An Error Has Occurred!

[~]

An Error Has Occurred!

[rong]

sweet

[Chief Uwachiquen]

Awesome. They ought to be thankful that pyramid wasn't some dude's head.

[Elder Iptuous]

video's not working for me 
does the space ship hang in the air in almost exactly the way a brick doesn't?

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The official explanation of this is even worse than the norway spiral: they claim it's a runaway party balloon.

I vaguely remember something similar mentioned in one of Vallee's books, and again in Russia (rather, the USSR). I will try to track it down.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

What in the hell.

That is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.

[Dalek]

I don't know if I really hope for a reasonable explenation. I'm both a sceptic and a Star Wars fan.

[NotPublished]

Could the UFO sightings happen in another country atleast  ! The Russians are hogging everything. Maybe the USSR are making new weapons

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The official explanation of this is even worse than the norway spiral: they claim it's a runaway party balloon.

I vaguely remember something similar mentioned in one of Vallee's books, and again in Russia (rather, the USSR). I will try to track it down.

       he phone rang in my home in San Francisco on October 8, 1989,
     a quiet Sunday afternoon. A friend from New York, a journalist,
     was calling me about an extraordinary dispatch from the Associated
Press that had just come across on her teletype.
   "The New York Times will be running this tomorrow on the front
page," she said. "It comes from Tass through the office of Associated
Press in Moscow. It's a landing report from Russia that happened
sometime between September twenty-first and October second. I
thought you should see it right away."
   A few minutes later the full text appeared on my facsimile machine.
It described some extraordinary events in the Soviet Union.
   "Scientists have confirmed that an unidentified flying object recently
landed in the Russian city of Voronezh," the report went. "They have
also located the landing site and found traces of aliens who made a short
promenade about the park."
   The Tass report went on with the assertion that a large shining ball
or disk had been seen hovering over the park by several residents. They
saw the UFO land and three creatures, similar to humans, emerge,
accompanied by a small robot.
   "The aliens were three or four meters tall (ten to thirteen feet), but
with very small heads. They walked near the ball or disk and then
disappeared inside."
   The report also mentioned that scientists, including professor Gen-
rikh Silanov, Director of the Geophysical Laboratory in Voronezh, a
city located three hundred miles southeast of Moscow, was studying the
case, and that the path followed by the aliens had been ascertained
"through the use of biolocation."
   The people who had seen the aliens "were overwhelmed by a fear
which lasted for several days."
   When the report appeared in the New York Times of October 9, the
word biolocation had been garbled by the prestigious newspaper into
bilocation, which made no sense whatsoever. The editors had failed to
realize that biolocation was a special term in Soviet psychotronic litera-
ture that designates dowsing, or radiesthesia, the detection of hidden
mineral, water, or living entities by paranormal means. Dowsers often
use a pendulum or a stick for such work.
   The Russians seemed to be saying that they had a team of official
scientists studying UFOs using the techniques of parapsychology, but
the reputedly smart and aggressive American press, led by the New York
Times, missed the real story.
   In the following days the situation became even more garbled, cour-
tesy of the Western media. Instead of investigating and clarifying the
original claim, radio and television stations across the U.S. consulted
experts whose sole expertise consisted in turning the sighting into a joke.
Thus, Paul Kurtz, chairman of a Committee of Skeptics, commented
that the reports were "largely uncorroborated."
   On San Francisco radio station KCBS Kurtz openly mocked the lack
of hard evidence, pointing out that two strange rocks reportedly found
by the Russians at the site sounded to him like simple pieces of outer-
space excrementa. In other words, alien shit. Another expert pointed
out that if such an event had actually happened, Gorbachev would have
announced it personally, because it would have been too important to
be left to underlings like Professor Silanov! For further comic relief the
reporter went on to interview two American cult members from the
Aetherius Society.
    Even the psychosociological explanations flourished once more: some
media authorities interpreted the sighting by saying that traditional
Russian imagination had always been wild and that the UFO story
expressed the people's need for escapism, which had finally blown the
lid off the system after long years of repression. The UFO research
community did not fare much better: the Center for UFO studies in
Evanston, Illinois, speaking through a vice president, stated flatly that
it knew the answer. "I am certain this is a hoax," the man was quoted
as saying in the October 11 issue of the Hartford Courant. He had
thousands of "more reliable sightings" in his files that described the
space visitors as being three to four feet tall with large heads and spindly
bodies. "The reports are remarkably similar down to the smallest of
details," he said, to such an extent that the Center now uses some
little-known details of the aliens' anatomy as a test of the validity of the
sightings. The tall occupants described in Voronezh did not fit the
Center's patterns, and the case, accordingly, must be rejected.
   Such a position illustrates the dilemma into which American ufology
now finds itself. No sinister manipulation of the researchers is necessary
to throw them into confusion. In their eagerness to grasp onto a few
tentative patterns, which they often reinforce by bombarding witnesses
with leading questions under hypnosis, many researchers actually select
the cases that match their preexisting expectations. This mockery of the
scientific method can only lead to absurd results.
   While skeptical U.S. scientists and the true believers reacted with
such flippant comments that are so characteristic of ignorance, it be-
came obvious that not only the region of Voronezh, but a large part of
Eastern Europe was in the grips of a major wave that ranked in impor-
tance with the largest concentrations of UFO sightings ever reported
The French CNES, instead of jumping to hasty conclusions, took the
trouble to call Dr. Silanov with a Russian interpreter on the line. The
Russian professor verified the facts and added that a full-scale scientific
investigation was in progress in the Soviet Union, and that over forty
witnesses had already been interviewed.
THE GLASNOST WAVE
The Soviet wave may actually have begun early in 1989. On April 24
an object described as "three times the size of an aircraft" flew over
Cherepovetsk, according to a witness named I. Veselova, who saw it
hovering a thousand feet in the air at 10:55 P.M.
   In central Russia, in the Vologda region, on June 6, 1989, school
children near the village of Konantsevo in the Kharaovsk district, saw
a luminous dot in the sky. It became larger and soon turned into a
shining sphere. The object landed in a meadow and moved to the
nearby river as the children watched from a quarter-mile away. The
sphere appeared to split, and "something resembling a headless person
in dark garb" appeared, its hands reaching lower than its knees. The
sphere and the creature quickly became invisible.
   Three more spheres, some of them associated with entities, later
landed in the same meadow.
   On June 11 a woman named O. Lubnina saw a fiery ball above
Vologda at 9:20 P.M. It was visible for seventeen minutes.
   In Shevchenko, on the Mangyshlak peninsula in the Caspian Sea,
witnesses had seen an object several times larger than a passenger
aircraft in August 1989. It vanished in clouds above the sea, its lights
remaining in sight for a long time. In the area of Kasturskoye Highway
near Moscow people reported a mysterious burned patch of ground in
a grassy area in August 1989.
   On the night of October 11, 1989, Soviet television viewers saw a
picture of one of the creatures on a news show devoted to the Voronezh
landing. It was a figure with two eyes, a nose, and a broad mouth, inside
a glowing, two-legged oval object. When I saw the drawing on French
television later that month, I noticed how closely the proportions of the
object resembled those of the silvery egg seen at Socorro, New Mexico,
in 1964.
   Like the Socorro object, this one sported an insignia on its side. And
the insignia was none other than our old friend, the U M M O symbol.
   I decided the time had come to buy some warm clothes and to board
the first Air France flight to Moscow.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Basically the whole of Chapter 9 of Revelations is about the 1989 UFO sighting wave in and around Moscow.

[Jasper]

I think it's a big balloon.  See the way it bobs and gimbals around, like a lighter than air object?

[hooplala]

Now that is strange...