NARRATOR: Over the past
century, innumerable secrets have lurked deep behind
the Iron Curtain. Case in point, a 50 year
string of mysterious incidents that many say include
UFO crashes, dogfights, and underground
reverse engineering at the most top secret of all
former Soviet military bases, Kapustin Yar. Some even say that
this base was the site of a mysterious
incident that took place in 1948, a spectacular
UFO crash landing. It's 1948, suddenly a cylinder
appears over Russia's most sensitive air base. There's no question that
Joe Stalin was interested in crashed saucers, was
interested in alien technology. There's nothing in
which I just believe. In this case, I know that
UFO has visited Kapustin Yar. Kapustin Yar was at the top
of the list of facilities the US was monitoring in Russia. NARRATOR: Go behind the barbed
wire at Kapustin Yar, as we reveal for the first time the
detailed classified accounts of this reported UFO crash. Did the research
following this incident help the Soviets
win the space race? I'm sure the Russians have
done their darndest to reverse engineer anything that
can get their hands on, whether it's American
or German or alien. NARRATOR: From never before
seen reconnaissance footage of this secretive base-- This [inaudible] imagery of
Kapustin Yar is the first time anyone outside the CIA or the
intelligence community has looked at it. NARRATOR: Do an exclusive look
deep underground into Kapustin Yar's UFO research center. They buried the most secret
facilities within the base that was secret within the base. NARRATOR: The incident that took
place at Kapustin Yar in 1948 remains a Soviet era enigma,
a seminal event that UFO researchers still
call Russia's Roswell. This is Kapustin Yar, a top
secret military facility located 60 miles southeast
of the former Stalingrad and 500 miles south of Moscow. Built under the personal
direction of Joseph Stalin, it is Russia's oldest and
largest military facility. Its activities over
the past 60 years have fueled controversy
over what really goes on behind these walls. Kapustin Yar, or Vladimirovka,
as it initially was called. It was, and it still is,
is the first Russian space [inaudible]. I am Vladimir [inaudible] and
I was with KGB for 26 years. Kapustin Yar,
everything was top secret. There was nothing
there not secret. I am Sergei [inaudible]. I am former prime minister of
Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev. NARRATOR: Less than a year
after the Roswell crash made headlines around the world, many
believe that this Russian base may have experienced a landmark
UFO encounter and crash of its own. June 19, 1948, early evening. According to reports, Kapustin
Yar's air traffic controller sees a strange object
appear on his radar screen. At the exact same moment, a
MIG pilot about 10 kilometers downrange from the base sees a
large silver cigar shaped UFO directly in front of him. He radios back to the base
that he's being blinded by a bright light. A Russian pilot
encountered a UFO in 1948 and tried to attack it with
extremely unfortunate results for both. The pilot was blinded by rays
of light emanating from the UFO. NARRATOR: It is believed
that under direct orders from Soviet Air Force
commander in chief [inaudible],, the pilot engaged the UFO
for almost three minutes before launching a
missile that was finally able to bring the object down. But unlike Roswell, this
crash never made the papers. It's 1948, it's
a secret airbase, suddenly a cylinder appears
over Russia's most sensitive air base. They scramble the MIGs. It's a dogfight. Russian pilots are good, and
imagine this plane getting right on top of that craft. The MIGs fire their rockets
as the directed particle beam weapon explodes the MIG
and they both go down. NARRATOR: Reports suggest
that the blinded pilot in his final attempt to
regain control of his MIG was hit by the object's
weapons and perished along with his airplane. What did the aliens use? What were they firing? What they were probably using
was a particle beam weapon. We know what the MIG used. It was the things
that the Russians were using at the time. It was firing its guns. It was firing its rockets. It's firing some very
early version of a missile. Somehow, that MIG
was able to break up the anti-gravity envelope
that surrounded the craft. The cigar shaped object couldn't
stay aloft anymore and crashed. And the Russian retrieval
teams, overjoyed that they had their first spacecraft,
jump on this thing, and they take it
underground to [inaudible],, and the Russian secret
UFO program begins. I'm Bill Burns, publisher
of UFO Magazine. Let's face it, everybody wants
to get his hands on a flying saucer. It's a wonderful weapons
delivery and defense system. I'm Stanton Friedman. I'm a nuclear physicist,
lecturer, ufologist. NARRATOR: This 1948 crash is
one of many strange events that has turned Kapustin Yar
into an even more mystifying version of America's
Roswell and Area 51. The Soviets had to get
their hands on what we had. We had the Roswell crash. We really had a
storehouse of technology that we developed in the
early 1960s out of Roswell. The Russians didn't have that. Well, how do you
get that technology? It doesn't just
fall out of the sky. You go after it, and the
Russians went after it by embarking on
suicide missions. Anything they could do to get
their MIG pilots to shoot down an extraterrestrial
spacecraft was fair game. NARRATOR: From the time it was
constructed in the early 1940s, Kapustin Yar was
cloaked in secrecy. It is a place where it is
said the Soviet Union's top researchers, scientists,
and military specialists were sent to develop highly
classified Cold War technology and weaponry. I know everything because
I spent months and years in the Kapustin Yar working
there, testing our cruise missiles that we designed
for the Soviet submarine to sink American
aircraft carriers. Kapustin Yar was on a very
short list of facilities that US intelligence
wanted to get imagery of. They're basically three
things going on there. There is testing
surface to air missiles, they're test surface to
surface ballistic missiles, and they're also testing
air launch missiles, cruise missiles. All three are going
on at the same place, and so it's of high
interest to US intelligence. NARRATOR: In fact, the
building of the base was so secretive that when a
small town nearby was deemed by the Soviet military to
be too close for comfort, its residents were evacuated
and it was simply eliminated. The name of the town, Zhitkur. Zhitkur is a small
town just a few miles down range of the Kapustin Yar
test complex, and basically, probably what happened
was the Russians decided that due to people seeing
what was being tested, it would be better to
just close that town off. NARRATOR: Many researchers
believe the name Zhitkur was subsequently assigned
to the highly classified subterranean UFO research
center beneath Kapustin Yar. There is an idea that in
Zhitkur and Kapustin Yar there is a storage point
for crashed UFOs and corpses of the visitors and
members of the crew. Zhitkur is analogous to what
Area 51 is to Nellis Air Force base in Groom Lake in Nevada. Different countries
have various places where they take
their UFO technology, and what they do with it is
they try to break it down. They see what it is and how
can reverse engineer this. NARRATOR: But long
before the 1948 crash, the area around Kapustin Yar
and the skies over Russia have been home to many other
well-documented and eerie encounters with UFOs. Some date back to a time before
what we know as Russia even existed. Russia is a huge land. UFOs have been sighted over its
territories for, I would say, thousands of years. I am Paul Stonehill,
co-author of UFO USSR. One which is quite famous
was cited back about 950 AC by an international traveler
of the time, [inaudible].. He and his co-travelers were
able to see strange sightings in the sky that
scared them immensely. But the local people would
laugh at them and say, we see it quite often. Aerial battles, beings fighting
each other, strange aircraft, something that similar
to a Star Wars battles from a modern movie. Amazing stuff. NARRATOR: Legend has it that the
spectacular aerial battles that played out in the skies gave
the Arab warrior's strength and courage to defeat their
enemies during the next day's fight. In the 17th century,
Russia experienced a rash of UFO sightings. These objects were described
by many who witnessed them as comet shaped balls of fire. The most famous one would
be the Robozero incident when a very unusual
huge disk, fiery disk, arrived in the area of
a northern Russian lake. NARRATOR: One
eyewitness submitted the following account. On this, the
15th day of August in the year 1663, a great crash
sounded out from the heavens. Around the stroke of midday,
there descended upon Robozero a great ball of fire from
the clearest of skies. In front of the fire, there
were two fiery beams that went from south to the west. It was about 500 meters
away when it vanished. But once again it returned,
staying over Robozero for one hour and a half,
filling all those who saw it with a great dread. NARRATOR: This documented
account goes on to detail fishermen scalded
by the burning lake, along with glowing fish
that flung themselves onto the ground to escape
the looming fireball. INTERPRETER: Stories
like what they saw over Robozero were common in
pre-revolutionary Russia, and outside of Russia in Europe. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: When we speak
specifically of sightings on the territory of
the Soviet Union, percentages are very
high, more than 50%, that these UFO sightings
would be some sort of fiery, sphere-shaped UFO. NARRATOR: Another extraordinary
sighting took place over Moscow in 1892. An eyewitness report was later
published in the March 17 1892 edition of the Russian
newspaper, "Svet." MAN: The pillar of light
was pointed straight down to the earth, forming a
cone-shaped bundle of rays in the color of ordinary flames. The brightness was considerable,
and could sometimes be compared to the brightness
of an electrical street lamp. The point from which
the rays originated didn't move during
the whole time, and the rays were visible
for 20 to 25 minutes. NARRATOR: While enormous
fireballs have been sighted over Russia for centuries, there
have been none bigger or more devastating than the event that
leveled the Siberian forest of Tunguska in 1908. And of course, it was one
of the theories would have to be that it was not a
comet, it was not meteorite, that in reality, it
was a spacecraft. REPORTER: Hurtling
through the solar system, a speck of cosmic dust
strikes the Earth. Commonly, these
meteors are vaporized by friction in the atmosphere. This is part of a story of one
that wasn't, meteor that landed in 1908 in Siberia with the
destructive force of an atom bomb. NARRATOR: June 30, 1908,
approximately 7:00 AM. The tranquil forest
of Tunguska, Siberia was rocked by a deafening,
earth-shattering explosion. The explosion packed the power
of a 40 megaton hydrogen bomb. Large trees snapped
like tiny twigs as the explosion decimated
the dense forest. The effects of the blast were
felt as far away as Western Europe, and were
at first believed to have been caused by a giant
meteor smashing into Earth. My own personal conclusion
is that that was mother nature showing off, if you will, but
that there was no intelligence beside-- behind what happened there. It wasn't a rocket,
it wasn't a bomb sent to let us know that aliens
are watching you, Earthlings. REPORTER: --delivering a
catastrophe from outer space. NARRATOR: Yet UFO
researchers say if this devastating explosion
was the result of a meteor, why were there no craters
found in or around Tunguska? It is something
scientists to this day have had trouble explaining. This was-- let's
call it an explosion, although some people
call it an implosion. Whole kilometers of the
taiga forest were destroyed. The event itself caused
changes in the magnetic field of our planet. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: The academic
establishment is of the opinion that the Tunguska event
was simply a meteor, but there are many facts
that speaks to the idea that it was, on the contrary,
rational, guided flight. It made a turn, which is
something that a natural object or meteor could not have done. What was it that could have
done that level of devastation and not leave a crater? NARRATOR: Modern day
UFO researchers were not the first to suspect that
the Tunguska event was the work of something
other than a meteor. Reports suggest that Stalin
believed the Tunguska blast was the result of a UFO that
had launched some sort of experimental weapon. Stalin was interested in
the acquired information to determine whether UFOs
presented an immediate threat to the Soviet security. That's why he used some
of his top scientists to give him an assessment,
scientists like Korolev studied UFO materials. NARRATOR: Sergei Korolev,
one of the Soviet Union's most celebrated
scientists, would go on to become the father
of the Russian space program and the man
responsible for Sputnik. Along with Stalin, he was
determined to solve the mystery of Tunguska. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: These
observations prompted him to finance an
expedition to the place where the Tunguska
event happened. Sergei Korolev
used his own money to send an expedition to the
Tunguska area in helicopters. VLADIMIR SEMENOV: Korolev
never met with Stalin. There was some researchers
who was looking to prove that Korolev
really met with Stalin, but they didn't find any record. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: Stalin
presumed it really could have been a spaceship. He wanted to find the
fragments of that ship, put it back together,
and recreate the object for military purposes. NARRATOR: Initially,
Korolev found that many of the physical
scars left behind at Tunguska were still visible, but
the most shocking discovery came in the form of radioactive
metallic fragments found at the site, debris
uncharacteristic of any asteroid or meteor. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: If you go along
the flight path of the Tunguska object and continue
past the crash site, you reach an area that Russian
ufologists call The Devil's Graveyard. It's a 300 square meter area
where not a single plant grows and animals die. It also has a higher than
normal radioactivity level. This is a result of
what might possibly be a radioactive metallic
fragment from the crash. The radiation
levels were there. I mean, meteors don't come down
with that level of radiation. So one of the stories is it was
a mother ship that detonated. NARRATOR: It is believed that
Korolev privately told Stalin that the incident at Tunguska
had indeed been caused by a UFO, fragments of
which were still scattered around the area. However, in his top
secret official report, Korolev is said to have
told a much different story. The official party
line, Tunguska was the result of
a giant meteor. The whole point was,
if the information serves the bureaucracy, good. If it doesn't, it doesn't exist. NARRATOR: So where were
the radioactive fragments from Tunguska taken? Some believe the evidence was
transported to Kapustin Yar's underground base, Zhitkur. BILL BIRNES: Different countries
have various places where they take their UFO technology. Well, the Soviets basically
had one at Zhitkur, and it was where they
could try to figure out what the technology is
and how do we use it. And of course, the
security around those bases is essentially shoot
to kill security. NARRATOR: Was Stalin's
team of scientists inside the underground lab
of Zhitkur using UFO wreckage to advance their fledgling
missile defense and space programs? They had a couple
of people, men at the top of their program,
who really pushed the space program. I'm Fred Culick at Caltech. The head of the space
program had direct connection to Stalin, later, Khrushchev. NARRATOR: In their quest
to acquire UFO technology to beat the Americans
in the space race, it has been reported that
top Soviet military officials ordered MiG pilots to shoot down
UFOs as far back as World War II, a time just before the
Russian Roswell crash of 1948. So that gives you a
two-pronged concern about UFOs. One, you want the new technology
to top the other guy's flying technology, and two, we need to
be on the alert for new stuff from them. So either way, you want your
guys to shoot them down. NARRATOR: As the word spread
that UFO wreckage from Tunguska and the 1948 incident were
being studied at Zhitkur, Russia's Cold War enemies
were becoming more and more intrigued by what
might be going on above and below the top
secret military base. PAUL STONEHILL: The CIA had
agents in the Soviet Union back in 1950s who
had reported on UFOs. And the CIA was
very much interested in what was happening
in the Soviet Union. In the early stages
of the Cold War, a Soviet military test
site of Kapustin Yar became a hotbed of
secret activity, activity that involved advanced weapon,
missile, and rocket tests. So after World War II and the
development the atomic bomb, they were not able to
build small atomic weapons, so they had to build big
rockets to carry them. Unlike the US, we still
had fairly sizable rockets, but we could miniaturize
things to a certain extent much better than they could. So from the very beginning,
they envisioned large rockets, and that really gave them a
start on the space program as well. STANTON FRIEDMAN: The Russians
had one of the scariest pieces of paper. I've seen it in one of the
20 archives I've been to. Said that the Russians have made
more progress in the past 18 months in the development of
nuclear weapons and methods for delivering them than
had been anticipated for five years. That was in 1951. NARRATOR: By the early
1950s, rumors of UFO activity and experiments at
Kapustin Yar had, indeed, leaked beyond Soviet borders,
alarming news that some say may have prompted the
US to find out once and for all if the Soviets
had gotten their hands on UFO technology. BILL BIRNES: Kapustin
Yar and Zhitkur were at the top of our
military watch in the same way that Area 51 and Wright
Patterson Air Force base on Los Alamos were at the top
of their military watch. NARRATOR: Tim Brown is a senior
analyst at globalsecurity.org. His specialty, interpretation
of top secret satellite and spy imagery for both private
and governmental agencies. Kapustin Yar was in
the top 10% of facilities that the US intelligence
was monitoring in Russia, and that's evidenced by
just the sheer volume of declassified documents
that are available to show that there was a consistent,
ongoing interest in what was going on at that facility. NARRATOR: Not long after the
United States had developed its most sophisticated spying
machine to date, the U-2 spy plane, the first mission was
to, where else, Kapustin Yar. This is probably the first
time anyone outside of the CIA or the intelligence
community has looked at this, the U-2 imagery of Kapustin Yar. NARRATOR: These never before
seen U-2 reconnaissance photos provide a detailed look into
this covert military base. TIM BROWN: Looking
at all the imagery that we put together
for this project, one of the things you
notice is different activity at the different test
sites at different times. The Russians not only
tested missiles here, they also trained their
missile troops there. So there's missile drills,
and there's-- there's test preparations and test launches
going on at this facility all the time. NARRATOR: According to a
December 1, 1960 joint Army Navy and CIA intelligence
brief, Kapustin Yar is a 1,400 square mile
military test complex described as a place of intense interest
to the intelligence community. It contained, at the time, at
least four ballistic launch complexes, 14 launch pads,
a precision tracking radar facility, three
3,500 foot runways, and numerous strange
and unidentified areas. But what U-2 reconnaissance
couldn't reveal can now be seen for
the very first time in this exclusive underground
tour of what could be the nerve center of all Soviet
UFO activity, Zhitkur. Based on reports and drawings
from Russian UFO expert Anton Anfalov, seen in the
West for the first time, this rendering is what might
possibly be the first glimpse ever of this secret cryptic
facility a quarter mile below Kapustin Yar. Let's say that you get
a chance to go down there, to the most secret Russian UFO
laboratory, it's not glorious, high-tech, and brightly lit. It's dank, it's
dark, and it's dingy. It's Russian. It's extremely
compartmentalized. It's like an underground
shopping mall, except inside the mall are
all these rooms where there's exotic technology being taken
apart and put back together. In this hub, they're doing
autopsies on alien bodies. In that hub, they're
reconstructing an engine. Then you've got these fantastic
Rube Goldberg machines. What they are are machines
to test various components. And then finally, you come upon
these huge underground hangars, and what you're struck
by is that there are no airplanes in the hangars. There are these long,
cigar-shaped, cylinder-shaped craft in various
stages of disrepair because they've
crashed, and they're going to try and
reverse engineer these. That's what you'd
see at this base. NARRATOR: Is this
the secret location where the wreckage from the
1948 Russian Roswell crash was taken, along with fragments
from the Tunguska UFO? I cannot deny rumors of
the so-called captured UFOs. The Soviets tried to
recover lost fragments of their secret tests, and it
would be convenient to them to say, yes, UFOs is
something that we captured. A UFO is in our hands. But why would they keep the
secrecy on the subject of UFOs so tight? NARRATOR: And did this heavily
guarded experimental facility specialize in reverse
engineering designed to destroy the United States? If Kapustin Yar
is where you're doing your advanced development
work, rocketry, aircraft, weaponry, laser weapons,
all this kind of stuff, well, you need high
security, and a good setting for your scientists, and major
computer facilities, then you'd expect that that's where
they'd be doing their UFO-- advanced UFO research. Not UFOs 101. UFOs 404. It's just natural to do that. And of course, you'd
have underground bases. You'd have protection
against intruding aircraft. You'd be looking
out for the U-2s. NARRATOR: Another mysterious
aspect of Kapustin Yar are the many strange
patterns on the ground. Did Stalin and
Korolev strategically arrange these patterns to
attract UFOs to the base? Some researchers believe the
Russians may have borrowed this idea from ancient
civilizations, whose pyramids are said to have been
constructed in geometric shapes and patterns designed to attract
inhabitants from other worlds. Looking at Kapustin
Yar from the air, there's a lot of facilities,
markings, patterns that might, to the untrained eye, look like
they're from another planet or not of this Earth. They might look like
something that you'd see in South America
with the Mayan cultures, or maybe crop circles. NARRATOR: Between the
reported UFO crashes and the ultra top
secret research, how did the Soviets flaunt
their advances at Kapustin Yar? REPORTER: Now, there was a new
date for Russian youngsters to remember, October
4, 1957, when Sputnik, the first Earth
satellite was launched. NARRATOR: October 4, 1957,
the Soviet Union space program successfully
launches the world's first artificial
satellite into orbit. REPORTER: In the
history of the Earth, no other event had captured the
imagination of so many people as this first step into space. NARRATOR: Four years later,
the Russians once again beat the Americans by launching
Yuri Gagarin into space in the first manned
flight to orbit the Earth, two feats that put the
Soviet Union way out in front in the ultra
competitive space race. We are the first, and all
next steps in space for-- I would say for nearly
10 years, Soviets was ahead of the United States. First, first man into space,
first woman into space, first walk into space,
first [inaudible] in space, first dog in space,
and so on and so forth, until 1981 when the
shuttle was launched. STANTON FRIEDMAN: I'm sure
the Russians have done their darnedest to reverse
engineer anything they can get their hands on, whether it's
American or German or alien. Russia's foremost
authority on UFOs is a man so legendary and
popular around the country that he is known only
by his last name, Ajaja. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: On this
spot of the UFO landing, an American group is
filming for the first time. He was very popular at
the peak of the UFO activity in the Soviet Union. It was late '60s, '70s. At the time, it was
not permitted, but not restricted to talk about this. NARRATOR: Ajaja invited
The History Channel on an exclusive tour of
a reported UFO crash site not too far from the site of the
Russian Roswell crash of 1948. INTERPRETER: For that,
I have to stand there, on that particular corner. NARRATOR: Using two copper
rods, Ajaja begins the tour by testing the ambient energy
that the crash site still emits today. INTERPRETER: There it is, a
negative sign, right there. Down there, that way. So here, in this spot, occurred
the crash landing of a flying saucer. First, I'm going to
go directly across, then I'll go perpendicularly,
then I'll go by the diagonals. This is where the
boundary begins. All right, I'm going
towards the center. In the center, we see a lot
of plant growth and compact. And what's most important
is that here, it shows a positive signal. Now, we are going
towards the border. Now, they're showing neutral. And here, here's the other part
of the border, right from here to over there. Now, I'm going away from the
center toward the other side. NARRATOR: Ajaja is walking the
100 foot by 20 foot outline of a cigar-shaped UFO that
reportedly crash landed here in 1961. INTERPRETER: Again,
now, we're going back. It shows a powerfully
strong signal. See how it's turning? It's powerfully positive. We're going back. Negative. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: There.
There it is. See? Here's where the border is. We got one point over there,
another point over there. Three point, and four point. INTERPRETER: Animals
avoid this place. They go around it. Cattle don't graze here. Yes, there is unknown energy,
which as experience shows, affects people in
a negative fashion. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: Your pulse changes. The heartbeat changes. You go short of breath. You begin to sweat. OK, I don't recommend you stay
here any longer, because it's already harmful. Come on, let's leave
here for a normal place, where no unknown forces will
influence us and act upon us. NARRATOR: Ajaja's
account of this UFO crash was supported by a resident of
adjacent [inaudible] village, who, upon seeing Ajaja, told her
account of seeing the crash out of her window, which
overlooks the site from less than 200 yards away. WOMAN: [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: Well, it was
4:00 or 5:00 in the evening. It was later in the day. And suddenly, my mother scream. She said, hey, look at that. There was some kind of
ball, a sphere that flew by. And then she said, oh, it's
probably a flying saucer, and it was a big, fiery,
red sphere that flew by. The sphere went over there
past the train tracks and went down into the
valley of the River Skunja, right down and over the river. NARRATOR: Experts
like Ajaja believe that UFO events like this crash,
as well as the 1948 Russian Roswell crash, caused
a Pandora's box to open over
Kapustin Yar, leading to what some have called a
war in the skies over Russia. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: Pilots would often
receive orders from the ground to defend their airspace
and shoot down UFOs. Other times, the UFOs would
go on terrifying attacks. What intrigues me
about the Russians as much as anything is apparent
dogfights between UFOs. And I've read of several
accounts of that, several of them having dogfights. NARRATOR: Perhaps the
most compelling evidence of encounters between Soviet
MiGs and UFOs over Kapustin Yar comes firsthand from
the most celebrated of all Soviet test
pilots, Marina Popovich. A national hero, a cosmonaut,
perhaps the Chuck Yeager of Russia, she says that
she witnessed actual battles between Soviet pilots and UFOs. One incident in 1964 occurred
during a Soviet Air Force training mission. INTERPRETER:
Alexander [inaudible] was the commander of a squadron
and a pilot instructor in one of the flight schools. One day, he was
flying with a cadet, and they were attacked by a UFO. They went into a spiral dive. NARRATOR: While on another
top secret military expedition in February, 1980,
Colonel Popovich encountered multiple
unidentified objects in the skies over Russia. [speaking russian] INTERPRETER: I saw three
fireballs, three amazing lights in the form of a triangle,
and I observed them as they flew away. NARRATOR: Another MiG test
pilot, Colonel Vyatkin Lev Mikhailovich agreed to
tell his first person account for our cameras
for the very first time. August 7, 1967,
6:30 in the evening. Colonel reports that his MiG was
momentarily captured in midair by a UFO. INTERPRETER: When I was
making the aerial move to the left, suddenly,
from above, I saw a light. This big disk began
to slowly light up, and I just had time to
quickly tilt the plane, but the wing hit
the ray of light. The plane shook and the
gauges and instruments began to move right to
left, right to left. It is as though the ray of
light dissolved into shining little points of light. Imagine my surprise when my
technician named Mikhail said, Lev Mikhailovich, the wing
of the airplane is glowing. As it turns out, for a
whole week in the hangar, the left wing was glowing
with a white light. They washed the
wing with kerosene, and soon after that,
the glowing ended. NARRATOR: Fortunately, Colonel
Mikhailovich's encounter with a UFO over the skies
of Kapustin Yar in the 1960s did not end as dreadfully
as the famous 1948 encounter in the same skies. No, I wasn't scared. I was just puzzled. I was particularly stunned
that the ray of light turned out to be hard,
because I felt the impact. NARRATOR: As UFO reports
continued to stream into the Soviet government
from both civilians and military officials, the
KGB was busy covering up the reports, silencing
those who made them and clamping down on the press. But all the while,
the spy agency was creating an official
report on UFO activity in the USSR called
the KGB blue file. VLADIMIR SEMENOV: Americans
will never understand this, you know? Because you have to be inside
KGB to know the power KGB had. And during Stalin time, KGB
was unbelievable powerful. NARRATOR: Written and
researched over the 20 year span between the mid
'60s and the mid '80s, the KGB blue file was
one of the most extensive official explorations of
UFOs ever commissioned by any governmental
agency anywhere. PAUL STONEHILL: The KGB blue
file is a 124 page collection of documents released in 1990. I believe this is not everything
the KGB has had in their hands, and I'm not the only one. NARRATOR: The blue file compiled
thousands of reports of UFO sightings, dogfights,
and crashes, all of which were described in vivid detail. According to the blue file,
as recently as March 21, 1990, the residents of a
dozen Russian towns not too far from the
gates of Kapustin Yar all witnessed the exact same
UFO sighting between 10:00 and 11:30 PM. The following is from the
written account of a KGB internal affairs officer. MAN: After obtaining
more exact information, it was established that a
rather large number of residents in nearby cities became
eyewitnesses of a UFO, and in several cases, two UFOs. One witness saw a ray of light
emitted from the object that illuminated the Earth's surface. If there are so many
rumors and talks about UFOs, sooner or later, the government
will ask its intelligence, what's going on, guys? Explain us. And KGB had to create this
file with all the publications abroad and some witnesses who
saw or thought that they saw it. NARRATOR: Is it possible that
this 1990 incident could have been a simple military test
sent up from the grounds at Kapustin Yar, or was
it yet another incident involving UFOs? If the Soviet Union had not
imploded under its own weight in the early 1990s,
the chilling accounts you've just seen of close
encounters of the first kind in and around Kapustin Yar
would have remained yet another Soviet era secret. It's different, because
the time is different. If you're talking with elder
generation, yes, of course. No question about it. But nowadays,
absolutely different. The younger generation now
is living in another society, and they have much more freedom. NARRATOR: This new
freedom in Russia helped the producers
of this program acquire, through
official channels, this Soviet military footage
you are about to see. Throughout the '50s and
'60s, the Soviet military experienced a string of failed
rocket launches and missile tests that resulted in one
disaster after another. Were these simply accidents,
or retaliatory attacks by UFOs. I have heard a story,
for what it's worth, and I don't usually
talk about myths, but I've heard that four
Soviet big launch vehicles were exploded on the pads by aliens
because they kept trying to shoot down the
flying saucers. A Soviet military cameraman
captured the after effects of what appear to be two
fireball-shaped UFOs that, according to experts in Russia,
crashed in October, 1960. [music playing] Three Red Army firemen
are seen running from this massive fireball,
which according to reports, continued to expand, causing
other massive explosions in the area for over an hour. One of the fireballs
was believed to have destroyed three Soviet
rockets on their launch pads, while the other targeted and
destroyed a rocket fuel depot. According to experts,
the charred remains of the two reported
UFOs seen here were quickly sent across
Russia to Zhitkur. Try and imagine Earth
as an undeveloped colony, and just like the United
States and the Soviet Union fought wars over other
areas, political wars over other areas, imagine the
aliens want our resources, and they are fighting
over Earth the same way the US and the Soviet Union
had conflicts over other areas after World War II. NARRATOR: How could all
of these shocking events have been held back from the
public for so many years? The Stalin time and
early post-Stalin times, everything was restricted, so
you was not allowed to talk about this. In Stalin's time, they will
simply send you to the prison. NARRATOR: Could all of these
UFO accounts and the trail of freshly unearthed
evidence of UFOs be attributed to
logical explanation, or is it possible that
strange things really do happen in Russia? A reporter for one of America's
largest newspapers says yes. In May, 2005, reports reached
the Moscow bureau of "The Los Angeles Times" that a lake about
three hours away from Moscow had simply vanished. We went up there because
we heard that it had just disappeared. And I said, you know, I'm
not going after this story. A lake does not just disappear. NARRATOR: Kim Murphy visited
the site a few days later. Her account was published on
the front page of the newspaper on May 27, 2005. KIM MURPHY: We got up there
and just found this huge hole in the ground. The only eyewitness as far as
we know who actually saw what happened described
going down to the lake, and where he says there's this
swirling of water that looks like water going
down a toilet bowl, just, you know, in a raging
circle, just tumultuous. And it's going, and it's going,
and it's going, and pretty, soon it's gone. NARRATOR: From disappearing
lakes, to fireballs seen in the sky, to reported
attacks by cigar-shaped UFOs, Russia continues to be a
land of incredible mystery. And as top secret work continues
to this day at Kapustin Yar and Zhitkur, the base remains
a potent lightning rod for UFO activity. According to one
researcher, Kapustin Yar was the site of a crash in
1989, and even more recently, the debris of a
1997 crash in Poland was taken to Kapustin
Yar for analysis. Recent political moves by
Russian President Vladimir Putin have caused
some in the West to accuse his government of
closing the iron curtain once again on today's vibrant Russia. On a day-to-day basis, people
are convinced and worried that Putin's Russia is a much more
authoritarian Russia than was Yeltsin's Russia. I do know that UFO information
is not available from Russia as easily as it had been before. You lose the ability
to control secrets in an open society. Putin came out of the KGB. He's seeing a lot of
valuable information and valuable technology
go to private sources. The Soviet Union
is closing down, closing down in a lot of areas,
but also closing down in UFOs. NARRATOR: It might be even
longer until the curtain is pulled back on the secret
underground laboratories and layers of this
legendary Area 51 of Russia, and we have only just begun
to scratch the surface for puzzling mysteries
of Russia's Roswell. Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence. Seeing is believing. [music playing]
