The Taszár airbase object and the 16-MiG-21 scramble

Taszár airfield lies in Somogy County, about 10 km east of Kaposvár. In the late 1960s it was a working military airbase. No source gives the exact date or the hour of what happened there. The earliest versions say 1968 to 1969. Later retellings settled on 1969.

An object appeared on one of the runways. The soldiers could not define its exact shape. Something surrounded it. In the words of the report, it was enveloped in "opalescent fog, partly shimmering gold." A later version calls it disc-shaped.

The base's armed guards moved in. They got within about 200 metres. Then the base command ordered that no one go closer. Soviet soldiers also tried to approach.

Then it moved. The object rose from the concrete runway to a height of 150 to 200 metres. The command ordered it pursued and forced to land. Sixteen MiG-21 interceptors armed with missiles were scrambled. It did not wait for them. "Before everyone's eyes, within a few minutes, it vanished into the heights." The radars, the report says, could follow it for only a few moments. No interception was ever reported.

This is not a military report. The only identified document is a state-security informant report held at the Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security, the ÁBTL, as ÁBTL-3.1.5-O-16221, dossier "Columbus." It was filed by subdivision III/II-B of BRFK, the Budapest police headquarters, and dated 12 May 1976. The account is third-hand. An informant code-named "Riporter" heard it from a sailor from Kaposvár. The sailor had heard it from a soldier from Kaposvár.

A 2022 version in Origo tells it differently. It names a witness only as "J. István," stationed at the base, and says a police major noted that he feared the consequences and would say no more. The earlier versions do not mention him.

Nobody was investigating Taszár. The file was opened to watch Kálmán Keviczky. He was a former officer of the pre-war general staff, by then a US citizen and head of the New York-based UFO network ICUFON. He spent a month in Hungary in summer 1975. Investigators suspected he was working for US intelligence. They recruited informants, ran surveillance and coordinated with Soviet and Polish services. They found no intelligence activity against Hungary. UFO propaganda was not a crime, so they closed the case. The Taszár sighting survives as a by-product of watching Keviczky.

The ÁBTL considered the informant verified, but not the content. The story was written down about seven years after the event. No military logs of the scramble have been made public, and no radar records. Origo dated the protocol to 12 May 1969, which conflicts with every other version. In 2023 the Ministry of Defence told Blikk it had "never found traces of extraterrestrial activities in the airspace of Hungary." No hoax claim and no specific conventional explanation has been published.

The account was online by February 2015. In December 2017 Sonline and HírKlikk ran it from a post on the ÁBTL's Facebook page. Origo returned to it in 2022, Blikk and Daily News Hungary in 2023. László Miskolci, who works in the state-security and military history archives, includes it in Magyar UFO-Akták. Of Taszár and Kaposvár, Miskolci says: "There were visual and radar sightings." Nearby, fighter pilot Gyula Knoll reported chasing a spherical light that shone like the Sun, a sibling case still waiting on its own dates.