Ongoing phenomenonVoronezh Landing (27 September 1989)

On 27 September 1989 the Soviet news agency TASS distributed a wire dispatch reporting that on 27 September 1989 in a public park in Voronezh, a city of ~900,000 population some 500 km south of Moscow, a group of schoolchildren and several adult witnesses had observed the landing of a flattened-sphere craft and the emergence of three large humanoid figures (“two tall figures and a smaller robot-like figure”) wearing silver-toned coveralls. The TASS dispatch named witnesses Genrikh Silanov of the Geophysical Laboratory at Voronezh University as a confirming investigator. Western news services — UPI, AP, Reuters, BBC, and the New York Times — picked up the TASS dispatch and ran their own coverage on 9–11 October 1989. The full first-person reports were collected from approximately a dozen children aged 9–14 over the subsequent weeks. Investigators measured what they described as physical traces in the park — indentations in the soil, locally elevated background radiation readings — and Silanov’s lab published a brief report in 1990. The skeptical reading: Soviet authorities through 1989 had institutional reasons (under glasnost, an opening of expression) for permitting publication of such accounts, and the children’s accounts contain mutually inconsistent details. The TASS dispatch itself, however, is the unique data point. TASS was not in the business of publishing fictional UFO landings under its own masthead. The dispatch is preserved in the news-agency archives and in U.S. embassy cables FOIA-released in stages from the 1990s onward.