Sterlitamak Crash Site, Bashkortostan
53°37′N, 55°57′E — Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia — region southwest of Sterlitamak in the Southern Urals foothills
What's documented
The Sterlitamak region of Bashkortostan (then the Bashkir ASSR) was the location of an alleged Soviet UFO crash retrieval in 1968, one of the case files reported within the so-called "KGB UFO Files" — a body of documents released by the KGB to journalist Pavel Stonov in 1991, in the immediate post-Soviet thaw. The crash files reportedly include a complete official Soviet Army report on the recovery of an object at the site.
Notable & intriguing
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In October 1991, the KGB released to TASS journalist Pavel Stonov a 124-page collection of UFO-related case files spanning 1953-1990. The files included the Sterlitamak/Bashkir 1968 case alleging Soviet Army recovery of crashed material. Portions of the dossier aired on TF1 (France) in 1998 in the documentary 'KGB UFO Files,' produced by Cosgrove-Meurer Productions.
TASS, October 1991; 'KGB UFO Files' (Cosgrove-Meurer Productions, 1998)
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The Russian Defense Ministry's response to multiple FOIA-equivalent requests under the 2009 Russian Federation freedom-of-information statute has been to neither confirm nor deny the existence of the Sterlitamak 1968 case file. Researchers (including Dr. Vladimir Azhazha and Anton Anfalov) have been unable to locate any matching incident in the open Soviet Army logistics record.
Azhazha case-survey database; Anfalov, 'The USSR UFO Files' (2019)
Public-record imagery
