Why ‘Aliens’ ‘Landed’ in Russia 25 Years Ago
Oct. 9, 2014
They had small heads and wore silver overalls,
apparently
Extra-terrestrial
contact has already been made — at least if you believe a report that ran 25
years ago Thursday, on Oct. 9, 1989, in the Soviet press agency TASS.
On Sept. 27
of that year, according to the official report, tall three-eyed aliens with
small heads showed up in the city of Voronezh, arriving in a shiny ball (or,
alternatively, a “banana-shaped” object) and bringing with them their robot.
”Scientists have confirmed that an unidentified flying object recently landed
in a park in the Russian city of Voronezh,” an Associated Press translation of
the report read. ”They have also identified the landing site and found traces
of aliens who made a short promenade about the park.” They left behind them
“two pieces of unidentified rocks,” made of a substance that “cannot be found
on Earth.”
When pressed, TASS stood by the
report. In fact, the agency could add more details a few days later, the New
York Times reported. For example,
aliens were wearing “silvery overalls and bronze boots.”
And, as TIME reported in the Oct.
23, 1989, issue, that wasn’t all:
Earlier in the year, the newspaper Socialist
Industry reported an “encounter” between a milkmaid in the region of Perm
and a cosmic creature that looked like a man but was “taller than average with
shorter legs.” Last week the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda declared
that not only had an Abominable Snowman been caught stealing apples in the
Saratov region but researchers had “registered the influence of energies” at a
site in Perm, leading a geologist to conclude that they had discovered a
landing field for flying saucers. The same story transcribed a telepathic
discourse between Pavel Mukhortov, a journalist from Riga, and an
all-too-knowing extraterrestrial.
“Where are
you from?” asked Mukhortov.
“The Red
Star of the Constellation of Libra is our home.”
“Could you
shift me to your planet?”
“That will
mean no return for you and danger for us.”
“What
danger?”
“Thought
bacteria.”
To the
chagrin of Soviet scientists, the thought bacteria are everywhere.
But, as
writer Howard G. Chua-Eoan explained, there was actually a pretty good reason
for TASS and other Soviet news outlets to go nuts for crazy news like this. For
one thing, the policy of glasnost — openness in the media —
was still relatively new, and publications were experimenting with how far they
could go. More importantly, at a time when hope for the Soviet Union was
waning, stories of aliens and mystical creatures provided something a little less
depressing to think about.
Though many educated Soviets
objected strongly to the anti-scientific trend in the state media, UFOs weren’t
the only fake reports for them to be mad about. “They’ve been feeding us
rubbish about the dream of Communism for years, and we now see they were
lying,” a Soviet source told TIME in 1989. “At least this gives us something
new to dream about.”
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