Incident · 7 September 1984 · Airspace about 120 km from Minsk, Byelorussian SSR
Aeroflot flight 8352 light near Minsk (1984)
Also known as Minsk UFO 1984, Aeroflot 8352, Tu-134 Tbilisi–Tallinn 1984, Cherkashin crew, At 4:10 Precisely
Partly explained. Former NASA mission controller James Oberg matched the co-pilot's real-time drawings to nighttime missile launches seen from afar and proposed a submarine-launched missile test, but he called the answer technically unproven until Russian records are released. (source)
In the early hours of 7 September 1984, by James Oberg's dating, the crew of Aeroflot flight 8352 saw a light about 120 km from Minsk. The Tu-134 was flying from Tbilisi via Rostov to Tallinn with an Estonian crew under Igor Cherkashin. The newspaper Trud published their account in January 1985: a bright, steady "star" that sent a beam to the ground, opened into cones of light, turned into a green cloud and seemed to escort the airliner as a glowing "cloud airplane" all the way to Tallinn. In the account, the Minsk controller first saw nothing, then reported the "northern lights" in the same direction, a second airliner described the cloud as it came closer, and the Tallinn controller spoke of two extra radar blips. N. A. Zheltukhin of a Soviet scientific commission concluded that the crew had seen a UFO.
The only primary record we hold is the newspaper article, in the English translation the CIA later released. It is a journalist's retelling of the crew's story: there is no flight report, radar record or official finding. The Soviet state programme's history (Platov & Sokolov, 2000) does not mention the case.
The leading explanation is a missile launch. James Oberg, a former NASA mission controller, found that the co-pilot's drawings matched those of night-time launches. He traced sightings made the same morning in Sweden and Finland to a source over the Barents Sea, and proposed a submarine-launched missile test. He also said the case cannot be closed until Russian records of that launch are released.
Sources: Trud, 30 January 1985 (CIA Reading Room 0005516658, English translation); James Oberg, NBC News, 15 May 2008
Facts and claims
- claimed Counter-evidence: James Oberg, who spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and orbital designer, compared the co-pilot's drawings, published in Science in the USSR in 1991, with drawings of nighttime missile launches and wrote that the Minsk object "looked and changed just like them". He placed the source over the Barents Sea, from sightings the same morning in Sweden and Finland, and proposed the test launch of a submarine-based missile, adding that until Russia releases the records "the answer to the mystery will remain technically unproven." Source: nbcnews.com (archived)
- claimed Trud reported that flight 8352, a Tu-134 from Tbilisi via Rostov to Tallinn, was flown by a crew of the Estonian Administration of Civil Aviation: commander Igor Cherkashin, co-pilot Gennadiy Lazurin, navigator Yegor Ognev and flight engineer Gennadiy Kozlov. At 4:10 am, 120 km from Minsk, the co-pilot saw on his upper right "a large star that was not flickering", from which a thin beam of light fell vertically to the ground, then opened into luminous cones. Source: doc-cia-trud-1985-01-30-aeroflot-8352.pdf
- claimed According to the crew's account in Trud, the light turned to the aircraft, flashed, and became a green cloud that moved up and down and then kept station beside the airliner at 10,000 m and 800 km/h. It changed shape into a "cloud airplane" and stayed with them past Riga and Vilnius to Tallinn; the crew estimated it as long as Lake Pskov. Source: doc-cia-trud-1985-01-30-aeroflot-8352.pdf
- claimed The Minsk controller at first saw nothing on radar or in the sky, then reported: "I am observing the northern lights on the horizon. Where do you see your cloud?" On hearing the crew's bearing he said: "It coincides". A Tu-134 from Leningrad, about 100 km away, saw nothing at first but described the cloud once about 15 km from the encounter. Source: doc-cia-trud-1985-01-30-aeroflot-8352.pdf
- claimed After landing, the Tallinn controller is reported to have told the crew that on the airport's surveillance radar "Two more blips followed its radar return on the screen, although there was not one more aircraft in the air." Source: doc-cia-trud-1985-01-30-aeroflot-8352.pdf
- claimed N. A. Zheltukhin, deputy chairman of the Commission on Aerodynamic Phenomena of the All-Union Council of Scientific and Technical Societies, said the commission's Estonian section had investigated the sighting. He rejected a distant geophysical process seen as an optical illusion because the aviators had determined the distance, and concluded that "the Tallin crew dealt with what we call a UFO." Source: doc-cia-trud-1985-01-30-aeroflot-8352.pdf
- claimed Oberg dates the flight to 7 September 1984; the Trud article gives the time (4:10 am) but not the date. He wrote that the most dramatic later additions, such as a pilot's death from cancer half a year later, could never be traced to any original first-hand source. Source: nbcnews.com (archived)
Connected files
Documents
- Trud, 30 January 1985: "At 4:10 Precisely" (Aeroflot flight 8352), English translation released by the CIA (documented in)
Incidents
- Petrozavodsk jellyfish light (Soviet Karelia, 1977) (similar to) — Another light display over the north-western USSR that was later put down to a rocket launch
Mentioned in this file
- Central Intelligence Agency (Organization)
- NASA (Organization)