Pilot Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich and UFOs
Independent Soviet ufologists did nottake the continuous scorn from debunkers lying down, and basically moved the Academy of Sciences aside, by directly approaching military coordinators of the secret program. The initiative to create the Commission was supported by military researchers, who were tired of fruitless activities of the academic debunkers. The Commission included also those who served the Ministry of Defense research. Pavel Popovich played a role in its workings, although due to the secrecy and his oath, he had not revealed all he knew.
According to Popovich, most of the information about anomalous phenomena came from military and pilots, trusted, sane and healthy people. Among the reports many were nonsensical, but some were historically important. UFO data started being reported from the days of W.W.II. During the Kursk Battle, Soviet aviators and witnesses on the ground observed mysterious objects in the sky. He revealed this in the April, 2009 interview to the Ukrainian web portal DonbassUA. The Kursk episode is described in detail in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon.
On May 29 1984, Trud newspaper published an article where Popovich told the author about a case that took place on March 27, 1983, in Gorky (and investigated by the Commission’s Gorky section). It was an object that flew in the area of the city’s airport. The airport’s radars registered but could not identify the object. The object flew at the altitude of no more than one kilometer, and the speed approximately 180-200 kilometers per hour. The witness (Flight Controller A. Shushkin) who had observed the object said that the object's size was similar to that of the IL-14 aircraft fuselage. But there were no wings. It was a “cigar”. Its color light gray, steely, and it moved slowly across the sky. The phenomenon lasted around forty minutes. At the distance of 30 to 40 kilometers NE from the airport the radars lost it. Shushkin later corrected Pavel Popovich and said the UFO actually appeared over the city on March 28, 1983; flew at an altitude of 400-600 meters, and disappeared ten seconds after it was sighted.
A more dramatic, episode took place in January of 1978, and Popovich described it to Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya newspaper on August 6, 1984.
During the flight of YAK-40 over the area between two settlements Medvezhye and Nadim, the crew noticed something round; a very bright foreign body that approached rapidly and sometime later appeared straight in front of the aircraft. Every minute the size of this body increased. When the crash appeared to be imminent, the object soared right in front of the aircraft’s nose, not causing any harm.
THE KGB UFO FILES
In 1991, a file of KGB documents was provided to Pavel Popovich (he had urged them to release the information). It was the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB (Counterintelligence), or rather the Tenth Department within the Directorate (Control of the defense facilities) that had received UFO information. The file (124 pages of printed text) contained copies of UFO reports: handwritten reports, typed testimonies, and notes from KGB informers, crude drawings and eyewitness reports of UFOs. An accompanying letter was written by the Deputy Chairman of the Committee for State Security USSR, N.A. Sham. This cooperation between UFO researchers and the KGB was unprecedented and was a landmark in UFO research in the Soviet Union and possibly the world.
Years later Sham stated that the KGB was not engaged in research of anomalous phenomena (he pointed to the SETKA program as the responsible entity for such research). See Philip Mantle’s article The Real KGB UFO Files (http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0308/kgb.html.
ROSWELL
In 1992, on behest of UFO researchers, Pavel Popovich had contacted two Russian ministries, to find out whether the Soviet-era archives contained documents pertaining to the Roswell Crash. The reply from the Ministry of Defense stated that the officials of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense had conducted search of the materials of interest to Popovich. They did not find any Roswell materials. The second reply came from the Ministry of Security of the Russian federation. No documentary materials about the case of the “flying saucer” crash in the area of Roswell, USA in the year 1947 were discovered, it stated.
Soviet intelligence, quite active in the United States in 1940s, would not miss the Roswell Crash controversy.
REVELATIONS
After every interview Pavel Popovich had to sign a special document stating that he did not reveal any state secrets. He never did tell all he knew, a military person loyal to his oath.
In 2006, Pavel Popovich gave an interview to Bul’var Gordona, a Ukrainian magazine. (Issue 31[67]). He said that the inhabitants of Phaeton or Moonah (an ancient planet with advanced civilization, believed to exist next to Earth ages ago, but perished due to nuclear explosions) probably visit Earth from time to time.
