Arizona Republic, Phoenix, AZ-July 15, 1990 

CR: D. Kettles

SOVIET DEFENSE UNIT SCRAMBLES TO CHECK SIGHTINGS OF UFOS
Pilots, radar spot 'flying saucers'
By David Wood    
Newhouse News Service

     WASHINGTON-The Cold War may be over, but the Soviet Union's
military air defenses are struggling with a new threat:  an
apparent invasion by flying saucers.
     Dozens of sightings of unidentified flying
objects-disk-shaped spacecraft with blinking lights and
performing impossibly high-speed maneuvers-have been recounted in
the past few months, including eyewitness reports from Soviet
interceptor pilots that reportedly have been corroborated by
surveillance radar.
     "I am not a specialist on UFOs, and, therefore, I can only
correlate the data and express my own supposition," said Gen.
Igor Maltsev, chief of the main staff of the Air Defense Forces.
     And what is Maltsev's supposition?  That UFOs exist and are
piloted by extraterrestrials, he indicated in an interview with a
Moscow Communist Party newspaper, Rabochaya Tribuna.  
     And they may not be friendly.  Vladimir Akhaltsev was
driving his milk tanker truck one night in May when he noticed a
shining ball following him.  He tried to outrun it, gunning his
rig to 60 mph on the twisting road several hundred miles south of
Moscow before the UFO gave up the chase.
     Farmers who also saw the shining ball were said by the local
newspaper to have demanded, "If thirsty humaniods steal our
driver, who is going to deliver the milk?"
     Other Soviet reports, monitored and distributed without
comment by the U.S. Air Force's Technical Information Division
and by the State Department, have UFOs sniffing around
politically restive Estonia, probing with mysterious light rays a
buried gas pipeline in Siberia, and hovering over the village of
Delnegorsk in the eastern Soviet Union.
     The Soviets, a deeply superstitious people with a historic
mistrust of foreigners, have a ready explanation:  Space aliens,
perhaps running out of supplies at home, are after their natural
resources.
     Whatever their purpose, reports of alien visits are
exhaustively checked by the Soviets' elite Air Defense Forces,
which operates the military's most sophisticated aircraft and the
most powerful system of ground-based surveillance radar networks
in the world.
     The Soviet air-defense unit has had a bad case of the
jitters since 1987, when a 19-year-old West German on a lark flew
a single-engine Cessna unmolested through 400 miles of Soviet
airspace before buzzing President Gorbachev's Kremlin office and
touching down in Red Square.
     Today, with those unpredictable Americans flying around in
"Stealth" aircraft, no general or lowly radarman is going to
overlook an unexplained radar blip or ignore a hysterical phone
call.
     An example is the call from several Soviet policemen who
breathlessly reported last spring that they had been shadowed by
"two disk-shaped UFOs" near Krasnoyarsk.
     Or, the ominous report from Maj. V. Stroynetskiy, who along
with "several hundred other witnesses" claimed to have seen
numerous blinking, iridescent UFOs cavorting over a highway
outside Moscow.
     Soviet Lt. Col. A. A. Semenchenko was properly cautious when
he and other pilots recently were sent aloft to check out a UFO
at 6,000 feet over Pereslavl-Zalesskiy, a city northeast of
Moscow, according to after-action reports released by Maltsev and
published by Rabochaya Tribuna.
     "I visually detected the target, designated by two flashing
white lights, at 2205 hours," Semenchenko reported.
     Capt. V. Birin said the object "looked like a flying saucer
with two very bright lights along the edges."
     In confirmation, ground-control radar said, "At 2203 hours,
a fighter aircraft appeared in the field of observation... While
the fighter was approaching the object, the latter disappeared."
     Capt. V. Ivchenko and others pilots said the UFO's lights
flashed more quickly as the spacecraft accelerated.
   



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