The highly publicized releases of “UFO files” from France and Britain provide more puzzling tales about the “appearance” over the years of anomalous aerial objects. But the real stories behind some of the most spectacular sightings in UFO history will come to light only when the Russian Ministry of Defense opens up its files.

Consider one of the most sensational UFO stories in Soviet history—a story that has been enshrined in the most high-quality data files of world UFOlogy as a classic that cannot be explained in any prosaic terms. It really is an important case study, because the tale of the Minsk UFO sighting can teach a lesson about the irremediable vigor of unidentified flying objects as a cultural phenomenon.

A passenger jet is flying north on September 7, 1984, near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. Suddenly, at 4:10 am, the flight crew notices a glowing object outside their forward right window. In the ten minutes that follow, the object changes shape, zooms in on the aircraft, plays searchlights on the ground beneath it, and envelops the airliner in a mysterious ray of light that fatally injures one of the pilots. Other aircraft in the area, alerted by air traffic control operators who are watching the UFO on radar, also see it.

Respected British UFOlogist Jenny Randles, in The UFO Conspiracy (115) described it this way:

A radar visual case from the USSR began on an evening in 1985 [sic] at 4:10 AM when Aeroflot flight 8352 observed a strange yellow light while cruising at 30,000 feet in clear conditions. A “blob” shot out and downward from the light, and projected a cone of brilliant (greenish?) light at the ground below. Two additional beams appeared, and features on the ground could be seen to be illuminated.

One beam then swung around and illuminated the aircraft cabin. The light appeared to approach and resolved into a greenish luminosity as much as several degrees in extent, which then paralleled their course. There were multiple lights of different colors and fiery zigzags that crossed the vapor.

At this point, the aircraft was coming within range of the ground controller, who could then also see the object. The object seemed to change shape, [and according to a quoted report] “it developed an ‘appendage’ and then ‘became’ a wingless cloud-aircraft with a pointed tail (the spike?). The yellow and green glow, like phosphorescence, was eerily intertwined.” A second aircraft was vectored nearby and also could see the object near the first aircraft. Talinn approach radar detected the aircraft and the object, and also experienced unusual radar interference.

The incident also figures prominently in UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union (Ballantine, 1992, pp. 128-9), a 1992 book by Jacques Vallee, who was the real-life inspiration for the fictional UFOlogist in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Valle reports in the book that “Two military pilots saw an object that hit them with a beam of light. One of the pilots died; the other managed to land the plane, although he had also suffered psychological effects from the light.” Vallee said that he learned the story from Yevgeniy Kolessov in January 1990 during a visit to the “Kosmos” pavilion at the “VDNKh” exhibits park in northern Moscow.

On page 201 he categorizes the case as an “encounter” in which “witnesses suffer significant injury or death—one of only three in Russian UFO history.” The story is based on a “firsthand personal interview with the witness by a source of proven reliability,” with the “site visited by a skilled analyst,” and the conclusion was that “no natural explanation [was] possible, given the evidence.”

A leading Russian UFO expert, Vladimir Azhazha, reported in “UFOs: Space Aliens?” in Soviet Soldier magazine, December 1991:

Any meeting with or even sighting a UFO is fraught with danger. Let us consider the following case. On December [sic] 7, 1984, a liner flying from Leningrad to Tbilisi came across an unidentified flying object.

For some time the plane accompanied the alien craft, illuminating it with a searchlight. The outcome of the contact was tragic. Half a year later, V. Gorridze, the crew commander, died of cancer; Yu. Kabachnikov, the second pilot, had a serious mental derangement. The encephalogram of his brain was not of an “earthly” character, as he lost memory for long periods of time. Now he is a “first group” invalid; naturally, he cannot fly. The hostess, who was in the control room [i.e., cockpit] at the moment of the UFO “attack,” fell ill too. She developed a heavy skin disease of unknown character. Perhaps somebody [sic] of the passengers was also affected. Regrettably we have no information to this effect.

Ukrainian-born author Paul Stonehill has written many books on Soviet UFOlogy. In his version,

The greenish cloud suddenly dropped below the altitude of the aircraft, ascended vertically, moved to the left and right, and then stopped right across from Tu-134A [flight 7084]. The cloud was chasing it.... Lazurin shouted the object was teasing them.

Then another Tu-134A entered the control tower area. The distance between the two aircraft was [100 km]; one could not miss the giant cloud from such a distance, yet the commander of the other airplane did not see anything. Only at [15 km] did he see the UFO....

The captain of flight 7084, V. Goridze, died in 1985 as a result of electromagnetic radiation. Kabachnikov, the pilot, was fired because he developed heart disease.... The Tallinn crew suffered one casualty, a steward, who developed similar ailments as the pilots of Flight 7084.

This is certainly a story that “has everything.” It’s no wonder it achieved such elevated status—and absolute credibility—in UFOlogy. And as we shall see, it fully deserves such elevated status but for absolutely opposite reasons.

This combination of perceptions from multiple witnesses and sensors, together with the serious physiological effects, makes for a dramatic event that on the face of it defies any earthly explanation. It was just as amazing that the official Soviet news media, long averse to discussing UFO subjects, disclosed the story in the first place. So it was no mystery that over the years that followed, the story was never actually checked out. It was only retold again and again.

Weighing the Pilots’ Evidence

However much we are comfortable with entrusting our lives to airline pilots, a blind trust in their abilities as trained observers of aerial phenomena is sometimes a stretch. For a number of excellent and honorable reasons, pilots have often been known to overinterpret unusual visual phenomena, often underestimating their distance from what appear to be other aircraft.

Think of it this way: you want the person at the front of the plane to have hair-trigger alertness for visual cues to potential collisions so that avoidance maneuvers can be performed in time. A worst-case interpretation of perceptions is actually a plus.

So it’s no surprise that pilots have sent their planes into a dive to avoid a fireball meteor that was really fifty miles away or to dodge a flaming, falling satellite passing sixty miles overhead. Even celestial objects are misperceived by pilots more frequently than by any other category of witnesses, concluded UFO investigator J. Allen Hynek over thirty years ago. Since the outcome of a false-negative assessment (that is, being closer than assumed) could be death and the cost of a false positive (being much farther away) is mere embarrassment, the bias of these reactions makes perfect sense.

What Could Have Caused It?

Was there anything else in the sky that morning that the Soviet pilots might have seen? This isn’t an easy question, since the Moscow press reports neglected to give the exact date of the event, but I could figure it out by checking Aeroflot airline schedules.

It turned out that early risers in Sweden and Finland had also seen an astonishing apparition in the sky that morning. These are the report summaries Claus Svahn, an experienced researcher and writer for UFO-Sweden, published in his group’s magazine:

• Truck driver Jan Åke Jansson, heading ENE between Örebro and Arboga, observed a “very strong globe of light” just over treetops in the north, which vanished in twenty seconds.
• Policeman Mikael Smitt in Örebro received a radio call from a patrolman of a very strong light in the sky with “a skirt” under it, which slowly moved east. Smitt called Swedish Air Force in Uppsala and Arlanda airport; both sites confirmed observing the light in the ENE direction.
• Train engineer Ingvar Finér reported to UFO-Sweden that while driving a train south of Stockholm he observed a very bright light moving in the NNE “at a very high altitude.” He wrote that the light hit the ground in front of him, making it possible to see features he had not seen before.
• Olof Baard was driving a newspaper van near Sävsjö when he saw a strong light in the north. He stopped his van and got out for a better look. The object was soundless and looked “like a diamond in fog.”
• “UFO Research of Finland,” Annual Report 1984, stated: “Fifteen different locations all over Finland—phenomenon started as a bright rising object. Later there was a flash of light which created red, green, yellow and purple colors around the object. The skies were clear and therefore the phenomenon could be seen all over the country.”

The immediate disconnect that I found was that the Scandinavian witnesses were not looking southeast toward Minsk (where the airliner was flying with its terrified crew). Nor were they looking eastward, toward the top-secret Russian space base at Plesetsk, where launchings sparked UFO reports starting in the mid-1960s. They were looking to the northeast, across Karelia and perhaps farther.

The direction of the apparition being seen simultaneously near Minsk provided another “look angle.” If the vectors of the eyewitnesses are plotted on a map, they tend to converge over the Barents Sea, far from land. This made the triggering mechanism for the sightings—if they were all of the same phenomenon—even more extraordinary.

Still, some implications were attractive. If the two groups of witnesses were observing the same apparition (as subsequent evidence will support), then all interpretations of the UFO’s close proximity to the Minsk witnesses can be dismissed as misinterpretations, and all interpretations that the UFO was local to witnesses there and responding specifically to them can be dismissed as baseless.

Preludes and Precedents

Whatever the stimulus behind the 1984 Minsk airliner story turned out to be, I already knew that many famous Soviet UFO reports were connected with secret military aerospace activities that were misperceived by ordinary citizens. I’ve posted several decades of such research results on my Web site.

In 1967, waves of UFO reports from southern Russia and a temporary period of official permission for public discussion created a “perfect storm” of Soviet UFO enthusiasm. But it was short-lived—the topic was soon forbidden again, possibly because the government realized that what was being seen and publicized was actually a series of top-secret, space-to-ground nuclear warhead tests, a weapon Moscow had just signed an international space treaty to outlaw.

Once the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (south of Arkhangelsk) began launching satellites in 1966, skywatchers throughout the northwestern Soviet Union began seeing vast glowing clouds and lights moving through the skies. These were officially nonexistent rocket launchings. “Not ours!” the officials seemed to be saying. “Must be Martians.”

Other space events that sparked UFO reports included orbital rocket firings timed to occur while in direct radio contact with the main Soviet tracking site in the Crimea. Such firings and the subsequent expanding clouds of jettisoned surplus fuel weren’t confined to Soviet airspace. One particular category of Soviet communications satellites performed the maneuver over the Andes Mountains, subjecting the southern tip of South America to UFO panics every year or two for decades.

As the Soviet Union lurched toward collapse in the 1980s, its rigid control over the press decayed. This allowed local newspapers, especially in the area of the Plesetsk space base, to begin publishing eyewitness accounts of correctly identified rocket launchings. The newspapers sometimes printed detailed drawings of the shifting shapes in the light show caused by the sequence of rocket stage firings and equipment ejections.

The Evidence Comes Together

Still, I wasn’t willing to wave off the elaborate extra dimensions of the Minsk UFO case as mere misperception and exaggerated coincidences. Even though none of the most exciting stories, such as one pilot’s death half a year later from cancer, could ever be traced to any original firsthand sources, they made for a compelling narrative.

Fortunately, the Soviet Union’s collapse provided the opening for the collapse of the UFO story. The May/June 1991 issue of the magazine Science in the USSR contained an article that reprised the story with one stunning addendum from the co-pilot’s [Gennadiy Lazurin] flight log. As it was happening, he sketched the apparition, minute by minute, as it changed shape outside his cockpit window. Now, fourteen of the drawings have been published for the first (and as far as I can tell, only) time.

Nyonoska missile test site observed by U.S. Corona spy satellite, 1971.

The graphic sequence of bright light, rays, expanding halos, misty cloudiness, tadpole tail, and sudden linear streamers may have looked bizarre to the magazine’s readers, but they looked very familiar to me.

I dug out the clippings from Arkhangelsk newspapers mailed to me by an associate there. I looked up the other articles from recent Moscow science magazines that showed how beautiful these rocket launches looked. I also found the set of sketches made by a witness in Sweden of what was immediately recognized as a rocket launch. I laid the separate sketches out on a table.

They all clearly showed the same sequence of shape-shifting visions, as viewed from different angles to the rear and off to the side of the object’s flight. The more recent accounts were of nighttime missile launches—and the impression was overwhelming that the Minsk UFO, as drawn in real time by one of the primary witnesses, looked and visually evolved just like the Swedish sketches.

So what happened? Here is a prosaic hypothesis:

• The flight crew was unexpectedly treated to a spectacular naval missile test launch from the Murmansk area
• Interpreting the apparition as a structured craft that was a threat to their own aircraft (the proper instinct), they grossly misperceived its range and imagined its “intentions”
• Alerted by radio, other people in the area looked for weird apparitions in the sky or on radar—and a few found them
• Unusual in such cases, one witness took the opportunity to make real-time sketches of the developing phenomenon, and the record became public
• Amazed by the unprecedented experience, primary witnesses and their interviewees wove every coincidental occurrence into a single coherent narrative
• Media coverage was filtered to remove specific identifying details (e.g., exact date and possible simultaneous sightings in northern Russia) that could connect the UFO to a real event

1. Witnesses did NOT report UFO in direction of witnesses on airliners near Minsk (Southeast)
2. Narrative features (bright light cloud, timing and motion, even ground illumination) establish same identity of stimulus.
3. All interpretations of UFO close proximity to minsk witnesses can be shown as misinterpretations.
4. All interpretations that the UFO was local to witnesses and responding specifically to them can be shown as baseless
5. Plesetsj cosmodrome NOT likely as stimulus point of origin.

Case Closed—Or Minds Closed?

Without Lazurin’s detailed, minute-by-minute drawings, any claim for solving the case would have been tentative and circumstantial at best. Even now, the case isn’t quite closed. Until the Russians release the records for the test launch of a submarine-based missile—as we now know often happened from that region of the ocean without official acknowledgement—the answer to the mystery will remain technically unproven.

But the answer is compelling enough to remind us of wider principles of investigating—and evaluating—similar stories from around the world: there are more potential prosaic stimuli out there than we usually expect. Precise times and locations and viewing directions are critical to an investigation. The temptation to fall into excitable overinterpretation is almost irresistible. Myriads of weird but meaningless coincidences can be combined to embellish a good story.

What have we learned from this experience? What do “pseudo-UFO reports” (such as this one) sparked by military space and missile events teach us about world UFOlogy?

• “Control experiments” (albeit unintentional ones) underscore how extraneous details and exaggerations intrude on and pollute raw perceptions
• Almost without exception, the more “research” done to currently accepted UFOlogical standards, the greater the introduction of obscuring and mis leading, garbled information
• The world’s “best UFO experts” usually failed to identify and learn from the prosaic stimuli behind most top “Russia UFO” stories and aren’t likely to do so
• It is fair to generalize that this failure is endemic to the attitudes and capabilities of UFOlogy and that “arguments from incompetence” (“We can’t explain it—hence it cannot have an explanation”) are unworthy of general belief
• Contemporary UFOlogy has gotten the legitimate notion of “government UFO secrets” completely backwards (governments sometimes opportunistically exploit the public’s misinterpretations of their secret aerial activities in order to camouflage the truth about such activities, and UFOlogists are the unwitting tools of this deception)
• Reports of this type are not evidence for “alien visitations”

The most important factors for cutting through the misperceptions are having the good fortune to come across enough original evidence and having enough time to make sense of that evidence. The degree to which pure luck is critical to arriving at a persuasive prosaic explanation is humbling. That’s one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the Minsk UFO case: as long as those factors are in short supply, it’s no mystery why there are so many amazing UFO stories—and so many enthusiasts willing to endorse them.

Resentment of American cultural and political dominance clearly fuels other “disbelievers,” including those political groups who had been hoping for a different outcome to the Space Race—for example, many Cuban schools, both in Cuba and where Cuban schoolteachers were loaned, such as Sandinista Nicaragua, taught their students that Apollo was a fraud.

Like a counter-culture heresy, the “moon hoax” theme had been lingering beyond the fringes of mainstream society for decades. A self-published pamphlet here, or a “B-grade” science fiction movie there, or a radio talk show guest over there—for many years it all looked like a shriveling leftover of the original human inability to accept the reality of revolutionary changes.

But in the last ten years, an entirely new wave of hoax theories have appeared—on cable TV, on the Internet, via self-publishing, and through other “alternative” publication methods. These methods are the result of technological progress that Apollo symbolized, now ironically fueling the arguments against one of the greatest technological achievements in human history.

NASA’s official reaction to these and other questions was both clumsy and often counter-productive. On the infamous Fox Television moon hoax program, which was broadcast several times in the first half of 2001, a NASA spokesman named Brian Welch appeared several times to counter the hoaxist arguments (Welch was a top-level official at the Public Affairs Office at NASA Headquarters, who died a few months later). The poor TV impression he gave (a know-it-all “rocket scientist” denouncing each argument as false but usually without providing supporting evidence) may have been due to deliberate editing by the producers to make the “NASA guy” look arrogant and contemptuous. But to a large degree it accurately reflected NASA’s institutional attitude to the entire controversy. The disappointing results of participating seemed to strengthen the view within NASA that the best response was no response—to avoid anything that might dignify the charges.

Roger Launius, then the chief of the history office at headquarters, was an exception to NASA’s overall unwillingness to engage the issue. As an amateur space historian and folklorist, I had been discussing with him for years the need for NASA to fulfill its educational outreach charter and to issue a series of modest monographs (a historian’s term for a single-theme pamphlet-length publication) on many different widespread cultural myths about space activities. These ranged from allegations of UFO sightings (and videotapings) by astronauts, to the discovery of alien artifacts on the Moon and Mars and elsewhere, to miraculous and paranormal folklore associated with space activities, to the hoax accusations. Launius, nearing retirement in early 2002, decided it was time for a detailed response to the Apollo hoax accusations, and offered me a sole-source contract to write a monograph that analyzed why such stories seemed so attractive to so many people. Launius departed NASA soon thereafter, leaving the project in the care of a junior historian, Stephen Garber.

My requests for inputs from various NASA offices and public educational organizations soon reached the ears of news reporters, and some print stories appeared in late October. Although NASA officials were somewhat taken aback by the publicity, they were at first inclined to defend the project on educational grounds.

Then, on Monday, November 4, 2002, the eve of the national elections, ABC’s World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings chose the subject for his closing story: “Finally this evening, we're not quite sure what we think about this,” he intoned. “But the space agency is going to spend a few thousand dollars trying to prove to some people that the United States did indeed land men on the moon.”

Jennings described how “NASA had been so rattled” it “hired” somebody “to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists.” He closed with a misquotation: “A professor of astronomy in California said he thought it was beneath NASA’s dignity to give these Twinkies the time of day. Now, that was his phrase, by the way. We simply wonder about NASA.”

Jennings was referring to Philip Plait, an educator (not a professor) in California who runs the Bad Astronomy Web site that discusses many mythical aspects of outer space. What Plait actually had said was that he felt it was proper for NASA to respond, but that it did seem “beneath their dignity” to be forced to do it. Contrary to Jennings’s account, Plait fully supported the monograph contract.

But that TV insult did it as far as NASA management was concerned. Their dignity called into question, and fearing angry telephone calls from congressmen returning to Washington after the election, they decided to revoke the contract. They paid for work done to date and washed their hands of the project.

Many educators contacted me in dismay. Like them, and unlike the NASA spokesmen, I had always felt that “there is no such thing as a stupid question.” And to me the moon hoax controversy was not a bothersome distraction, but a unique opportunity.

This is the way I see it: If many people who are exposed to the hoaxist arguments find them credible, it is neither the fault of the hoaxists or of their believers—it’s the fault of the educators and explainers (NASA among them) who were responsible for providing adequate knowledge and workable reasoning skills. And the localized success of the hoaxist arguments thus provides us with a detection system to identify just where these resources are inadequate.

I intend to complete the project, depending on successfully arranging new funding sources. The popularity of this particular myth is a heaven-sent (or actually, an “outer-space-sent”) opportunity to address fundamental issues of public understanding of technological controversies.

At about 10 P.M., EST, on Tuesday, August 12, 1986 (0200 UT, August 13), nearly the entire eastern half of the United States was treated to a spectacular celestial apparition. Millions of people were outside looking for Perseid meteors, and many of them had their astronomical instruments and cameras at the ready. So when a bright cloudlike UFO (for it was a genuine unidentified flying object, at least for a day) appeared in the eastern sky, moving from right to left, it had probably the largest audience of any UFO ever witnessed in North America. Sightings occurred from Georgia (Florida was socked in with clouds) to Louisiana to Houston, Texas, to Tulsa and Oklahoma City, to Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Ontario and Quebec, and all points in between: South Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts — the whole eastern seaboard.

Descriptions of the object and its motion varied, but a general picture soon emerged. It was called, in turn, a pinpoint, a moving spiral, a glowing cloud, and a big ball of fire. In Houston, Don Stockbauer described an orangish nebulosity surrounded by an irregularly shaped white cloud elongated vertically, with a dim starlike nucleus. Brenda Newton of Rochester, New York, recalled: “It started to get bigger and it had a tail. By the time we got out of the truck, it had begun to spiral. It lasted for a few minutes, then became like a dim star and floated toward the west.” The vice president of the Syracusan Astronomical Society (New York) said it resembled a “reflection of the moon off a cloud, but it was very iridescent, very vivid.” Wayne Madea, an amateur astronomer in northern Maine, saw a bright starlike object emit a luminous, rapidly expanding donut-shaped cloud; through a telescope Madea saw “a pinpoint of light, like a satellite, traveling with the cloud.”

As it turned out, amateur radio listeners — “hams” — were also receiving radio signals from space at that very moment. And that was the key that led many independent observers to solve the apparition quickly and accurately. Others did it the hard way, as I did, with the application of basic principles of spaceflight and orbital motion.

My involvement began at noon, August 13, when, at a “brown bag” luncheon meeting of astronomy enthusiasts, a report of a bright light in the eastern sky, seen from Houston, was discussed. Returning from lunch, I received a phone call from David L. Chandler, a writer for the Boston Globe with whom I had discussed other spaceflight stories months before. He filled me in on the sightings, and I suggested he check about space launchings, particularly the Japanese launch (which I had also learned of that morning). At first there was difficulty in ascertaining the exact launch time (International Date Line, and confusion at the Japanese representative’s office over EST vs. EDT), but an hour later, armed with a good liftoff time and with known orbital inclination and period, I was able to produce a hand-calculated map that showed the object heading up the East Coast at about 10 P.M. EST. Its altitude was about 1,500 km (almost a thousand miles), quite high enough for it still to have been sunlit even though the ground below had been dark for more than an hour.

Part of my advantage was a long familiarity with similar apparitions caused by space launches elsewhere in the world, most notably over South America (Soviet launchings from Plesetsk) and Australia (American launchings from Cape Canaveral). So my initial hypothesis about a propellant venting sprang quickly to mind. Such a phenomenon was unheard of over North America, but the new Japanese rocket test was also the first of its kind.

The names of the vehicles involved were a little confusing. The booster was called the “H-1,” and it was the first launch. Its second stage was powered by the new “LE5” engine, using super-cold liquid hydrogen as fuel. Two payloads were deployed: an amateur radio satellite variously called JAS-1 (Japanese Amateur Satellite #1), JO-12 (Japan OSCAR 12), or “Fuji” (by the builders); the geodetic mirror satellite, EGP (“Experimental Geodetic Payload”), or “Ajisai” (“Hydrangea Flower”). The booster was launched from Tanegashima Island off Kyushu at 5.45 A.M., JST, August 13 (2045 UT, August 12), after a 14-minute hold. Precise tracking data from NORAD allowed a perfect match of sightings to space vehicle.

I then reported my results to the Smithsonian Scientific Event Network in Washington, D.C.; to NORAD Public Affairs in Colorado Springs; to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (which got me on a Buffalo, New York, radio show that had aired live accounts of the UFO on Tuesday evening); to NASA Public Information at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida; and to the MUFON research group in Texas. This in turn resulted in my receiving about 20 additional telephone calls from news media throughout the east.

Chandler’s story appeared in the Boston Globe (p. 6) on Thursday, August 14. It moved over some national news wire, too, since it also appeared in the same day’s Houston Chronicle and elsewhere. On Friday, I did an interview with an Associated Press reporter from Louisville, Kentucky, and that story moved nationally over the weekend.

Within a week, the “UFO” was stuffed, boxed, and buried. (It should also have been seen from Central America, the Caribbean, and the northern coast of South America — those reports may dribble in over the next few months.) But it was a marvelous experience for the witnesses and for the analysts, and several interesting points can be raised about “UFO reports” based on this fortuitous experiment.

Several interesting events involved coincidences. Caught up in the excitement, Time Jones, an air traffic controller in Syracuse, reported three different-colored lights randomly moving and hovering for 45 minutes (but it turned out he was watching B-52s land at nearby Rome AFB, several hours after the real UFO). His account was carried in the nationwide news media, but the solution rarely was. In Clark County, Kentucky, residents were panicked by an explosion while the light show was going on — but the sheriff later got an and anonymous phone call confessing to setting off illegal fireworks. Recalled County Deputy Larry Lawson: “the people said their homes shook and windows vibrated as if there had been an explosion or earthquake. They said the whole sky lit up. All these people weren’t imagining or seeing things. Some of them were very terrified over it right after it happened.” These illustrate the power of coincidence, in which two concurrent independent events can easily (and erroneously) be integrated into a single unsolvable mystery. Also, the emotions (such as fear) of witnesses are no measure of the authenticity of their original perception.

One other amusing aspect was the wide variety of half-baked explanations offered for the “UFO.” Some speculation associated it with the meteor shower, a barium cloud, or a satellite burnup, while other guesses associated it with an explosion of the Japanese satellite. Professor Richard Stoner of Bowling Green State University in Ohio was quoted as saying: “It is caused by little bits and pieces of dust from the comet. They’re very small, but if there were a larger piece, an icy piece of material, something about the size of a snowflake, it might well cause something like this. It would vaporize and leave a glowing cloud behind it.” Astronomy professor Martha Haynes of Cornell didn’t trust the observers: “When people who watch the stars once, maybe twice a year go out and look hard for a while, they’re bound to see things they think are strange. When you’re in that mind-set anything like the light of a plane on the horizon looks strange.” John Bosworth of NASA’s Goddard Space Center scored a near-miss when he attributed the reports to glints off the EGP satellite’s mirrors, reflecting moonlight: “I suspect that’s what they saw,” he told a reporter. The National Weather Service and the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting Center agreed “it was some sort of natural phenomenon.”

A number of people, however, got it right, and right from the start. Tom Bolton of the David Dunlap Observatory north of Toronto told newsmen it was caused by release of something from a satellite: “The satellite was actually seen in the telescope here and we had a report from an amateur astronomer (who) saw it and saw the release of the material from it — but we’re not sure which satellite it was and we’re not sure what the material was that was released.” A number of amateur radio people also told their local papers exactly the true story: For example, Richard C. Eaton of Fayetteville, N.Y., a retired G.E. engineer, was quoted in the Syracuse Herald Journal as suspecting the cloud was part of the Japanese launch.

The spiral form also was intriguing. In Syracuse, amateur astronomer Denis Sabatini reported: “It started out as a pinpoint of light. It was as if it were releasing some type of reflective gas into the air, and as the gas was released into air, it was as if it was spiraling around the pinpoint of light.” The spiral was “like pouring milk into coffee.” Astronomer Karl Kamper at the David Dunlap Observatory described the object as starlike surrounded by a small spiral cloud. (He told newsmen the spiral could have been fuel spilling from a damaged satellite and said it must have been extremely high in the sky.) Chuck Barnes, head naturalist at the Troy Farm and Nature Center near Detroit, had been giving an outdoor lecture on meteors when the UFO appeared: “It was glowing like a spiral pinwheel standing on end and moving on a line from southeast to northwest,” he told newsmen (the motion was actually from southeast to northeast); “It appeared to be five or six times larger than a full moon.” In Massachusetts, an amateur astronomer watched the plume from the rocket perform two full turns in four minutes, painting the spinning wheel as he watched.

The relevance of these perceptions to other UFO reports is connected with a series of night-time sky spirals seen over China in the late 1970s. While UFO enthusiasts have accepted them uncritically, experienced analysts have voiced the suspicion that they actually involved space launchings (much like the H-1 over America on August 12). These intuitive suspicions were encouraged by a recent official Chinese disclosure of the cancellation of the “Windstorm” space booster, which through the 1970s was being developed in competition with the “Long March 3” booster; there were several flight tests, including one unsuccessful satellite launching, although precise dates were not provided. Further disclosures may allow a precise connection between “Windstorm” space shots and the “spiral UFOs” over China.

Another interesting phenomenon was the way in which UFO groups seemed to get a type of description different from those reported to the national news media. Robert Gribble of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle got more than a hundred telephone calls, consistently describing an object shooting straight up into the sky until it mushroomed at a certain altitude. (“It seemed to hold in a certain airspace,” he recalled, adding “I got no reports of it moving across the sky.”) Sherman Larson, with the Center for UFO studies in Illinois, said his group received numerous calls: “In each case, witnesses said an object appeared to have exploded in the sky and then moved into a cloud.” In these accounts, subconscious interpretations by the collectors had evidently colored the straightforward, pure perceptions, and without other accounts the stories collected by the UFO groups could well have coagulated into a “true UFO” if the solution had not been published so quickly. This is a long-recognized (but evidently still serious) problem with anecdotal data collection.

All in all, the great cloud UFO of August 12, 1986, was an exciting, illuminating experience, in more ways than one.