The Siberian "Petrified Soldiers" UFO Shoot-Down

Siberia. A military base where a unit of 25 soldiers was on routine training exercises. That is all the story ever gives.

One retelling, in the Ukrainian weekly Zerkalo Nedeli in January 1997, calls it an air-defence missile unit and names a moment. 13 October 1987. 8:35 am. Other versions place it in 1989 or 1990. No town, unit or soldier has ever been named.

A small saucer flew low over the unit. Then, "for unknown reasons, somebody unexpectedly launched a surface-to-air missile and hit the UFO." The craft "fell to Earth not far away." Zerkalo Nedeli puts it about 25 metres from the soldiers, hitting the ground so hard that it literally split apart.

"Five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes emerged from it." They came close together. They merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape. It began to buzz and hiss sharply, then became brilliant white. Within a few seconds it grew much bigger and exploded in an extremely bright light.

"At that very instant, 23 soldiers who had watched the phenomenon turned into stone poles." Only two soldiers who stood in the shade survived.

The 23 stone figures and the wreckage were reportedly taken to a "secret scientific research institution" near Moscow. There, the account says, researchers found the men had become a "substance no different from that of limestone." Zerkalo Nedeli, citing Florida journalist Nick Mann, describes a 250-page KGB folder holding the survivors' testimony, photos and sketches. It supposedly got out after the KGB directorate was dissolved in 1991. The folder has never been produced.

The document behind the modern story sits in the CIA Reading Room. It is a Foreign Broadcast Information Service translation of Holos Ukrainy No. 57, 27 March 1993, a piece titled "Cosmic Revenge." That article was a reprint from Ternopil Vechirnii, which cited the "authoritative magazine Canadian Weekly World News." The translation is marked UNCLAS, was never classified and was approved for release in May 2000. Former CIA officer Tracy Walder identified it as FBIS-type open-source material.

In 2017 the Estonian site Propastop traced the tale to the US Weekly World News of 8 September 1992, which described an alien ship shot down over Siberia in 1987. Propastop called the journey from tabloid to Ukrainian papers to a government archive "source laundering." Snopes, MEAWW and 360.ru all rejected the claim.

Former CIA officer Mike Baker thought the story changed through repeated rewriting. Russian ufologist Aleksandr Petukhov was blunt: "Nobody saw the documents, and then they were stolen. What is there to talk about?" Historian Aleksandr Kolpakidi called it nonsense. Gordon Bonnet of Skeptophilia, answering a comparison with the Terracotta Army, noted that "the terracotta army is, unsurprisingly, made of terracotta."

The story keeps coming back. It spread in 2017 through the Daily Express and was discussed on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2023. In April 2025 the file went viral again, and a Fox News Digital report by Julia Bonavita was followed by LADbible, Kyiv Post, Hromadske and NEWS.ru. In March 2026 it returned on Instagram. No witness has ever stepped forward, and the soldiers of stone remain a lesson in how far a story can travel.