Russia (USSR) · 28 July 1989

Military unit near the Kapustin Yar missile test range, 1989

Reported

The most-cited single document in Soviet UFO literature: a serving soldier's contemporaneous duty log describing a disc with a half-sphere on top moving in irregular sideways and vertical jumps, filed from a unit next to the USSR's principal missile test range.

Where
Military unit near the Kapustin Yar missile test range, Astrakhan Oblast
When
28 July 1989
Who reported it
Personnel of a Soviet military unit; the report was filed by the man on duty in the communications centre
Entities described
None reported
Handled as
INSUFFICIENT SOURCE PROVENANCE
Evidence class
GOV-3 (GOV-1 only if the Blue Folder provenance holds)

The record

An official file preserves that a report was made and examined. It does not, by itself, establish what was seen.

UNKNOWN

No document is attached yet. The retrieval is open work.

What is not settled

Beyond the Blue Folder provenance problem the retellings are internally inconsistent - the reporting soldier is called a corporal in some accounts and a lieutenant in others, and no two sources agree on the report's length or co-signers. Kapustin Yar was an active missile and air-defence test range, which supplies an obvious mundane candidate.

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