Person
Igor Maltsev
Also known as Igor Maltsev, Col. Gen. Maltsev
- Colonel General of Aviation; chief of the Main Staff of the Soviet Air Defence Forces (1990)
Igor Maltsev was a colonel general of aviation and, in 1990, chief of the Main Staff of the Soviet Air Defence Forces. After air-defence radars and an interceptor were alerted to lights near Pereslavl-Zalessky on 21 March 1990, he gave the unit reports to the newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna. This was an unusually senior public acknowledgment of a UFO alert by the Soviet military.
His published assessment described a large, silent, highly manoeuvrable disc, but he presented it as his own reading of the eyewitness data rather than a conclusion.
Sources: CIA/FBIS Foreign Press Note FB PN 90-123
Facts and claims
- documented In April 1990 he released air-defence reports on the 21 March sightings to Rabochaya Tribuna and described the object, from the eyewitness evidence, as a 100–200 m disc that moved silently at up to 2–3 times jet-fighter speed and "It seemed that the UFO was completely devoid of inertia", while stressing he was not a UFO specialist. Source: CIA/FBIS Foreign Press Note FB PN 90-123: "USSR: UFO sightings no. 2 — General Maltsev comments" (1990)