A declassified CIA report about an alleged UFO attack on Soviet soldiers in the dying days of the USSR has gone viral after being posted to the agency’s website.
The document is a single-page summary of newspaper articles from Canadian Weekly World News and the Ukrainian paper Holos Ukrayiny dating back to March 1993, which describe a hostile encounter between the Russian Army and a flying saucer that is said to have taken place in 1989 or 1990.
The story – headlined “Cosmic Revenge” in the Ukrainian source and said to derive from an extensive 250-page KGB file, complete with witness testimony and documentary photographs – recounts how 25 Soviet troops were participating in training drills when a “low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer” passed over their base in Siberia.
The sighting prompted the men to react “for unknown reasons” by launching a surface-to-air missile at the craft, which they successfully brought down.
“Five short humanoids with ‘large heads and large black eyes’” emerged from the wreckage, the file reports, before fusing together into a “single object”: a spherical shape that emitted a sinister buzzing sound.
The sphere then burst in an explosion of brilliant white light, leaving 23 of the men “turned into stone poles” while the remaining two, shielded from the blast by virtue of being stood in the shade, escaped unharmed.
The bodies of the victims were reportedly recovered by the Red Army and taken to a secret research laboratory outside Moscow, where it was discovered their molecular structure was now identical to that of limestone, with the light that petrified them attributed to a “source of energy” not currently known to humanity.
“If the KGB file corresponds to reality, this is an extremely menacing case,” an unnamed CIA analyst is quoted as saying in response to the tale.
”The aliens possess such weapons and technology that go beyond all our assumptions. They can stand up for themselves if attacked.”
Ex-CIA agent Mike Baker, for one, has expressed skepticism about the encounter, which reads like a scene from a pulp science fiction novel or 1950s B-movie.
“If there was an incident, regardless of the nature of the incident, I suspect that the actual report doesn’t look much like what has now come out from five or six or seven iterations of what originally was [written],” he told Fox News Digital.
“I’m sure there’s something out there. I just don’t think that they landed decades ago, turned Soviet soldiers into limestone, and we’re just now hearing about it. I don’t think that’s the case.”
UFOs nevertheless continue to be a subject of huge fascination in the United States and around the world.
President Donald Trump said he did not believe in extraterrestrials when he appeared on Logan Paul’s podcast during last year’s presidential campaign. However, in the first few months of his presidency, he signed an executive order demanding that all federal documents pertaining to them be declassified to expose or dispel rumors of any “cover-up” that may or may not have taken place.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, issued a report last year detailing the 757 tip-offs it had received from members of the public between May 2023 and June 2024 regarding unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena, ultimately conceding that none had delivered proof of life beyond the stars.
That said, among the hundreds of misidentified balloons, birds, and satellites it received, there were also a number of episodes that defied easy explanation, including a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York.
