TZUTC: -0400   
   MSGID: 279.fidonet_ufo@1:3634/60 2d40f072   
   PID: Synchronet 3.19b-Win32 master/a2a9dc027 Jan  2 2022 MSC 1928   
   TID: SBBSecho 3.14-Win32 master/a2a9dc027 Jan  2 2022 MSC 1928   
   BBSID: RICKSBBS   
   CHRS: UTF-8 4   
   SUBJECT: SOVIET DEFENSE UNIT SCRAMBLES AFTER UFOS            FILE: UFO1147   
      
      
   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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