The Nemėžis Pulsing Sphere: Vilnius Police Encounter

The road from Vilnius to Medininkai runs out of the Lithuanian capital toward the Belarus border. About 10 km along lies Nemėžis, a village in Vilnius District. On the night of 25 to 26 June 1996, two motor-police officers were on patrol there. The transcribed reports name them Jaunius Pozera and Laimis Kraujalis, though the spellings vary from copy to copy.

About 00:30. Something was hanging over a field. A sphere, round and luminous, some 20 to 30 metres above the ground. It pulsed, alternately shrinking and expanding. With it came a strange sound, like an electric or electronic crackle.

The officers watched for about half an hour. Then they moved toward it through the long grass. They had covered about 50 metres when the sphere began to move. It drew away, rose higher and rapidly departed, heading toward Vilnius.

Their report put the whole Vilnius police force on alert. Vehicle loads of soldiers from the ARAS rapid reaction force arrived, with sniffer dogs and police reinforcements. Investigators measured the background radiation and tape-recorded the crackling sound, which reportedly could still be heard after the object had gone. The dogs found nothing suspicious. But the tall grass around the place where the sphere had hung was flattened to a radius of 10 metres.

Vilnius police commissioner Valentinas Juchnevičius had not seen the object. He vouched for the officers on the radio. They were, he said, "psychologically healthy, normal people, not noted for crankiness."

Vladas Burbulis wrote the story for ITAR-TASS. It went out on the World Service wire at 0920 GMT on 26 June 1996. FBIS translated it, and the two-page cable became document 0000098713 in the CIA's "UFOs: Fact or Fiction?" collection. It was open-source monitoring of the foreign press, not a CIA investigation.

A month later, on 27 July, France-Soir ran the story as "Un OVNI à Vilnius." The cable was released under FOIA in 1997. Patrick Gross posted the clipping and the cable scan on his ufology site, arguing that the document showed the CIA was still collecting UFO reports worldwide in 1996. In 2017, after the CIA's mass CREST release, news.com.au and Maxim brought the case to a new audience.

No official explanation was ever given. The cable noted that Lithuanian scientists had not yet offered an opinion, and no later finding from police or scientists has surfaced. Nobody has alleged a hoax.

Ball lightning would fit a luminous, pulsing, crackling sphere close to the ground. Half an hour, though, is far longer than it normally lasts. Electrical discharge near power lines, a lit balloon or aircraft lights are other possibilities. None has been tested against the case.

One loose end lingers. A UFO Baltics page reportedly says that several years after the incident the witnesses apparently disappeared, and no one succeeded in contacting them. That claim cannot be confirmed. What remains is a translated wire report, a newspaper clipping, and a circle of flattened grass near Nemėžis that nobody ever explained.