The Voronezh Park Landing

Autumn 1989. Glasnost had loosened the Soviet press, and state media were testing their limits. In Voronezh, a city about 300 miles south of Moscow, residents had been reporting strange lights for days. Sightings were logged on 21, 23 and 29 September and 2 October, between 6 and 9 p.m.

Wednesday, 27 September 1989. About 6:30 p.m. Boys were playing football in Yuzhny Park when they saw a pink light in the sky. It came down. "The pink glow became a deep red as it touched down." The ball circled the park at an extremely low altitude, and the children could see the grass being disturbed beneath it. Then it disappeared. Within a few minutes it returned and hovered. A hatch opened in its lower part. As it landed, it bent a large poplar.

The children described a giant, 3 to 4 metres tall, with a tiny head. It had three eyes, two white and a red one between them. It wore silvery overalls, bronze-coloured boots and a disc on its chest. Beside it was a small robot, which began to walk after the alien touched its chest.

A boy in the crowd screamed. The being looked at him, its eyes shining, and he "fell silent, unable to move". The being pointed a tube at a 16-year-old. The boy vanished. He came back only when the sphere left. In the end, "the alien went inside the sphere, which then took off." Police Lt. Sergei A. Matveyev never saw the beings. But he saw "a body flying in the sky". "It was not an optical illusion," he said.

The local paper Kommuna ran "Football with aliens" in early October. On 9 October 1989 TASS released the story, and the Associated Press carried it the same day. TASS insisted it was "not a joke, nor a hoax, nor a sign of mental instability, nor an attempt to drum up local tourism." Its correspondent, Vladimir Lebedev, had spoken to about 10 youngsters aged 12 to 13. Genrikh Silanov, head of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, described a circular area about 20 m across with four dents arranged in a rhombus. The site had been found by "biolocation", the Russian term for dowsing.

A city commission chaired by Igor Surovtsev gathered forensic, nuclear physics, chemistry and biology experts. About two months later it reported no anomalies. Soil contamination came from industry. Radioisotopes were put down to Chernobyl fallout. Still, it did not rule out that some anomalous phenomenon had been seen. AFP reported that the "alien" rock was iron ore, and Silanov said he had been partly misquoted. "Don't believe all you hear from Tass."

TASS later admitted the story may have been overembellished. Vladimir Posner's film crew found no witnesses apart from the children. Pravda mocked the affair with a parody landing of four-eared beings in rubber boots.

Vladimir Azhazha called it "the landing of the century". Jacques Vallée accepted the case as genuine and linked a Ж-like symbol in Roma Torshin's drawing to the Ummo sign. Boris Shurinov said the boy drew it after a local ufologist showed him a photo of the faked 1967 San Juan de Valdeiras saucer, and that the case "collapsed like a house of cards." Patrick Gross classes it as a hoax. Yet the park became known throughout the Soviet Union. A private company even sold "land of the aliens" tours for 59 rubles.