Sighting record / 1991
Friday, 18 January 1991. Ten minutes before midnight. Officers on duty at Kecskemét Air Base watched a bright light cross the sky above their runway. They put its speed at about 300 kilometres per hour. They were not alone. Across Hungary, people reported a luminous object passing through the country's airspace. Two days later it was on the front page of Kurír, and the Defence Ministry's own spokesman, Colonel György Keleti, had gone on the record. An astronomer called it most likely a meteor. Thirty years on, a CIA media-monitoring file brought the night back into the news.
Kecskemét Air Base sits in Bács-Kiskun county, in the middle of Hungary. One concrete runway, 2,499 metres long. It was a tense week. The US-led air war against Iraq had begun on 17 January, and air defences across Europe were on heightened alert. No source ties what happened next to that war.