When the Monsters Came to Earth: The Voronezh UFO Incident

It was a warm fall day and Voronish a small town not too far from Moscow in Russia. The sun was out and the freezing snow was still about a month away. This is probably why the small park was so crowded. There were old couples going for a walk, young families playing with their little ones, and a group of older kids playing soccer. The park stayed busy until the sun began to set. It was six thirty and as some people were heading out, the sky began to change. There was a bright light in the sky. Everyone froze to look at it. There was silence as they watched. The bright light turned into an orb and as the object got closer, the sky turned red and so did the orb. It was nine feet across and hovering thirty feet above everyone in the park. The kids stood frozen, and they were the first to see when an opening appeared right in the middle of the object in the sky. Everyone saw it. A large humanoid figure emerged from the orbit. It was ten feet tall, with a tiny head, three eyes, and no neck. It had a disc on its chest and it scanned the park and was wearing silver overalls and bronze boots. When it finished scanning the park. He re entered the sphere and flew down the UFO, then hid a tree in its path, and then landed. The humanoid came out of the red sphere again, but this time there was a robot with it. The alien spoke and in language that no one else in the park could understand, and a rectangular object appeared on the ground. It said something again, and the rectangle disappeared. One of the kids screamed. The alien looked at him, and the kid fell silent. The sphere, alien and robot vanished. The people were too scared to move the sphere, humanoid and robot reappeared again. Five minutes later. The alien pointed a four foot long tube of the kid who had been screaming, and the kid opened his mouth, screamed, and the humanoid pulled the trigger. The boy vanished. Everyone began to scream. It was chaos. The humanoid turned around, the robot followed. They returned to the orb and it sped away until they could no longer be seen. When the orb was gone, the boy suddenly reappeared. He was so shocked that he couldn't speak a single word. People ran home, panicked, and in fear. This encounter in Varonash on September twenty seventh, nineteen eighty nine, changed the entire conversation on other worldly sightings, and in this episode will be exploring the terrifying aftermath and the realization that it was not the only occurrence. My name is Edwin, and here's a horse. When the people ran home, they began to talk, and soon there were official reports made. After the reports, the Soviet Scientific Commission ordered an official investigation of the UFO claims. Scientists from the Varonish Geophysical Lab descended upon the little park. They examined the ground where the UFO had landed and tass tasks and official Soviet news network reported that the scientists found extraterrestrial compounds. That claim was eventually disproven. The official investigation determined that no UFO had landed in Varonish on that September night. If you look up the Varonish UFO incident article online, like I did, you'll find that it is deceptively short. But if you look deeper into this incident, you'll find that it wasn't the only UFO siding of Varonish. In fact, there were three separate sightings in September nineteen eighty nine. And that's not all. The residents of Roonish were not the only Soviets to have seen a UFO. For some reason, during the tail end of the Soviet Union, there was a rise in UFO sidings. What was going on? Were aliens really flocking to the Soviet Union in the late nineteen eighties. UFO sidings in the Soviet Union go back to the nineteen forties. The first documented sighting happened in nineteen forty six. Back then, the Soviet government thought UFO reports were part of psychological warfare by American intelligence agencies. Maybe they were right about that. Flying Saucers was the only book on UFOs to be translated and sold in the USSR, and the author of the book actually did have ties to American intelligence agencies. Either way, the sightings didn't stop, but it was something only talked about in secret. It wasn't until nineteen sixty seven that open discussion about the existence of UFOs was allowed in the so Soviet Union. A group called Stoilarov Committee was established. It was made up of scientists who wanted to investigate theories to explain all the UFO sightings happening in the Soviet Union. In nineteen sixty eight, Soviet ufologist Felix Ziegel published Unidentified Flying Objects in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This was the first compilation of UFO sidings in the Soviet Union to be recorded. But not long after the Stoilarov Committee was disbanded. The Soviet government felt threatened there were too many unexplained cases, and so they shut down all open dialogue about UFOs. This remained strict policy until Mikhail Korbachev came into power. Under his leadership, Soviet media operated with openness or a glass noche in Russian. Her normal belief, something that was forbidden to speak about in the Soviet Union, was allowed again, especially in the summer of nineteen eighty nine. Right before the Varoni sightings. In July nineteen eighty nine, farmers claimed to have seen huge, headless motorcyclists riding by their farm. Psychic Alan Chumach made regular appearances on a Soviet talk show. Allan's fans believed he had healing powers, and Allan himself claimed to be able to influence the weather, and a tall Kushpiroski was using hypnotism to heal people out in the open. On air astrology also became very popular. In nineteen eighty nine, the paranormal was okay to talk about, and UFO sightings were Two that year became known as the Return of the Humanoids. Another group of children saw something before the partgoers of Varonesh were terrified. On the night of September twenty seventh, school children were outside playing when the sky changed colors. They saw a red sphere land not far in front of them, and suddenly a hole appeared on the sphere and two humanoid figures got out. They had a box that appeared to be following them. Legs came out from the bottom of the box and all three figures stared at the children. The children screamed, all at the same time, and the figures quickly turned around. They got inside the red sphere, the hole closed and it flew away, and this was six days before the park siding. A few days after that first group of children saw the sphere and another sighting took place in the Varonish suburbs. This time the primary witness was an adult. Poliokove was a factory worker. He usually got rides from his friend and the two were driving home after their long shift. Though it was after six, the sun was just about to set, and as his friend drove on the lonely road, the car died. The car's headlights, radio, and the engine all suddenly stopped working. The driver was able to use a lass of the car's momentum to reach the side of the road, and once he was safely on the shoulder, he got out to inspect them hood. He called Polikov to take a look at something outside. Philkov got out of the car, and that's when the sky changed colors. There was a pinkish yellow sphere floating above the road. A beam of light shot out of the sphere and appeared to be scanning it. The beam got closer and closer to the car, Polykov began to feel an intense paralyzing fear. The beam landed on the car hood and the engine started smoking. Polykov could feel something was there, but he couldn't see it. It felt like he could reach out his hand and touch something or someone. The red in the sky went back to normal and the beam disappeared. A few seconds later, the car started working again. The strangest part of this story is that when Polkov asked the driver what he thought about what they had just gone through. The driver said he never saw his fear in the sky. He even denied that the car stopped running, just denied it all. As much as the driver wanted to pretend that nothing happened, it was impossible. Another group of witnesses saw a beam of light piers the surface of a lake. The beam didn't touch them, but they all suffered from headaches after seeing it. Pullico. The driver and the witnesses by the lake weren't the only ones who experienced something that night. There's an even more disturbing report that came from a woman in that same area. She was in her house when she saw three shadowy silhouettes in her hallway. They were missing their eyes and ears. The dark figures were calling to her for a full hour, and during that time she was frozen. She physically could not get out of bed. Whatever these humanoids and silhouettes were, it was clear they were making several appearances in town and the government needed to figure out what was going on. I'll tell you all about the investigations up next. Stay with me. The investigators of the Varonish sighting started by talking to the children who witnessed a flying red sphere on the twenty seventh. They separated the kids and asked them to draw what they had seen. They all drew the same thing, spheres with four legs and humanoid figures. Some of the aliens they drew had three eyes, others had two eyes and some kind of device on their foreheads. Jenrik Celanov, a scientist of the Varonish Geophysical Lab, investigated at the park where the sphere had landed on the twenty seventh. Jenrick and his team used biolocation to find the landing site. Biolocation is a classic Soviet ufology measurement tool. It's a form of dowsing. I've heard of this before, but I had to look it up, and it's defined by the American Society of Dowsers as the exercise of the human faculty which allows one to obtain information in a manner beyond the scope and power of the standard human physical senses of sight, sound, touch, et cetera. That was hard for me to understand, but basically it means that it is a way to find information with more than just our human senses. At some point, I believe it was also used to find water for wells and stuff. Anyway, this is an ancient technique. There are cave paintings from eight thousand years ago that show a dowsing rod in the Sahara Desert. Some people think it doesn't work, but it has been used for ages and all over the world. No one knows for sure how dowsers do what they do. Some believe it's a form of telepathy, and others thinks that dowsers can sense electromagnetic changes in the soil. But anyway, Generic used an L shaped dowsing rod and made notes when it bent to the left or right, and he and his team found his circle in the ground with a sixty five foot diameter. They also found four craters that were about two inches deep and six inches across. These holes were believed to been made by the legs of the sphere. It was just like how the children drew. The team also found large pieces of rock that looked like red sandstone. They ran an analysis on the rock and they determined that it was not from Earth. They called it extraterrestrial. But the weird thing is that a little while later, Jenrik changed the statement, claiming that it was regular old Sandstone after all. After the Varonish incident on September twenty seventh, American news networks such as ABC, Radio, AP, and CNN wanted to report on it too. They reached out to the Committee for Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal or csi COOP. I'm kind of tempted to call it SYCOFF, but we'll stick with CSICOP. This committee was a part of a New York nonprofit called the Center for Inquiry founded by philosophy professor Paul Kurtz. The news reporters wanted to know what CSICOP thought of the Soviets news report on the sightings. Paul called Philip Klass, the lead investigator in CSICOP's UFO subcommittee. Philip told him what he had answered to many skeptics. If aliens had really landed in the Soviet Union as reported, and if this has been confirmed by Soviet scientists, it would be a momentous event in human history. Paul also contacted Jim Oberg, another member of the csi COP UFO subcommittee. Jim worked at NASA and was an expert on Soviet satellite launches. He searched NASA data and didn't find any evidence of rocket launches or space debris from the Soviet Union. Some that could explain the way the UFO sightings. So what are some possible explanations for the Varonish sightings. Paul Kurtz believed that the openness policy under Gorbachev's leadership led to a freer society, something the Soviets had not experience, and this left a vacuum that could be filled with magical thinking. He also suggested another idea the government allowing and even encouraging the discussion about UFOs and the paranormal and that was their way to calm down on happy citizens. A Time article that was published in twenty fourteen, twenty five years after the Varonish sightings, suggested that all the UFO and extraterrestrial life talks were a distraction from the imminent fall of the Soviet Union. Others believed the UFO sightings could have been chalked up to the overactive imagination of children. A TV show called Verima or Truth in English, sent a film crew to Varoniesh. After investigating, the TV show decided that childhood imagination was to blame. But for me, that raised a question what about the rest of the witnesses. It wasn't just children who saw the sphere, and it wasn't just at the park. One Soviet newspaper investigated the sidings between September twenty first and October seventh. The newspaper interviewed several adults who claimed to have seen the sphere. They also talked to a Soviet news reporter named Vladimir Lebedev. He had interviewed the young witnesses. He didn't believe that aliens had truly visited Varonesh, but he did believe that something out of the ordinary had happened. Why else would the kids have been so scared? And remember the drawings that investigators asked the kids to make. A few of those kids also included a symbol in their drawings that resembled the symbol of a cult. This cult was dedicated to a planet called Umo. They called themselves the Daughters of Umo. It was established in Spain in nineteen sixty six. The cult's leader claimed to have seen an enormous circular object with three legs. It was marked with the symbol, made up of three vertical lines and a horizontal line connecting them. Information about Umo was relayed in the form of letters, and someone later admitted to faking all of it. Because of that confession, UMO and that UFO sighting are now considered fake. The kids had drawn the symbol and none of them knew what UMO was. To this, it meant that the kids really had seen the symbol then added it to their drawings to make their stories more credible, even though it ended up doing the opposite. There are true believers, though, people like doctor Jacques Valet. Doctor Valle first saw a UFO in nineteen fifty five. In nineteen sixty one, when he was working for the National Center for Space Studies in France, he and his coworker saw a non terrestrial satellite, but one of his superiors destroyed all the evidence of it. In the mid sixties, doctor Valley became an advocate for the extraterrestrial hypothesis or the eth which states that UFOs are spacecraft powered by aliens or unmanned probes. He changed his mind about this hypothesis in nineteen sixty nine, instead propose his own multi dimensional visitation hypothesis. This new theory accounts for the possibility that UFOs don't just come from somewhere in outer space. Instead, they could actually come from a dimension outside of our understanding of space and time, and that alien beings could be visibly coexisting with humans. And he has five main arguments for the multidimensional visitation hypothesis. First, the number of UFO sightings outnumber what would make sense if an alien race was coming to Earth to survey our planet. Second, if the aliens that people see are humanoid, then they aren't likely to have originated from a different planet. If their bodies are similar to ours, they would not be suited for space travel. Third, UFOs are not a new phenomenon. They have been seen throughout human history. Fourth, reports by victims of alien abductions don't fit a narrative of experimentation on humans by aliens. And Fifth, UFOs and the beings in them have been reported to be able to manipulate space and time, they can't defy the laws of this dimension. For instance, the sphere scene in Voronesh had disappearing and reappearing abilities. In nineteen ninety two, doctor Valais published a book called UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, a Cosmic Zamsidot. This book was a culmination of an investigation conducted by doctor Vallei and Martin Costello, a French science reporter. In Russian samsidat means a document that is distributed secretly. Documents on UFOs and parapsychology often fell into this category. Among other stories, this book includes Polikov's UFO sidings titled in the book The Case of the Paralyzing Ray. The Varonish sightings weren't the only ones during this time period either. The reports all over the Soviet Union. In Petersburg, Russi Tamara, a local factory worker, was on our brik. She was sitting on a bench resting across from the Moscow railway. Suddenly the sky went dark. It was cloudy and quiet. There was no one around her, but she thought there had been out of nowhere, a woman approaches her, and this woman was carrying some kind of purse and she wore a dark green jacket. She sat next to Tamara and told her she needed to rest, and they sat together and talked. As the last train of the night left the station, the dark sky was bright. It was a flash from the sky and half the houses lit up. They stood up, worried that there was a fire or something. But when they looked up, they saw a flying saucer coming down. It landed only a few feet in front of them. The top of the saucer stretched and a red light beamed from the top. Suddenly it was too bright, and a tall humanoid stepped up out from it, and then another one, this one was a lot shorter. The other woman ran, but Tamadai was frozen in place. The tall one walked toward her, though it didn't make any noise. As it walked, it looked like it was going to run into her, but then it disappeared. Then everything disappeared. Tamada lived home, but she was so scared and confused. Nearby workers saw the same light, and another railroad worker reported seeing the tall figure as well. Investigators arrived to try and find out what took place, but nothing came of it. There are theories and ideas of what happened, but only those who lived it know what it was really like. While reading about these sightings, I kept coming back to Philip Class's conclusion if alien descended upon the Soviet Union in nineteen eighty nine, then there would have been a global uproar. That's a pretty common argument, regardless of when and where the UFO shows up. At this point, there have been so many cases of UFO sightings that I'm not convinced that any amount of proof will be enough to change the minds of skeptics. I can't help but wonder if UFOs, either ones from outer space or another dimension entirely have visited our planet already we just ignored it. Maybe the residents of Varnish experienced a mass delusion that September. Maybe they didn't to them the fear they felt was real. I don't know if UFOs and aliens will ever be taken seriously as a science, or if it will always be relegated to the realm of the paranormal, but it brings forth a question if extraterrestrial beings ever have, or ever will walk among us, would we even notice? What do you think could explain these sightings? Let me know. Up next, listen to our season three episode ten Story called Alien Visitors and Ufolks in case you want to get more information about this. This episode of Horror Story was researched and written by Tess Redmond, with additional writing and supervision by Christina Lamagi, hosting a production by me Edwin Kruges. To listen at free try out scary Plus. It's a premium version of the shows that I make over on scaryplus dot com and it lets you listen to the shows as normal right here, but without ads. You can also get in touch with me through email or Instagram as Edwin Cove. That's e EDWI nco V, Email and other contact info is in the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening, Keep it scary everyone. See you as soon