Otradnensky UFO Fragment

Kuybyshevsky District lies in Novosibirsk Oblast, in Siberia, some 2,000 miles from Moscow. In December 2011, people near the village of Otradnensky heard strange sounds in the forest. That is the whole of the sighting. No witness described lights, a craft or a fall. The headlines that later said a UFO had dropped from the sky were written in newsrooms, not in the village.

March 2012. Villagers came upon a large metal object lying in the woods. It was cylindrical and capped on one end by a ridged dome. One description called it smooth, silvery and U-shaped, attached to a rounded section. Another said it looked like a huge rubbish bin. It stood about 2 m tall, roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and weighed about 200 kg.

They dragged it out at night. They attached it to a trailer and hauled it through the snow to their village.

A 2017 Russian repost, which credits no original outlet, names the finder as Mikhail Bobrov, a 28 year old local entrepreneur who came across the object while driving into the forest. No other source confirms it.

Sunday 18 March 2012. The police were told. They alerted Moscow, and the object was put under police guard.

Yuri Bornyakov, head of the rescue service department in Kuybyshevsky district, checked it. "We measured the radiation level near and inside the object. We found no radiation here." District officials said part of it was titanium. Valery Vasiliev, head of the Kuybyshevsky Department for Civil Defence and Emergency Situations, called it ultra-strong titanium.

Then the object left. According to the 2017 repost, a local police officer said "a military man dressed in civilian clothes" collected it, adding that "it looks like a rocket fuel tank". The same account has Alexey Kuznetsov of the Roscosmos press service saying it had gone to a scientific institute in Novosibirsk, and that the checks would take "several days".

Early theories said it was part of a rocket or satellite from a failed launch in Kazakhstan. Those theories were denied. Roscosmos was blunt. "The object found is not related to space technology." It added that "a final conclusion can be made after a detailed study of the object by experts".

In the United States, Nick Johnson, head of NASA's orbital debris office, gave his view. "The object almost certainly is not related to a spacecraft. It also does not look like part of a launch vehicle which has fallen from orbit. However, we cannot be definitive in our judgment without better photos and other data." Johnson called the date the object fell "vitally important". The reports never gave it.

Local media speculated about space debris or the fuel tank of a ballistic rocket. Life's Little Mysteries raised a quieter possibility. It was "unclear whether the object really did fall from space or got lost in the woods by some other route". No one has alleged a hoax.

The press wave came fast, between 21 and 23 March 2012, from tabloids to science sites around the world. Then nothing. No laboratory result has been published. The cylinder from Otradnensky remains in the record as a heavy, titanium, very real object that nobody has publicly identified.