Byelokorovichi 1982: George Knapp's 1994 field report with Lt. Col. Vladimir Platunov

0:00 October 4th, 1982, Byelokorovitcha, Ukraine. Near a sleepy farming village, our search brought us to perhaps the most frightening case of all, an incident that could have started an accidental nuclear war. I was riding a motorcycle not far from here. I saw a large object in the air. It had a perfect geometric shape. Every person we spoke to in Byelokorovitcha said they saw a flying saucer on that day. They told us it was huge, about 900 feet in diameter. For hours, it hovered over the nearby ballistic missile base, where Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Platunov worked as a missile engineer. It looked just like a flying saucer, the way they show them in the movies. No portholes, nothing. The surface was absolutely even. The disk made a beautiful turn like this on the edge, just like a plane. There was no sound. I had never seen anything like that before.

1:01 Lieutenant Colonel Platunov took me to the ruins of what was then a missile silo, with a nuclear warhead pointed at the United States. It was dismantled three years ago under an arms reduction treaty. Platunov was in the bunker on that day, 12 years ago. In this room were dual control panels for the missile, each hooked up to Moscow. What happened next so alarmed the Soviet military leadership that a four-man commission was sent the next day to investigate, including Colonel Boris Sokolov. During this period, for a short time, signal lights on both the control panels suddenly turned on, the lights showing that missiles were preparing for launching, as could normally only happen if an order was transmitted from Moscow. No one had touched any buttons. No one had entered any codes. And yet, as the UFO hovered over the base, the control panel showed the missiles were preparing to launch. For 15 agonizing seconds, the base lost control of its nuclear weapons.