2017).
Two years later a more nuts-and-bolts interloper made itself known above the heads of 25,000 protesters who had gathered at Bolatnaya square, in central Moscow, to make their feelings known about parliamentary fraud. That a clear mechanical device complete with flashing lights was visible to the crowd of protesters was unarguable and would later be reported as a UFO story by the respected British newspaper The Daily Telegraph (12th December, 2011). Later however, Russia Today rebuffed this notion with some haste. Writing for that outlet, Vitaly Mateev, who had himself attended the rally, insisted that this was a drone sent out by the Ridus News Agency to cover the event. The assembled masses were only concerned as to whose drone it was. (R.T, 13th December 2011).
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